The Coal War: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

  He went to union headquarters to see Tim Rafferty, and there was a Slav woman with a young baby in her arms, having been brought that morning from the town of Mateo, thirty-five miles away. The woman had gone out of her home with a shawl over her shoulders, her destination being the corner grocery, when three militiamen had stopped her and told her she was “wanted”. They had put her in an automobile and driven her thirty-five miles over the mountains in mid-winter, and taken her before the “military commission”, only to discover that they had made a mistake. At least, that appeared to be the situation; they turned her loose with no explanation, without money enough to get home, and here she was at union headquarters, sobbing and moaning, her lips blue with cold, her baby half frozen.

  Hal heard the story through an interpreter, and then phoned Billy Keating, who was in Pedro getting material for the “Gazette’s” campaign against the “Czarism” of the Adjutant-General. Billy came, and told Hal the story of his adventures—the “Czar’s” headquarters were in the American Hotel, and Billy, hanging about the lobby, had been too successful in picking up gossip about the “military commission” and its doings; so yesterday a guard had been set for the purpose of keeping him away. At least the guard had no other purpose that any man could discover; he stood all day at the entrance to the hotel, and other people came and went freely—all save the reporter of the Western City “Gazette”!

  They laughed; but then Hal became suddenly grave. “Billy,” said he, “I have a statement to make—something I want to go into the ‘Gazette’.”

  “Our columns are at your service,” said Billy. “What’s happened?”

  “Sit down,” Hal said; and the other, who knew shorthand, got his note-book and pencil ready.

  Hal began: “With regard to my arrest, I would state—”

  Billy stopped and looked up. “Your arrest?” he said.

  “Go on,” said Hal; “a stenographer shouldn’t interrupt.” He repeated, “With regard to my arrest, I would state—” And he went on to give an account of the sights he had witnessed, and of what he knew about the torturing of prisoners in the county-jail.

  “Good stuff!” commented Billy, when he was through. “But how about the arrest?”

  Hal answered, “Is it so very difficult to get arrested in this part of the world?”

  “What are you gong to do?”

  “I’m going to pay a call on General Wrightman. I’ve given you my last will and testament. And now let me tell you what to do. You watch the hotel, and when you see me arrested, go to the nearest telephone and get Mrs. Edward S. Warner, Junior, in Western City. I want it for a test, so do it without delay.”

  “What shall I say?”

  “I’ve written her a letter, which she’ll no doubt receive this morning. I told her what the jails are like, and how they’re treating the prisoners, so I feel reasonably sure she’ll do her part, if only you get word to her.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Billy. “I’ll get word to her. What else?”

  “Nothing—only give that statement to the ‘Gazette’. Give it to the other papers, too, if you’re capable of that much altruism.”

  “I’m capable of enough altruism to give it,” said Billy, dryly; “but you’ll find that they aren’t capable of enough to take it.”

  And so Hal went over to the American Hotel and sent in his card to Adjutant-General Wrightman.

  [17]

  Hal had met the eminent eye-doctor once before, and their interview had been pleasant enough; but that had been in the “era of good feeling”, before the General had realized what a desperate character Hal was. Now he found the great man sitting up straight and stiff in his desk-chair, glaring at him from under bushy eye-brows, his long mustaches making Hal think of a big walrus with white tusks.

  “Well, young man?” said he.

  “General Wrightman,” began Hal, “I happened to be in union headquarters just now—”

  “You had no business to be there!” snapped the General.

  Hal was disconcerted for a moment; then he went on, “I met a Slav woman, Mrs. Bobek. She had been brought over from Mateo in an automobile by some of your soldiers. Possibly you know about the case.”

  “I know something about it,” said the General.

  “She had nothing on but a calico house-dress and a shawl. As a result of this joy-ride, her baby is dying.”

  “Who says the baby is dying?”

  “A doctor who has just examined it.”

  “One of those union doctors? I wouldn’t believe him on oath!”

