"Let me suggest that when you get my time, you give me part of it in scrip. I want it for a souvenir."
Still there was silence.
"You know," persisted the prisoner, tormentingly, "there's a law against paying wages in scrip."
The marshal was goaded to speech. "We don't pay in scrip."
"But you do, man! You know you do!"
"We give it when they ask their money ahead."
"The law requires you to pay them twice a month, and you don't do it.
You pay them once a month, and meantime, if they need money, you give them this imitation money!"
"Well, if it satisfies them, where's your kick?"
"If it doesn't satisfy them, you put them on the train and ship them out?"
The marshal sat in silence, tapping impatiently with his fingers on the desk.
"Cotton," Hal began, again, "I'm out for education, and there's something I'd like you to explain to me--a problem in human psychology.
When a man puts through a deal like this, what does he tell himself about it?"
"Young man," said the marshal, "if you'll pardon me, you are getting to be a bore."
"Oh, but we've got an automobile ride before us! Surely we can't sit in silence all the way!" After a moment he added, in a coaxing tone, "I really want to learn, you know. You might be able to win me over."
"No!" said Cotton, promptly. "I'll not go in for anything like that!"
"But why not?"
"Because, I'm no match for you in long-windedness. I've heard you agitators before, you're all alike: you think the world is run by talk--but it isn't."
Hal had come to realise that he was not getting anywhere in his duel with the camp-marshal. He had made every effort to get somewhere; he had argued, threatened, bluffed, he had even sung songs for the marshal! But the marshal was going to ship him out, that was all there was to it.
Hal had gone on with the quarrel, simply because he had to wait for the automobile, and because he had endured indignities and had to vent his anger and disappointment. But now he stopped quarrelling suddenly. His attention was caught by the marshal's words, "You think the world is run by talk!" Those were the words Hal's brother always used! And also, the marshal had said, "You agitators!" For years it had been one of the taunts Hal had heard from his brother, "You will turn into one of these agitators!" Hal had answered, with boyish obstinacy, "I don't care if I do!" And now, here the marshal was calling him an agitator, seriously, without an apology, without the license of blood relationship. He repeated the words, "That's what gets me about you agitators--you come in here trying to stir these people up--"
So that was the way Hal seemed to the "G. F. C."! He had come here intending to be a spectator, to stand on the deck of the steamer and look down into the ocean of social misery. He had considered every step so carefully before he took it! He had merely tried to be a check-weighman, nothing more! He had told Tom Olson he would not go in for unionism; he had had a distrust of union organisers, of agitators of all sorts--blind, irresponsible persons who went about stirring up dangerous passions. He had come to admire Tom Olson--but that had only partly removed his prejudices; Olson was only one agitator, not the whole lot of them!
But all his consideration for the company had counted for nothing; likewise all his efforts to convince the marshal that he was a leisure-class person. In spite of all Hal's "tea-party manners," the marshal had said, "You agitators!" What was he judging by, Hal wondered.
Had he, Hal Warner, come to look like one of these blind, irresponsible persons? It was time that he took stock of himself!
Had two months of "dirty work" in the bowels of the earth changed him so? The idea was bound to be disconcerting to one who had been a favourite of the ladies! Did he talk like it?--he who had been "kissing the Blarney-stone!" The marshal had said he was "long-winded!" Well, to be sure, he had talked a lot; but what could the man expect--having shut him up in jail for two nights and a day, with only his grievances to brood over! Was that the way real agitators were made--being shut up with grievances to brood over?
Hal recalled his broodings in the jail. He had been embittered; he had not cared whether North Valley was dominated by labour unions. But that had all been a mood, the same as his answer to his brother; that was jail psychology, a part of his summer course in practical sociology. He had put it aside; but apparently it had made a deeper impression upon him than he had realised. It had changed his physical aspect! It had made him look and talk like an agitator! It had made him "irresponsible," "blind!"
