"Can you?" whispered Pelham.
"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."
Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams.
The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty.
The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow.
Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me," said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head.
This first-hand contact with the bloody struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the Advertiser and the Times-Dispatch warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.
"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."
The young mining inspector, as yet unassigned to his duty by the State, preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale, and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get! Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office, out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone; why not make it your government?"
In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.