  “Well,” said Hal, “perhaps you will believe the coroner.”

  There was a pause.

  “General, you may know why that woman was arrested. Certainly she doesn’t. To have brought her in that condition, and without a wrap, was nothing but wanton cruelty.”

  “I have ordered an investigation into that matter,” said General Wrightman, and his tone conveyed the words, “That settles it. What else?”

  “This morning,” said Hal, “I was in Horton, where an old miner, Mike Sikoria, whom I have known for a year and a half, and whom I can certify to be a decent, hardworking man, was brutally assaulted and seriously injured by a militiaman.”

  “Did you witness the assault?”

  “I did not. But I saw the man immediately afterwards, and I heard his account—”

  “I am hearing accounts all the time,” said the General. “They are always lies.”

  “This man was going into the Horton post-office—”

  “The Horton post-office is in the railroad-station, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course—”

  “Well, then, he had no business there.”

  “But it’s the post-office, General—”

  “When a post-office is in a railroad-station, it’s not a post-office for my purposes, it’s a railroad-station. Strikers are not permitted near it; they know it, and you know it.”

  “General, this man was struck without warning, and brutally struck—”

  “Do you know the name of the militiaman?”

  “Yes.” Hal gave the name.

  “Very well. I will investigate the matter.”

  Hal was tempted to smile, so many times had he heard that word “investigate”. But he had come for more than words, so he pursued his course. “General, two days ago I was talking with Joe Prince, the negro. You know him?”

  “I’ve heard of him.”

  “He had just come out of the county-jail. He had been there nineteen days, and had not even had a bath.”

  “Well,” said the General, “did it occur to you to ask if he had had a bath in the nineteen days before he was taken there?”

  Hal decided to “pass up” that question.

  “At least he had been accustomed to have more food than they gave him in the jail. He had lost twenty-five pounds. And it seems that his cell was next to Louie the Greek. Now, I know Louie. He’s a man of peace, if there ever was one in this world. He’s an educated fellow, generous and fine-spirited—.

  “I know all about you fine-spirited men, you troublemakers,” broke in the General. “I’ve heard your phrases before! You teach what you call humanity to this foreign scum, but when it comes out at my end of the machine, it’s murder and assassination. I’ve got my own information about your ‘Louie the Greek’, and it’s from people whose judgment I have more respect for than I have for yours, young man. What else?”

  “General, they are torturing those men to try to make them confess something. They are not allowing them to sleep—”

  “Stuff and rubbish!” cried the other. “I’m tired of hearing such tales!”

  “Joe Prince is the seventh man who has told me what is going on in that prison. Their stories all agree, and I have talked with them before they had a chance to get together and compare. That man Prince was arrested without any charge whatsoever. He’s a decent, hard-working negro—used to be a stable-boss at Pine Creek. Apparently the only purpo
se your office had in holding him was to frighten him into declaring that Johann Hartman had given him a gun.”

  Hal was watching the General, and saw the blood mounting into his face.

  “That’s enough, young man!” he cried. “I’ll not have you come here to slander and insult my officers.”

  “They are torturing those prisoners—”

  And the General brought his fist down on the desk with a bang. “That’s enough, I say! Have you come here to be insolent?”

  “It depends upon what you call insolent,” Hal answered. “The purpose for which I have come is to pay a debt which I owe to my own self-respect.”

  [18]

  The General was puzzled by this remark—enough to let Hal go on; which was what Hal intended. “For seven weeks now I have lived in the Horton tent-colony, devoting myself to helping those people, to bringing a little order and decency into their lives. I have been sanitary officer and chief of police and international diplomat and captain of a baseball team. And for a month not a day has passed that I have not witnessed outrages. I have seen peaceable and decent-hearted peasant people driven about like cattle, deprived of every right guaranteed by our laws and our constitution—”

  The General brought down his fist again. The “constitution” was a red rag to him. “That’s enough, I say! I’ll not listen to lectures from you.”

