Several women of the labouring class and one or two travellers who might have been small local storekeepers made up the rest of the company, with the exception of one young man in a corner by himself. It is with this man that we are concerned. Take a good look at him, for he is worth it.
He is a fresh-complexioned, middle-sized young man, not far, one would guess, from his thirtieth year. He has large, shrewd, humorous grey eyes which twinkle inquiringly from time to time as he looks round through his spectacles at the people about him. It is easy to see that he is of a sociable and possibly simple disposition, anxious to be friendly to all men. Anyone could pick him at once as gregarious in his habits and communicative in his nature, with a quick wit and a ready smile. And yet the man who studied him more closely might discern a certain firmness of jaw and grim tightness about the lips which would warn him that there were depths beyond, and that this pleasant, brown-haired young Irishman might conceivably leave his mark for good or evil upon any society to which he was introduced.
James McParlan, who used the alias James McKenna and is disguised in The Valley of Fear as John McMurdo. Scribner’s 18 (July 1895)
Having made one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the fading landscape.
It was not a cheering prospect. Through the growing gloom there pulsed the red glow of the furnaces on the sides of the hills. Great heaps of slag and dumps of cinders loomed up on each side, with the high shafts of the collieries towering above them. Huddled groups of mean, wooden houses, the windows of which were beginning to outline themselves in light, were scattered here and there along the line, and the frequent halting places were crowded with their swarthy inhabitants.
The iron and coal valleys of the Vermissa district were no resorts for the leisured or the cultured. Everywhere there were stern signs of the crudest battle of life, the rude work to be done, and the rude, strong workers who did it.
The young traveller gazed out into this dismal country with a face of mingled repulsion and interest which showed that the scene was new to him. At intervals he drew from his pocket a bulky letter to which he referred, and on the margins of which he scribbled some notes. Once from the back of his waist he produced something which one would hardly have expected to find in the possession of so mild-mannered a man. It was a navy revolver of the largest size.101 As he turned it slantwise to the light, the glint upon the rims of the copper shells within the drum showed that it was fully loaded. He quickly restored it to his secret pocket, but not before it had been observed by a working man who had seated himself upon the adjoining bench.
“Hullo, mate!” said he. “You seem heeled102 and ready.”
The young man smiled with an air of embarrassment.
“Yes,” said he, “we need them sometimes in the place I come from.”
“And where may that be?”
“I’m last from Chicago.”
“A stranger in these parts?”
“Yes.”
“You may find you need it here,” said the workman.
“Ah! Is that so?” The young man seemed interested.
“Have you heard nothing of doings hereabouts?”
“Nothing out of the way.”
“Why, I thought the country was full of it. You’ll hear quick enough. What made you come here?”
“I heard there was always work for a willing man.”
“Are you one of the labour union?”103
“Sure.”
“Then you’ll get your job, I guess. Have you any friends?”
“Not yet; but I have the means of making them.”
“How’s that, then?”
“I am one of the Ancient Order104 of Freemen.105 There’s no town without a lodge, and where there is a lodge I’ll find my friends.”
The remark had a singular effect upon his companion. He glanced round suspiciously at the others in the car. The miners were still whispering among themselves. The two police officers were dozing. He came across, seated himself close to the young traveller, and held out his hand.
“Put it there,” he said.
A hand-grip passed between the two.
“I see you speak the truth,” said the workman. “But it’s well to make certain.” He raised his right hand to his right eyebrow. The traveller at once raised his left hand to his left eyebrow.
“Dark nights are unpleasant,” said the workman.
“Yes, for strangers to travel,” the other answered.106
“That’s good enough. I’m Brother Scanlan, Lodge 341, Vermissa Valley. Glad to see you in these parts.”
“Thank you. I’m Brother John McMurdo, Lodge 29, Chicago. Bodymaster,107 J. H. Scott. But I am in luck to meet a brother so early.”
“Well, there are plenty of us about. You won’t find the order more flourishing anywhere in the States than right here in Vermissa Valley. But we could do with some lads like you. I can’t understand a spry man of the Labour Union finding no work to do in Chicago.”
“I found plenty of work to do,” said McMurdo.
“Then why did you leave?”
McMurdo nodded towards the policemen and smiled. “I guess those chaps would be glad to know,” he said.
Scanlan groaned sympathetically.
“In trouble?” he asked, in a whisper.
“Deep.”
“A penitentiary job?”
“And the rest.”
“Not a killing!”
“It’s early days to talk of such things,” said McMurdo, with the air of a man who had been surprised into saying more than he intended. “I’ve my own good reasons for leaving Chicago, and let that be enough for you. Who are you that you should take it on yourself to ask such things?”
His grey eyes gleamed with sudden and dangerous anger from behind his glasses.
“All right, mate, no offence meant. The boys will think none the worse of you, whatever you may have done. Where are you bound for now?”
“To Vermissa.”
“That’s the third halt down the line. Where are you staying?”
McMurdo took out an envelope and held it close to the murky oil lamp. “Here is the address—Jacob Shafter, Sheridan Street. It’s a boarding-house that was recommended by a man I knew in Chicago.”
