Mountain Part 34

to us----"

"Can you?" whispered Pelham.

"I ... don't ... know," an answer as low. "We'll try."

Brant dropped off to catch the last edition of his paper; the others, for their various home car-lines. Only McGue accompanied Dawson to the Mecca, to sleep armed beside him. Pelham noticed the gray warning of daybreak staining the east, before he pulled down his shade and adjusted his splitting head on the chill pillow, to writhe through somber dreams.

The careless truckmen, satisfied with their load of thirteen, overlooked the black body hurriedly flung against the ties of the switch track. It was one of the Lilydale children, berrying in the early grayness, whose frightened tongue brought Stella the answer to her long night of uncertainty.

The other Cole boys had gone off to work, sure that Babe would turn up somehow.... Stella got a man from the Judson stable to help her carry over the dewed body on an empty barrow.

Babe's funeral was simple. "Suffer little chillun tuh come untuh me,"

said Brother Adams unctuously, "fuh ob sech is de Kingdom ob Hebb'n." A second fresh earth mound disturbed the irregularity of the Zion Cemetery meadow, with the name "Cole" painted on the scantling driven beyond the head.

This first-hand contact with the b.l.o.o.d.y struggle made Pelham hurl himself with dynamic energy into the strikers' cause. Dawson used him to make the Board of Trade endorse the conflict. Flaring headlines in the _Advertiser_ and the _Times-Dispatch_ warned of a general strike, which would tie up the whole industrial machinery of Adamsville.

"They'll never do it," Dawson repeated pessimistically. "We can't dislodge that Pooley bunch. But this hot air helps."

The young mining inspector, as yet una.s.signed to his duty by the State, preached organization to the miners of Coalstock, Hazelton, Irondale, and Belle Mary mines; he never failed to wind up with a stirring appeal for unity on the political as well as the industrial field. "Strike at your jobs, when you must; strike at the polls every chance you get!

Let's drive the scabs out of the city hall, out of the sheriff's office, out of the legislature! The government isn't going to leave you alone; why not make it your government?"

In hardened Democratic ears the brilliant insistence made little impression, although mining locals sprouted and flourished.

"He don't do any harm," Dawson confided to John McGue who had attached himself as the big man's private guard. "Let him spit fire if he wants to. My G.o.d, man! A state mining inspector as organizer! We'll have Paul Judson in the local yet!"

Sullenly the strikers held to their Hewintown homes, cowed by the armed guards from interfering with the spasmodic attempts of the convicts, negroes, and strike-breakers to keep the mine product up to normal.

Formal notices of eviction came to them; but Ben Spencer rea.s.sured the disheartened committee. "They've got to follow the state law; that means delay. Tell the boys to sit steady till h.e.l.l freezes over. They're sewed up."

Henry Tuttle rendered an exhaustive report upon the same matter to the managing committee of the directors. "We can go ahead, if you say----"

Paul Judson, at Judge Florence's nod, shook his decisive head. "Wait.

We're not quite ready. When we are----"

After a thoughtful pause, the vice-president went on. "It's a good time to appropriate enough to outfit the State National Guard. We can't pay them directly, as the companies did in Colorado; the law's against that, Henry?"

The counsel nodded corroboration.

"But they'll appreciate new uniforms and guns.... You can never tell, you know.... I had a talk with Adjutant-General Rice last week; he approves heartily."

The matter was left to the vice-president, for action.

During these weeks of comparative inactivity, in spite of the details of strike work, Pelham found time to debate "Socialism the Remedy" with Burke Horton, an energetic lawyer-politician of near-radical views. The debate was the first of a newly opened community forum, under the auspices of Dr. Gulley's Free Congregation, which met in Edlin's Hall.

The crowd was packed with Horton's followers, but the young Judson made his points tell.

This was one of the meetings to which Jane Lauderdale could go; she had followed every motion of Pelham's with her large, intimate eyes, from a wall seat to the right, not far from the platform. Continually his own eyes sought hers, to test the effectiveness of an argument, or to draw approbation and inspiration from the source that meant most to him.

Whenever there had been opportunity, she had been in his strike audiences, a vivid, sparkling fountain of encouragement and enthusiasm.

Pelham's watchfulness drew from his random hearers antagonism or sympathy, a groping for his meaning, a tardy stumbling after his flying feet; of her he drank cordial understanding and abounding love.

They left the hall together, and rode straight to her house. Lacking a home of their own, this house furnished an abiding-place for far-flung dreams and precious intimacies.

In her very restfulness he found a spur and a stimulus. Chin cupped in her down-turned fingers, seated in her favorite wicker chair, she mused above him, as he slouched on the rug at her feet.

"You were splendid to-night, boy; you're a cannibal at debating."

"I'd be sick of the whole b.l.o.o.d.y business," she smiled indulgently, "if it wasn't for you."

"Anyone would do just as well;" a denying finger caressed his hair possessively.

"Am I that unappreciative, Joan of Lauderdale?"

"Now you're poking fun. You don't deserve the taffy."

"It was only taffy?"

"I'm a good cook, you'll have to admit. No; you earned every word. I should think your father would have to be proud of you!"

"The oratorical prodigal ... whose far country is the heaven your slim oxfords print."

"Not even wings?"

"We are forging them together."

Hearty delights these hours with the vibrant girl always were; but they were not as heady and intoxicating as he had imagined love would be.

Perhaps too heady, in another sense; there was a lack somewhere, he meditated ruefully, as his car picked its way past the guarded entrances to the entrenched mountain. A prodigal son, he had called himself; but this was one of those itching hours when he envied the erotic mire of the earlier vagrant. His body hungered morbidly for the barely sampled flesh pots of the Meade bungalow, the perilous soilure of Butler's Avenue.

Night's dead peacefulness was the only reality. The moon froze ramp building and sagging shack into silver immobility; there could be no hour when bleeding forms lurched and died on this eternal background.

Day's conflicts were shadowy impossibility; he could not take further part in the fantastic strife that meant death and suffering; he was caught in the midnight spell of the silent world.

But a gush of warm-blooded hatred welled over him--hatred that turned this silver heaven into an iron-red h.e.l.l. No; he was pledged fighter in the cause of the mountain that must be all men's. He was vaguely aware that this reborn fealty came from two mothering, radiant eyes, that watched his steps in light and darkness, and waited with shadowy arms to welcome him at war's end.

The morning's headlines obtruded on Paul Judson's attention, at his usual early breakfast. They caused no lightening of his accustomed frown. Uncertainly he fumed around the place. When he saw Pelham about to start for the city, he walked over and intercepted him.

"Your car woke us up at three last night."

"It was shortly after two when I got here."

"You'll agree with me that such hours are a bad influence on the boys.

Your mother and I go to bed at ten. I can't have it."

Pelham did not answer, an ugly surge of anger up-boiling within him.

"It won't do for Hollis and Ned. It isn't decent. They're bound to imagine you are keeping bad company--of both s.e.xes----"

The wrath boiled over. "Father! You know I've been busy speaking--last night was the debate--you know I've been busy----"

His father's mouth closed to a thin line, then opened. "I can't have it.

They don't know what you do with your time; I am glad of that. You'll have to leave the mountain."

Pelham stood his ground against the menacing stare. "I shall be glad to." There was a blank wrench of anguish within him, at the thought of leaving the familiar home; the mere difficulties of moving and settling again loomed mountain-high. "Your suggestion that I am going with bad companions is trash, and you know it." He hesitated, then drove on.