Mountain Part 24

The energetic bricklayer told of the recent convert, and the Arlington Hall meeting.

"He can talk? We'll use him. But you can't trust them fellows too far.

I'm not a socialist, you know; don't believe in voting worth a d.a.m.n.

Never got nowhere, never will get nowhere. But in a strike, they help."

They went over the morning paper. "Mmm--only a few hundred out----What's the straight goods?"

"Over five hundred from the Judson mines, six fifty from the Birrell-Florence, and about four hundred others from the mines on either side. We haven't touched West Adamsville yet, or Irondale. If only the furnaces could be called out...."

"Won't come. We can try; but mine strikes don't get 'em. No organization. These men all joined?"

"Joined or joining."

"This says scabs from Pittsburgh.... No law to stop 'em?"

"Ben Spence, our lawyer, says there isn't. In the last street-car strike we tried the law; the courts wouldn't enforce it."

"How do the boys feel?"

"They want to fight like h.e.l.l. They'll stop the scabs."

"Got to be careful there. That sort of thing is dynamite; it blows both ways. Company won't hear the committee?"

"Young Judson's father's the reason. Says he won't allow a union man in his shop hereafter. No committees, nor nothing."

"Let's see the place."

They walked from the end of the car line. The roads through the property had been made city streets, when Hillcrest Addition was thrown open to the public, and the party could not be stopped. Dawson paused to shake hands with the groups of pickets on the various cross roads. He had a personal word for each, and a concentrated way of getting the details he needed out of the incoherent members of the working body.

Joined by Ben Wilson and several of the pickets, they pa.s.sed into the company estate, and by the entrances to the gap drifts and the second ramp. Only a few negroes were at work in the gap; it was not until the second big slope that the white workers appeared. Dawson looked a question at stocky Wilson, hardly up to his vest pocket.

"Convicts. Almost three hundred of them."

"Any n.i.g.g.e.rs go out?"

"Half a dozen. You met one, Ed Cole, picketing by Thirtieth Street."

A red-faced Irishman walked out of a knot of workers and greeted the tall organizer. "h.e.l.lo, Dawson. Remember me?"

"Your mug's familiar. Lemme see--your name's Hewin, ain't it?"

The superintendent grinned. "You ought to remember it. You beat h.e.l.l out of me in the Coalstock strike for staying on as foreman."

"Scab then, eh, and still at it." Dawson's tolerance had a touch promising danger.

"That's what you'd call it. I'm in charge here. Mind your own business, or I'm not the one who'll get beat up this time." He turned with grinning ugliness and climbed back to the opening.

They cut over to the railroad track, and entered Hewintown by the back way. Dawson studied the land carefully. "That's the way they'd bring the train from Pittsburgh, of course. And that's a pretty narrow cut beyond that d.i.n.ky little house. Who lives there?"

"Mr. Judson, the vice-president."

"This ain't no place for a mine-owner."

Dawson's comment on the shack town was a string of profanity. "Even in West Virginia they had better dumps than those! I wouldn't let my pig live there. Company houses, as always."

"Yes."

"This crew out?"

"All but two or three. The convict stockade is on the next hill; the n.i.g.g.e.rs live in Adamsville, or in Lilydale, over yonder." His pudgy fingers pointed through the trees to the south.

They pa.s.sed company detectives and guards, in cl.u.s.ters of two or three, at every corner. "These always here?"

"Most of them new."

"We'll help 'em earn their money.... Take me by number three, and the hospital you mentioned. I want to see it all."

They were not allowed to go down this ramp; guards with shotguns refused to allow any ingress. "You might get blowed up too, buddy."

Serrano left them, to pa.s.s around the word of the meeting that night.

Dawson listened to the vivid hatred of the company all the way down the hill. A vigorous nod punctuated his opinion. "That's what they are; a bunch of lousy murderers. It's no worse here than other places; you've got to fight for what you get, anywhere. Pretty bunch of uglies here already! And when they try to run in Pittsburgh scabs----" He did not finish.