“Well, I don’t know it, but Vermissa is out of my beat. I live at Hobson’s Patch,108 and that’s here where we are drawing up. But, say, there’s one bit of advice I’ll give you before we part. If you’re in trouble in Vermissa, go straight to the Union House and see Boss McGinty. He is the Bodymaster of Vermissa Lodge, and nothing can happen in these parts unless Black Jack McGinty wants it.109 So long, mate. Maybe we’ll meet in lodge one of these evenings. But mind my words: If you are in trouble, go to Boss McGinty.”
Scanlan descended, and McMurdo was left once again to his thoughts. Night had now fallen, and the flames of the frequent furnaces were roaring and leaping in the darkness. Against their lurid background dark figures were bending and straining, twisting and turning, with the motion of winch or of windlass, to the rhythm of an eternal clank and roar.
“I guess hell must look something like that,” said a voice.
McMurdo turned and saw that one of the policemen had shifted in his seat and was staring out into the fiery waste.
“For that matter,” said the other policeman, “I allow that hell must be something like that. If there are worse devils down yonder than some we could name, it’s more than I’d expect. I guess you are new to this part, young man?”
“Well, what if I am?” McMurdo answered in a surly voice.
“Just this, mister, that I should advise you to be careful in choosing your friends. I don’t think I’d begin with Mike Scanlan or his gang if I were you.”
“What the hell110 is it to you who are my friends?” roared McMurdo in a voice which brought every head in the carriage round to witness the alte
rcation. “Did I ask you for your advice, or did you think me such a sucker that I couldn’t move without it? You speak when you are spoken to, and by the Lord you’d have to wait a long time if it was me!”
He thrust out his face and grinned at the patrolmen like a snarling dog.
The two policemen, heavy, good-natured men, were taken aback by the extraordinary vehemence with which their friendly advances had been rejected.
“No offence, stranger,” said one. “It was a warning for your own good, seeing that you are, by your own showing, new to the place.”
“I’m new to the place; but I’m not new to you and your kind!” cried McMurdo, in cold fury. “I guess you’re the same in all places, shoving your advice in when nobody asks for it.”
“Maybe we’ll see more of you before very long,” said one of the patrolmen, with a grin. “You’re a real hand-picked one, if I am a judge.”
“I was thinking the same,” remarked the other. “I guess we may meet again.”
“I’m not afraid of you, and don’t you think it!” cried McMurdo. “My name’s Jack McMurdo—see? If you want me, you’ll find me at Jacob Shafter’s on Sheridan Street, Vermissa; so I’m not hiding from you, am I? Day or night I dare to look the like of you in the face—don’t make any mistake about that!”
There was a murmur of sympathy and admiration from the miners at the dauntless demeanour of the new-comer, while the two policemen shrugged their shoulders and renewed a conversation between themselves.
A few minutes later the train ran into the ill-lit depôt, and there was a general clearing, for Vermissa was by far the largest town on the line. McMurdo picked up his leather grip-sack111 and was about to start off into the darkness, when one of the miners accosted him.
“By Gar, mate!112 you know how to speak to the cops,” he said in a voice of awe. “It was grand to hear you. Let me carry your grip-sack and show you the road. I’m passing Shafter’s on the way to my own shack.”
There was a chorus of friendly “Good-nights” from the other miners as they passed from the platform. Before ever he had set foot in it, McMurdo the turbulent had become a character in Vermissa.
The country had been a place of terror, but the town was in its way even more depressing. Down that long valley there was at least a certain gloomy grandeur in the huge fires and the clouds of drifting smoke, while the strength and industry of man found fitting monuments in the hills which he had spilled by the side of his monstrous excavations. But the town showed a dead level of mean ugliness and squalor. The broad street was churned up by the traffic into a horrible rutted paste of muddy snow. The side-walks were narrow and uneven. The numerous gas-lamps served only to show more clearly a long line of wooden houses, each with its veranda facing the street, unkempt and dirty.
As they approached the centre of the town the scene was brightened by a row of well-lit stores, and even more by a cluster of saloons and gaming-houses, in which the miners spent their hard-earned but generous wages.
“That’s the Union House,” said the guide, pointing to one saloon which rose almost to the dignity of being an hotel.113 “Jack McGinty is the boss there.”
“What sort of a man is he?” McMurdo asked.
“What! have you never heard of the Boss?”
“How could I have heard of him when you know that I am a stranger in these parts?”
“Well, I thought his name was known right across the Union. It’s been in the papers often enough.”
“What for?”
“Well”—the miner lowered his voice—“over the affairs.”
“What affairs?”
“Good Lord, mister, you are queer goods, if I must say it without offence. There’s only one set of affairs that you’ll hear of in these parts, and that’s the affairs of the Scowrers.”
“Why, I seem to have read of the Scowrers in Chicago. A gang of murderers, are they not?”
“Hush, on your life!” cried the miner, standing still in alarm, and gazing in amazement at his companion. “Man, you won’t live long in these parts if you speak in the open street like that. Many a man has had the life beaten out of him for less.”