Yes, that was it! All this dirt, ignorance, disease, this knavery and oppression, this maiming of men in body and soul in the coal-camps of America--all this did not exist--it was the hallucination of an "irresponsible" brain! There was the evidence of Hal's brother and the camp-marshal to prove it; there was the evidence of the whole world to prove it! The camp-marshal and his brother and the whole world could not be "blind!" And if you talked to them about these conditions, they shrugged their shoulders, they called you a "dreamer," a "crank," they said you were "off your trolley"; or else they became angry and bitter, they called you names; they said, "You agitators!"
SECTION 24.
The camp-marshal of North Valley had been "agitated" to such an extent that he could not stay in his chair. All the harassments of his troubled career had come pouring into his mind. He had begun pacing the floor, and was talking away, regardless of whether Hal listened or not.
"A campful of lousy wops! They can't understand any civilised language, they've only one idea in the world--to shirk every lick of work they can, to fill up their cars with slate and rock and blame it on some other fellow, and go off to fill themselves with booze. They won't work fair, they won't fight fair--they fight with a knife in the back! And you agitators with your sympathy for them--why the hell do they come to this country, unless they like it better than their own?"
Hal had heard this question before; but they had to wait for the automobile--and being sure that he was an agitator now, he would make all the trouble he could! "The reason is obvious enough," he said.
"Isn't it true that the 'G. F. C.' employs agents abroad to tell them of the wonderful pay they get in America?"
"Well, they get it, don't they? Three times what they ever got at home!"
"Yes, but it doesn't do them any good. There's another fact which the 'G. F. C.' doesn't mention--that the cost of living is even higher than the wages. Then, too, they're led to think of America as a land of liberty; they come, hoping for a better chance for themselves and their children; but they find a camp-marshal who's off in his geography--who thinks the Rocky Mountains are somewhere in Russia!"
"I know that line of talk!" exclaimed the other. "I learned to wave the starry flag when I was a kid. But I tell you, you've got to get coal mined, and it isn't the same thing as running a Fourth of July celebration. Some church people make a law they shan't work on Sunday--and what comes of that? They have thirty-six hours to get soused in, and so they can't work on Monday!"
"Surely there's a remedy, Cotton! Suppose the company refused to rent buildings to saloon-keepers?"
"Good God! You think we haven't tried it? They go down to Pedro for the stuff, and bring back all they can carry--inside them and out. And if we stop that--then our hands move to some other camps, where they can spend their money as they please. No, young man, when you have such cattle, you have to drive them! And it takes a strong hand to do it--a man like Peter Harrigan. If there's to be any coal, if industry's to go on, if there's to be any progress--"
"We have that in our song!" laughed Hal, breaking into the camp-marshal's discourse--
"He keeps them a-roll, that merry old soul-- The wheels of industree; A-roll and a-roll, for his pipe and his bowl And his college facultee!"
"Yes," growled the marshal. "It's easy enough for you smart young chaps to make verses, while you're living at ease on the old man's bounty. But that don't answer any argument. Are you college boys ready to take over his job? Or these Democrat politicians that come in here, talking fool-talk about liberty, making labour laws for these wops--"
"I begin to understand," said Hal. "You object to the politicians who pass the laws, you doubt their motives--and so you refuse to obey. But why didn't you tell me sooner you were an anarchist?"
"Anarchist?" cried the marshal. "_Me_ an anarchist?"
"That's what an anarchist is, isn't it?"
"Good God! If that isn't the limit! You come here, stirring up the men--a union agitator, or whatever you are--and you know that the first idea of these people, when they do break loose, is to put dynamite in the shafts and set fire to the buildings!"
"Do they do that?" There was surprise in Hal's tone.
"Haven't you read what they did in the last big strike? That dough-faced old preacher, John Edstrom, could tell you. He was one of the bunch."
"No," said Hal, "you're mistaken. Edstrom has a different philosophy.
But others did, I've no doubt. And since I've been here, I can understand their point of view entirely. When they set fire to the buildings, it was because they thought you and Alec Stone might be inside."
The marshal did not smile.
"They want to destroy the properties," continued Hal, "because that's the only way they can think of to punish the tyranny and greed of the owners. But, Cotton, suppose some one were to put a new idea into their heads; suppose some one were to say to them, 'Don't destroy the properties--_take them!_'"
The other stared. "Take them! So that's your idea of morality!"
"It would be more moral than the method by which Peter got them in the beginning."