The momentum of the strike grew day by day. Most of the papers continued unfriendly; but the _Register_, which made a point of claiming to stand for the man in the shop as well as the man in the office, insisted that public sentiment was with the strikers, especially because of the recent memory of the accident horror.

The packed meetings in Arlington Hall were reported favorably in this paper; and they were emotional successes. John Dawson was not a graceful speaker; but his harsh bellow meant business, and his imperative magnetism shone through the awkwardest gesturings. Bowden contributed suave appeals, and Big John Pooley, the state president, took the floor the second night to remind that organized labor stood behind their efforts. "I am sure," he boasted, "that you will win, and even sooner than you expect. You have the companies practically beaten now."

Serrano turned to Dawson, puzzled. "What's he getting at, with that stuff?"

The enormous organizer looked at him searchingly. "If you watch a snake hole, you're liable to see the snake crawl out sooner or later."

During the rest of Pooley's speech, the huge organizer, head sprawled back against the wall, chin upraised, studied the speaker with a hungry intentness, as if investigating for that weak spot he had found every man to possess. The bricklayer chairman phrased and rephrased to himself his introduction for the next speaker, one of the negro miners. It was always risky, this opening the union doors to the black workers. Of course, as a socialist Serrano always urged it, arguing that labor's only safety lay in having this convenient surplus labor force within its own ranks, as protection against black scabbing; but there was some division in the local about it, and the southern unionist took slowly to the idea; occasional revivals of racial intolerance, based upon dislike of sharing work with the darker cousin, split unions and federations, delaying solidified strength for years and decades.

Pooley ended with lame vehemence; and the voice of the Italian chairman thundered another plea for labor's unity, introducing a black man to show that no boundaries of nation or race counted in the centuries' long battle. "I'm going to call on Will Cole to speak to you. Will is a black man, who was in Number Eight entry when the dynamite murder took place.

His dead comrades talk to you through his living lips. Come on, Will, tell us why you don't look for a pay check this week."

They laughed at the rude jesting at the invariable boomerang effect of their sole weapon of protest--a laugh that quieted to respect, as the grimy overalled negro was urged up the side steps and to the center of the stage. His eyes blinked at the dazzle of the lighting until the whites showed; his shoulders hunched deprecatingly. He could not speak to them as man to man, that he knew; the difference in color was ever in his mind, and in his audience's.

"Ah'm only a n.i.g.g.e.r," he began diffidently. "You-all white folks don't want n.i.g.g.e.rs in yo' unions, you-all don't want us to wu'k whar you do.

Some er you don't lak us havin' our own union. An' n.i.g.g.e.rs is crazy too; Ah kaint make dat wu'thless gang in number two come out, nohow.

"But Ah come out. You-all know Jim Cole was in Number Six when de mine oxploded; you-all know he's dead now. Ah live on dat mountain, same as Mister Judson. Dere ain't no more reason why me 'n' mah brudder should a got killed in dem mines dan why he should'a. Ah done jined dis union, an' Ah'll die befo' Ah'll scab. An' any scab dat comes mah way had better have his ears all aroun' his haid!"

They chuckled at the conclusion, but it made its effect. "When you all unite, white and black, you can snap your fingers at all the Paul Judsons in the world!" Serrano never lost a chance to drive home a point.

Next afternoon's headlines promised the arrival of a trainload of workers during the night. This lent an added air of uncertainty to the meeting following. Dawson's pleas to the men to hold fast, to convert the scabs with arguments, not bricks, were as strong as ever; but despite the ample audience, even he was a little upset by the fact that the whole Bowden-Pooley crowd were absent from their stage seats.

When he got around to Machinists' Hall later in the same evening, for the conference over the next day's activities, he found the state labor organization present in full force. The ornate double rows of mahogany-stained chairs, arranged in a hollow diamond shape, to accommodate the fraternities that met in the hall, with raised seats at the four points of the diamond for the officers, were half filled with the Pooley followers. Dawson called the meeting to order.