  “Day after day I have seen these things, and sat impotent—”

  “Young man!” roared the General. “Don’t make me lose my temper!”

  Hal might have thought this funny, if he had not had such a desperate purpose in mind. “General Wrightman,” he answered, with the utmost solemnity, “I am perfectly willing that you should lose your temper!”

  There was something so unexpected about this, that again the old man was disconcerted. “General,” persisted Hal, “will you permit me to ask you a question?”

  “What is it?”

  “Why have you never arrested me?”

  “What?”

  “You have arrested practically everybody else who has been active in the Horton tent-colony. Louie the Greek, for example—he has done exactly what I have done, no more and no less. Why is he being tortured in prison and threatened with death, while I am left at liberty?”

  The General was like the master of a sail-boat who finds the wind blowing unexpected gusts, so that he does not know which way to put his helm. “Anybody would think, young man, that you had come here in order to be arrested!”

  “A little over a year ago,” said Hal, “I was working as a ‘buddy’ in the North Valley mine. That’s how I come to know more about this strike than you do, General. While I was there, Jeff Cotton—you remember, he was camp-marshal at North Valley—threatened to send me to jail. I told him there were some people in the state who could not be sent to jail. He saw the point. Do you see it, General?”

  The General saw it, beyond doubt; the blood rushed into his face, and he thrust a trembling finger out at Hal. “You impudent young puppy!” he cried.

  “But General, that is not answering my question. And if there’s any other answer than the one I suggest, I want to know it. I have been watching the thing with wonder. I see your gunmen and troopers scowling at me as they pass, I hear them cursing me under their breath—but they let me alone. I go my way, I do what I please; I am protected by a mystic spell!”

  The General’s shaking finger suddenly became a clenched fist. “I’ll show you!” he roared. “You think because you’ve got a rich father I’m afraid of you! You think you can come here and insult me to my face! But you’re mistaken—by Jesus Christ, you’ll find out that you’re mistaken!”

  Hal had been prepared for such language; it was what everybody reported about these interviews. “General Wrightman,” he said, earnestly, “you must realize that it will be wiser to put me in jail. I am a very bad example to the people at Horton.”

  “I have realized that, sir.”

  “It is contrary to the whole spirit of our institutions that there should be one law for the rich and another for the poor. If you torture Louie the Greek, while you let the son of Edward Warner do what he pleases, you are simply giving arguments to anarchists; you are causing everybody to believe that the commanding general of the militia is a coward and a sycophant, who oppresses the poor and helpless, but cringes before his masters, the well-to-do and prominent—”

  “Hold your tongue, young man!” roared the infuriated old walrus. “You want to go to jail, I’ll send you there—and I’ll see if I can’t take some of the starch out of you while I’m about it!”

  The General pressed a button at his desk, and instantly the door was opened by a sergeant. “Take this man to the city-jail!”

  The sergeant saluted; and Hal, smiling his most irritating smile, remarked, “General Wrightman, I’ll make a wager with you—for the drinks. It’s ten o’clock now; I’ll wager you can’t keep me in jail until two!” And so leaving his victim on the verge of apoplexy, Hal followed the sergeant, and rode to the jail in a coal-company automobile.

  [19]

  Of this city-jail Hal had heard many terrifying accounts; it was in some ways worse than the county-jail—without ventilation, and crowded like the Black Hole of Calcutta. But still more prisoners came, until they were having to use the storage vaults underneath the court-house!

  “By God, another!” said the head-jailer, when Hal was brought to his office. He was a burly Irishman, and sat scratching his head. “Whatever am I going to do with this one?”

  “You needn’t worry, Kerrigan,” said Hal, promptly. “You’re only going to keep me a few hours.”

  The other looked at him in surprise. “Sure, and how do you know that?”

  “It stands to reason,” said Hal. “My father’s a millionaire.”

  “Go on!” said Kerrigan, staring. “Whatcher givin’ us?”

