Not possibly, was Moylan’s reply. It would be lost as soon as it was begun. There was no slightest hope of success until a lot of organisation work had been done.
“But meantime,” argued Hal, “the union at North Valley will go to pieces!”
“Perhaps,” was the reply. “We’ll only have to start another. That’s what the labour movement is like.”
Jim Moylan was young, and saw Hal’s mood. “Don’t misunderstand us!” he cried. “It’s heartbreaking—but it’s not in our power to help. We are charged with building up the union, and we know that if we supported everything that looked like a strike, we’d be bankrupt the first year. You can’t imagine how often this same thing happens—hardly a month we’re not called on to handle such a situation.”
“I can see what you mean,” said Hal. “But I thought that in this case, right after the disaster, with the men so stirred—”
The young Irishman smiled, rather sadly. “You’re new at this game,” he said. “If a mine-disaster was enough to win a strike, God knows our job would be easy. In Barela, just down the canyon from you, they’ve had three big explosions—they’ve killed over five hundred men in the past year!”
Hal began to see how, in his inexperience, he had lost his sense of proportion.
He looked at the two labour leaders, and recalled the picture of such a person which he had brought with him to North Valley—a hot headed and fiery agitator, luring honest workingmen from their jobs. But here was the situation exactly reversed! Here was he in a blaze of excitement—and two labour leaders turning the fire-hose on him! They sat quiet and businesslike, pronouncing a doom upon the slaves of North Valley. Back to their black dungeons with them!
“What can we tell the men?” he asked, making an effort to repress his chagrin.
“We can only tell them what I’m telling you—that we’re helpless, till we’ve got the whole district organised. Meantime, they have to stand the gaff; they must do what they can to keep an organisation.”
“But all the active men will be fired!”
“No, not quite all—they seldom get them all.”
Here the stolid old German put in. In the last year the company had turned out more than six thousand men because of union activity or suspicion of it.
“Six thousand!” echoed Hal. “You mean from this one district?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But there aren’t more than twelve or fifteen thousand men in the district!”
“I know that.”
“Then how can you ever keep an organisation?”
The other answered, quietly, “They treat the new men the same as they treated the old.”
Hal thought suddenly of John Edstrom’s ants! Here they were—building their bridge, building it again and again, as often as floods might destroy it! They had not the swift impatience of a youth of the leisure-class, accustomed to having his own way, accustomed to thinking of freedom and decency and justice as necessities of life. Much as Hal learned from the conversation of these men, he learned more from their silences—the quiet, matter-of-fact way they took things which had driven him beside himself with indignation. He began to realise what it would mean to stand by his pledge to those poor devils in North Valley. He would need more than one blaze of excitement; he would need brains and patience and discipline, he would need years of study and hard work!
XIX
Hal found himself forced to accept the decision of the labour-leaders. They had had experience, they could judge the situation. The miners would have to go back to work, and Cartwright and Alec Stone and Jeff Cotton would drive them as before! All that the rebels could do was to try to keep a secret organisation in the camp.
Jerry Minetti mentioned Jack David. He had gone back this morning, without having seen the labour-leaders. So he might escape suspicion, and keep his job, and help the union work.
“How about you?” asked Hal. “I suppose you’ve cooked your goose.”
Jerry had never heard this phrase, but he got its meaning. “Sure thing!” said he. “Cooked him plenty!”
“Didn’t you see the ‘dicks’ downstairs in the lobby?” inquired Hartman.
“I haven’t learned to recognise them yet.”
“Well, you will, if you stay at this business. There hasn’t been a minute since our office was opened that we haven’t had half a dozen on the other side of the street. Every man that comes to see us is followed back to his camp and fired that same day. They’ve broken into my desk at night and stolen my letters and papers; they’ve threatened us with death a hundred times.”
“I don’t see how you make any headway at all!”
“They can never stop us. They thought when they broke into my desk, they’d get a list of our organisers. But you see, I carry the lists in my head!”
“No small task, either,” put in Moylan. “Would you like to know how many organisers we have at work? Ninety-seven. And they haven’t caught a single one of them!”
Hal heard him, amazed. Here was a new aspect of the labour movement! This quiet, resolute old “Dutchy,” whom you might have taken for a delicatessen-proprietor; this merry-eyed Irish boy, whom you would have expected to be escorting a lady to a firemen’s ball—they were captains of an army of sappers who were undermining the towers of Peter Harrigan’s fortress of greed!
Hartman suggested that Jerry might take a chance at this sort of work. He would surely be fired from North Valley, so he might as well send word to his family to come to Pedro. In this way he might save himself to work as an organiser; because it was the custom of these company “spotters” to follow a man back to his camp and there identify him. If Jerry took a train for Western City, they would be thrown off the track, and he might get into some new camp and do organising among the Italians. Jerry accepted this proposition with alacrity; it would put off the evil
