When I climbed up onto the tracks I saw the boys huddled together, and around a little bend of the tracks, a machine gun and a group of gunmen.
“Oh Mother, don’t come,” they cried. “Let them kill us; not you!”
“I’m coming and no one is going to get killed,” said I.
I walked up to the gunmen and put my hand over the muzzle of the gun. Then I just looked at those gunmen, very quiet, and said nothing. I nodded my head for the miners to pass.
“Take your hands off that gun, you hellcat!” yelled a fellow called Mayfield, crouching like a tiger to spring at me.
I kept my hand on the muzzle of the gun. “Sir,” said I, “my class goes into the mines. They bring out the metal that makes this gun. This is my gun! My class melt the minerals in furnaces and roll the steel. They dig the coal that feeds furnaces. My class is not fighting you, not you. They are fighting with bare fists and empty stomachs the men who rob them and deprive their children of childhood. It is the hard-earned pay of the working class that your pay comes from. They aren’t fighting you.”
Several of the gunmen dropped their eyes but one fellow, this Mayfield, said, “I don’t care a damn! I’m going to kill every one of them, and you, too!”
I looked him full in the face. “Young man,” said I, “I want to tell you that if you shoot one bullet out of this gun at those men, if you touch one of my white hairs, that creek will run with blood, and yours will be the first to crimson it. I do not want to hear the screams of these men, nor to see the tears, nor feel the heartache of wives and little children. These boys have no guns! Let them pass!”
“So our blood is going to crimson the creek, is it!” snarled this Mayfield.
I pointed to the high hills. “Up there in the mountain I have five hundred miners. They are marching armed to the meeting I am going to address. If you start the shooting, they will finish the game.”