She shut her lips. "They cost something. Every cent cuts down profits. It's cheaper to kill men."
"It's horrible!" In dejected impotence he clenched his hands. The unemotional rows of figures began to acquire a breathing significance. His vivid imagination pictured mangled forms, the bursting hell of explosions, the isolated horror of lonely accident and death, the pallid faces of starving mothers and babies, staining the broad margins of the cheap white paper.
She looked up from the pamphlets, her brows creased. Pelham smothered an impulse to kiss away the slight gravure of worry. "The West, bad as it is in some things, at least has modern laws and safeguards." An unmeant accusation drove in her tones. "The creaky old laws here are not even followed! When was the last inspection of your mines?"
"More than a month ago. The inspector wasn't very thorough, I noticed. They were pronounced safe."
"It ought to be done weekly, at least, beside a daily inspection by your forces. Gas can collect in the coal mines, flaws and cracks in the roofing anywhere—only close inspection will do.... And, then, think of the wages paid here! Can a man live—decently, I mean, so that he can send his children to school, and all, on what you pay? And Judge Florence gets seventy-five thousand salary—outside of his dividends."
"My father gets fifty."
"It's compulsory starvation and death for the ones who really produce the wealth.... We'll see what the convention does."
Pelham missed the opening sessions; but Jane gave him reports of the meetings she witnessed, supplemented by what Hernandez and Jensen told him. It was a heated gathering. Big John Pooley was accused outright of dishonest accounting, by one violent structural iron worker. The oily eloquence of Robert E. Lee Bivens smoothed this over. Each of the administration officials—"the boodle gang," as the noisy radical minority called them—was flayed; the editor of the Voice of Labor received an especial lashing from Jensen, who charged him with deliberately selling out labor's paper to the corporations.
The machinery rolled smoothly. All protests were tombed in safely packed committees.
At last came the final night, with Paul's speech, and consideration of the mining bill afterward, as the only unfinished business.