“That sounds easy enough,” said Hal. “But tell me, Mr. Stone, why do you bother? Do so many of these wops have votes?”
“It ain't the wops so much. We get them naturalised on purpose—they vote our way for a glass of beer. But the English-speaking men, or the foreigners that's been here too long, and got too big for their breeches—they're the ones we got to watch. If they get to talking politics, they don't stop there; the first thing you know, they're listening to union agitators, and wanting to run the camp.”
“Oh yes, I see!” said Hal, and wondered if his voice sounded right.
But the pit-boss was concerned with his own troubles. “As I told Si Adams the other day, what I'm looking for is fellows that talk some new lingo—one that nobody will ever understand! But I suppose that would be too easy. There's no way to keep them from learning some English!”
Hal decided to make use of this opportunity to perfect his education. “Surely, Mr. Stone,” he remarked, “you don't have to count any votes if you don't want to!”
“Well, I'll tell you,” replied Stone; “it's a question of the easiest way to manage things. When I was superintendent over to Happy Gulch, we didn't waste no time on politics. The company was Democratic at that time, and when election night come, we wrote down four hundred votes for the Democratic candidates. But the first thing we knew, a bunch of fellers was taken into town and got to swear they'd voted the Republican ticket in our camp. The Republican papers were full of it, and some fool judge ordered a recount, and we had to get busy over night and mark up a new lot of ballots. It gave us a lot of bother!”
The pit-boss laughed, and Hal joined him discreetly.
“So you see, you have to learn to manage. If there's votes for the wrong candidate in your camp, the fact gets out, and if the returns is too one-sided, there's a lot of grumbling. There's plenty of bosses that don't care, but I learned my lesson that time, and I got my own method—that is not to let any opposition start. See?”
“Yes, I see.”
“Maybe a mine-boss has got no right to meddle in politics—but there's one thing he's got the say about, and that is who works in his mine. It's the easiest thing to weed out—weed out—” Hal never forgot the motion of beefy hands with which Alec Stone illustrated these words. As he went on, the tones of his voice did not seem so good-natured as usual. “The fellows that don't want to vote my way can go somewhere else to do their voting. That's all I got to say on politics!”