The last to come was an Austrian miner named Huszar, with whom Olson had got into touch. Then, it being time to begin, everybody looked uneasily at everybody else. Few of them had conspired before, and they did not know quite how to set about it. Olson, the one who would naturally have been their leader, had deliberately stayed away. They must run this check-weighman affair for themselves!
“Somebody talk,” said Mrs. David at last; and then, as the silence continued, she turned to Hal. “You’re going to be the check-weighman. You talk.”
“I’m the youngest man here,” said Hal, with a smile. “Some older fellow talk.”
But nobody else smiled. “Go on!” exclaimed old Mike; and so at last Hal stood up. It was something he was to experience many times in the future; because he was an American, and educated, he was forced into a position of leadership.
“As I understand it, you people want a check-weighman. Now, they tell me the pay for a check-weighman should be three dollars a day, but we’ve got only seven miners among us, and that’s not enough. I will offer to take the job for twenty-five cents a day from each man, which will make a dollar-seventy-five, less than what I’m getting now as a buddy. If we get thirty men to come in, then I’ll take ten cents a day from each, and make the full three dollars. Does that seem fair?”
“Sure!” said Mike; and the others added their assent by word or nod.
“All right. Now, there’s nobody that works in this mine but knows the men don’t get their weight. It would cost the company several hundred dollars a day to give us our weight, and nobody should be so foolish as to imagine they’ll do it without a struggle. We’ve got to make up our minds to stand together.”
“Sure, stand together!” cried Mike.
“No get check-weighman!” exclaimed Jerry, pessimistically.
“Not unless we try, Jerry,” said Hal.
And Mike thumped his knee. “Sure try! And get him too!”
“Right!” cried “Big Jack.” But his little wife was not satisfied with the response of the others. She gave Hal his first lesson in the drilling of these polyglot masses.
“Talk to them. Make them understand you!” And she pointed them out one by one with her finger: “You! You! Wresmak, here, and you, Klowoski, and you, Zam—you other Polish fellow. Want check-weighman. Want to get all weight. Get all our money. Understand?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Get committee, go see super! Want check-weighman. Understand? Got to have check-weighman! No back down, no scare.”
“No—no scare!” Klowoski, who understood some English, explained rapidly to Zamierowski; and Zamierowski, whose head was still plastered where Jeff Cotton’s revolver had hit it, nodded eagerly in assent. In spite of his bruises, he would stand by the others, and face the boss.
This suggested another question. “Who’s going to do the talking to the boss?”
“You do that,” said Mrs. David, to Hal.
“But I’m the one that’s to be paid. It’s not for me to talk.”
“No one else can do it right,” declared the woman.
“Sure—got to be American feller!” said Mike.
But Hal insisted. If he did the talking, it would look as if the check-weighman had been the source of the movement, and was engaged in making a good paying job for himself.
There was discussion back and forth, until finally John Edstrom spoke up. “Put me on the committee.”
“You?” said Hal. “But you’ll be thrown out! And what will your wife do?”
“I think my wife is going to die tonight,” said Edstrom, simply.
He sat with his lips set tightly, looking straight before him. After a pause he went on: “If it isn’t tonight, it will be tomorrow, the doctor says; and after that, nothing will matter. I shall have to go down to Pedro to bury her, and if I have to stay, it will make little difference to me, so I might as well do what I can for the rest of you. I’ve been a miner all my life, and Mr. Cartwright knows it; that might have some weight with him. Let Joe Smith and Sikoria and myself be the ones to go and see him, and the rest of you wait, and don’t give up your jobs unless you have to.”
IX
Having settled the matter of the committee, Hal told the assembly how Alec Stone had asked him to spy upon the men. He thought they should know about it; the bosses might try to use it against him, as Olson had warned. “They may tell you I’m a traitor,” he said. “You must trust me.”
“We trust you!” exclaimed Mike, with fervour; and the others nodded their agreement.
“All right,” Hal answered. “You can rest sure of this one thing—if I get onto that tipple, you’re going to get your weights!”
“Hear, hear!” cried “Big Jack,” in English fashion. And a murmur ran about the room. They did not dare make much noise, but they made clear that that was what they wanted.
Hal sat down, and began to unroll the bandage from his wrist. “I guess I’m through with this,” he said, and explained how he had come to wear it.
“What?” cried Old Mike. “You fool me like that?” And he caught the wrist, and when he had made sure there was no sign of swelling upon it, he shook it so that he almost sprained it really, laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks. “You old son-of-a-gun!” he exclaimed. Meantime Klowoski was telling the story to Zamierowski, and Jerry Minetti was explaining it to Wresmak, in the sort of pidgin-English which does duty in the camps. Hal had never seen such real laughter since coming to North Valley.
But conspirators cannot lend themselves long to merriment. They came back to business again. It was agreed that the hour for the committee’s visit to the superintendent should be quitting-time on the morrow. And then John Edstrom spoke, suggesting that they should agree upon their course of action in case they were offered violence.
“You think there’s much