“Well, I know nothing about them. It’s only what I have read.”
“And I’m not saying that you have not read the truth.” The man looked nervously round him as he spoke, peering into the shadows as if he feared to see some lurking danger. “If killing is murder, then God knows there is murder and to spare. But don’t you dare to breathe the name of Jack McGinty in connection with it, stranger, for every whisper goes back to him, and he is not one that is likely to let it pass. Now, that’s the house you’re after—that one standing back from the street. You’ll find old Jacob Shafter that runs it as honest a man as lives in this township.”
“ ‘Hush, on your life!’ cried the miner, standing still in his alarm, and gazing in amazement at his companion.”
Frank Wiles, Strand Magazine, 1915
“I thank you,” said McMurdo, and shaking hands with his new acquaintance he plodded, his grip-sack in his hand, up the path which led to the dwelling house, at the door of which he gave a resounding knock.
It was opened at once by some one very different from what he had expected. It was a woman, young and singularly beautiful. She was of the German type,114 blonde and fair-haired, with the piquant contrast of a pair of beautiful dark eyes, with which she surveyed the stranger with surprise and a pleasing embarrassment which brought a wave of colour over her pale face. Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture; the more attractive for its contrast with the sordid and gloomy surroundings. A lovely violet growing upon one of those black slag-heaps of the mines would not have seemed more surprising. So entranced was he that he stood staring without a word, and it was she who broke the silence.
“I thought it was father,” said she with a pleasing little touch of a German accent. “Did you come to see him? He is down town. I expect him back every minute.”
McMurdo continued to gaze at her in open admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion before this masterful visitor.
“No, miss,” he said at last, “I’m in no hurry to see him. But your house was recommended to me for board. I thought it might suit me—and now I know it will.”
“You are quick to make up your mind,” said she, with a smile.
“Anyone but a blind man could do as much,” the other answered.
She laughed at the compliment.
“Come right in, sir,” she said. “I’m Miss Ettie Shafter, Mr. Shafter’s daughter. My mother’s dead, and I run the house. You can sit down by the stove in the front room until father comes along—Ah, here he is! So you can fix things with him right away.”
A heavy, elderly man came plodding up the path. In a few words McMurdo explained his business. A man of the name of Murphy had given him the address in Chicago. He in turn had had it from some one else. Old Shafter was quite ready. The stranger made no bones about terms, agreed at once to every condition, and was apparently fairly flush of money. For seven dollars115 a week paid in advance he was to have board and lodging.
So it was that McMurdo, the self-confessed fugitive from justice, took up his abode under the roof of the Shafters, the first step which was to lead to so long and dark a train of events, ending in a far distant land.
97 At the end of the preceding chapter, Watson invites his readers to “journey back some twenty years in time” (to 1875). This would place the case in 1895, contrary to the date assigned by a majority of the chronologists, who place the events at Birlstone in January 1888 (see Appendix 3). However, an 1895 date would square with Watson’s claim in “The Final Problem,” said to have occurred in 1891, that he had not then heard of Professor Moriarty (see note 6, above).
98 A fictitious name. There is, however, a city of Gilberton in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, the heart of Molly Maguire territory.
99 The coal mining busines
s of the Schuylkill anthracite region was centered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the seat of the Schuylkill County Court House.
100 A fictional county, replacing the very real Chester County named in the manuscript of The Valley of Fear. Yet even that was a deliberate misdirection, as “Merton County” is undoubtedly a stand-in for Carbon County, two-thirds of which is agricultural and one-third devoted to anthracite mining, adjoining Schuylkill County.
101 William H. Conway and Lynda L. Conway, in their fine annotation of “The Scowrers” entitled The Valley of Fear & the Molly Maguires, conclude that this is probably an 1861 Navy .36-calibre revolver.
102 According to J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley’s Dictionary of Slang, the term “heeled” means “armed; from the steel spur used in cock-fighting.” The term is also used by Abe Slaney in “The Dancing Men.”
103 American editions have the more vernacular phrase, “Are you a member of the union?”
104 The “Eminent Order” in some American editions.
105 Most scholars associate the fictional “Ancient Order of Freemen” with the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), a fraternal organisation of Irish Catholics dating back to 1641; the U.S. chapter was founded in New York in 1836. Most, if not all, members of the Molly Maguires were first members of the AOH, which proved a welcome and needed refuge for Irish and Irish-Americans at a time when bigotry against them was rampant. To some outsiders, the Mollies, the AOH, and the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association appeared to be one and the same. But whereas John Siney, the head of the WBA, favored arbitration and pledged to oppose violence, the leaders of the AOH pushed the WBA to strike rather than compromise with the mine owners and accept a wage that would have broken the union’s contract. With its bold positions and outspoken leaders, the AOH—and the secret society that it allegedly fostered—earned the fierce loyalty of its followers and raised the alarm of Franklin Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad (and owner of several mines), who grew determined to suppress this threat to his authority.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 86