I.
A CITY WITHOUT A STREET.
“To know a man well you must learn his city.”
There are three districts in Soot City: By the Bridge, By the Tracks, and the Stonepastures.
Simeon Quarry—who lived with the Buttes By the Tracks, and who knew more of this story than I do—always began the tale of his town with this phrase, “As way back as ‘30”; for that was the year when the big birds sitting on the big boulders first watched the strangers with the strings and water levels, and heard the strangers’ words.
There abode in the wilderness of those days—for everything was Stonepastures then—a Methodist preacher with a taste for the scripturally obscure. His circuit included the site of Soot City, to which place he gave the name of Padan-Aram, which endures as the county name until to-day.
Among the strange words the birds heard were “ile,” “iron,” and “smelt-oven.” These sounds were each an “open sesame” to hordes of foreign workers, with a proportion of native Americans generalled by Jo Bentley—grandfather of the Bentley whose plant is still the first in Soot City.
In a single lustre there sprang from the arid strip of country confined with treeless hills—“Baldhead Rangers” and “Cleanshorns”—rows on rows of mean houses, containing men and women every year lessening their acquaintance with the world without. Soot City was their cradle, the arena of their endeavour, their deathbed, and their sepulchre.
By the Bridge dwelt foreman, bookkeepers, furnace masters, together with the Bentleys’ outdoor servants—for they had a great place now. The son had rowed in the Cambridge boat, the daughters had become Episcopalians and gave great house parties, and the people By the Bridge who knew them best were the lawyer, the doctor, the baker, and the undertaker, who conspired against the rest of humanity as occasion permitted.
Soot City has no street. Instead, it has narrow-gauge tracks, along which the workmen go forth to and return from labour in the empty ore cars. The houses By the Tracks are ranged on either side of them, and are inhabited by mechanics, iron workers, truckmen, freight handlers, and preachers of minor denominations.