  “Sure thing!” laughed Hal. “Did you never hear of Edward S. Warner?”

  “I have,” said Kerrigan. “You tell me he’s your father?”

  Hal took out his card-case, and handed a card to the jailer, who looked at it. He looked at Hal, and then at the two militiamen, who were standing by; but neither of them seemed to know. Could it really be that this genially impudent young person was the son of the coal-man? Or was he daring to mock them?

  Kerrigan was a Catholic, and perhaps had heard of the famous argument of Pascal. It is the course of prudence to believe the teachings of the church, for there is no penalty to be feared if you believe them and they should turn out to be false, but, on the other hand, if you refuse to believe them, and they should turn out to be true, you are damned. “Sure now,” said Kerrigan, “if they’ll be lettin’ you out in a few hours, there’s no use puttin’ you in with them bums.”

  Hal had not foreseen this possibility. “Oh, but I want to go in!”

  “What?” cried the other. “What for?” This looked decidedly as if the chances were in favor of the church!

  “Why, you see,” said Hal, “I’ve never been in a jail.”

  “Sure, this is no jail,” remarked Kerrigan, “it’s a menagerie. It smells like the monkey-house. ’Tis no place for a decent person.”

  He signed the receipt for Hal and gave it to the two militiamen. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take care of him.” And after they had gone, he turned to his charge again. “Now,” said he, “and what has a young gentleman like you been doin’?”

  “I’ve been telling the Adjutant-General what I thought of him.”

  The other’s eyes showed a flash. “I’d like to been there!” said he.

  To which Hal answered, “If you want me to, I’ll do the same thing to you.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “First tell me—are you the fellow who knocked down Louie the Greek when he came in here?”

  So the geniality of the head-jailer suddenly dried up; he perceived that he had a dangerous man to deal with, and took him to one of the cells and shut him in with a ba
ng.

  The size of this cell was eight feet by seven, and there were five men already in it—three of them sitting on the floor. There were six such cells in a tier, and two tiers, one on top of the other, and every cell crowded in exactly the same way; in addition, boards had been laid on top of the second tier of cells, where the hoboes and drunks were packed. Hal found that Jailer Kerrigan had been correct in his description of the odor of the place.

  All five of the men in the cell with Hal were strikers; four of them having been arrested for picketing in the early days. Hal introduced himself, and they shook hands all around; then, standing in the middle of the floor, Hal suddenly began to sing at the top of his voice:

  “We’ll win the fight today, boys,

  We’ll win the fight today,

  Shouting the battle-cry of union!”

  The song was taken up in chorus, and seemed to shake the very walls of the building. For a minute or two the city-jail was a glorious place to be in. But then one of the jailers, having marked the source of the trouble, rushed up with a bucket of ice cold water and hurled it into Hal’s face, and the young man’s revolutionary fervor was ingloriously extinguished!

  [20]

  It had been ten-twenty when Hal gave up his watch to the head-jailer; it was one-three by the same watch when it was returned to him. “However did you do it?” inquired Kerrigan, as he counted back Hal’s money to him.

  Then he added, somewhat nervously, “I hope you’ll understand, Mr. Warner, it ain’t my fault if this place is crowded.”

  “You could resign,” remarked Hal.

  “What good would that do?”

  “It would give you a chance to protest and let the public know what is going on.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Kerrigan, “but I’ve got a family.”

  “Children?”

  “Six of them.”

  “And you choose to feed them on the blood of these prisoners?” And so, leaving the head-jailer with his jaw fallen down, Hal went out with his guards, and returned in the automobile to the American Hotel.

  This time, however, it was not to the commanding officer, but to the Judge-Advocate. Major Cassels sat at his desk, tapping nervously with his pencil. “Well, Warner, you’ve had a little misadventure,” he remarked, with what was meant to be a genial smile. He was a foppish person with an affected accent, and his black-rimmed eye-glasses looked strange with his military uniform.