“But you work, yes?”
“I got work waiting for me in Sacramento.”
“Thees rocker? Pah!”
“There’s some other stuff, too.”
I had never told him about what I was doing for Annapolis, and for some reason didn’t want to. If I did, I had to admit some stuff that was heavy on my heart, but if he didn’t know it, at least there was that much he wouldn’t look down on me for. I could feel him studying me, and he must have figured there was some lying to it somewhere, because he said: “Rodrigo, how you like to come work with me?”
“In a mine? Would be pretty tough for me.”
“Is only part.”
“And what’s the rest of it?”
“You hear me tonight? Make spich Mexican miner, on a corner, after liddle plinka-plank and liddle song? I start a union. Right here in Virginia City, I get thees men together, thees Mexican fallow, in miners’ union.”
“You mean a loafing association.”
“That is what is called.”
“That’s what it is.”
“Rodrigo, I work in mine all over Estados Unidos, all over Mexico, see many mine, many town. Never, in my whole life, do I see such ’orrible mine, such throw away man’s life only to make money, such rich man no give a good goddam if poor man live or die, as here in thees place, Virginia City. Yes, one time I think like you, union is loafing association. But now I know, must come. Thees bad man, they no do for miner, then miner must say, yes you do. I make you.”
“Quite a speech you got.”
“To Mexican, yes. For American, I need you.”
“Sorry, it doesn’t interest me.”
“Rodrigo, you need. To forget thees girl.”
“I’m all against unions.”
“You make big mistake.”
I was almost asleep that night when it came to me, like a big bell ringing in the dark: with a union, if I could start it and run it and stop it when I chose, I could close down Virginia City tighter than the lid of hell, and stop that river of silver that was running east and furnishing the money to the North that they needed to win the war. I lay there so excited I couldn’t sleep, because that would make it all right about my being here, and I could write Annapolis, and my leaving Sacramento wouldn’t be something I had to be ashamed of any more. I waited as long as I could, but it was still dark when I ran down C Street and over to Gold Canyon, where he and two or three friends had their shacks. He was frying his beans when I got there, and showed his teeth and laughed when I told him about changing my mind, even if he had no idea what my reasons were. He took me over to the Dakota then, which was the mine he worked in, to get a job, because of course I couldn’t organize any union unless I had a job in the mines. We lined up in front of the timekeeper’s window, outside the stockade, us and the twenty or thirty that wanted jobs that day, and after a while Trapp came out, the foreman that needed men.
He was a big, heavy-set man, and there was a lot of talk about him as he went down the line, feeling muscles and looking at hands and feet and teeth, like we were a bunch of mules at a stock auction. He came from Ohio, one man said, but had been a slave dealer in Memphis up to 1858, when he did things that were too much even for that place, and when a couple of mulatto girls died in his barracks he got run out and came west. Even the mine-owners couldn’t stand him, and he kept getting fired, but could always get a new job because though he treated the miners bad he could get out the ore, and there was generally somebody that needed him. He picked about a dozen of us and took us inside, and the timekeeper fixed us up with overalls, tools, hat, and candles, and booked us with them, around fifty dollars, and then we were brought in to the owner and the superintendent. The owner was named Hale, and he was a little man around fifty with a pale skin, black mustache, and expensive clothes, that looked like a dignified rat. The super was a big rawboned man named Lew Williams that was dressed in corduroys and talked with a brogue. He made us a speech and said he came up from the face of the rock himself, back in Cardiff, Wales, and asked nothing from a man but good work, in return for which he expected to give him fair treatment. Then he shook hands all around, but when he came to me asked my name. “And what part of the world do you come from, Duval?”
“Annapolis, Md.”
“And what did you do there?”
“Went to college, mostly.”
“Ah, the naval school?”
“No. There’s a college there too, St. John’s.”
“And you took the diploma?”
“Yes sir. A.B.”
“But you worked as well as studied?”
“I was a page for the legislature a couple of sessions. Then, when I was in college, I worked a bugeye three summers.”
“A bug—?”
“It’s a boat. Pointed at both ends, raked masts, leg-o’-mutton rig, centerboard. Really, it’s an oversize, decked-over canoe. In the ocean they’d slide all around, but in the bay, with the board coming up for the sandbars, they handle all right. The oyster-men use them, and my boat I rented to naval officers when they felt like a sail down the bay for some fishing. They said it was fishing. From where
I stayed, at the tiller, it sounded more like poker-playing.”
“And whisky-drinking, no doubt.”
“Plenty of that.”
“What’s your weight, my lad?”
“One eighty, sir.”
“Drop in and see me, Duval.”
Going to the cage, the rest of them had plenty to say about teacher’s pet and the boy on the burning deck, but Paddy shook my arm and I let them get away with it.
They tell you Virginia was laid out for hell but the devil’s health couldn’t stand it, and it’s easy to believe once you’ve been there. It’s on the side of a big mountain with a flag on top of it, called Mount Davidson. Half the streets run almost straight up and down, and they have names. The other half, they run level but they’re tilted on one side, and they have letters. All over the place dust rises from the stamping mills that break up the ore, and in between the dust are big clouds of brown, yellow, and green chemicals they use to amalgamate the silver, depending on which formula they’re using, and practically every mill has a different one, because the process peddlers are in every saloon, and they’ve got everything from sulphuric acid to cyanide. The houses are made of everything there is, brick or shingle or frame or tin or sheet iron, but not one has a tree or flower or blade of grass near it, or even some moss in the chinks of the front walk. Some of the stores are big, three or four stories high and covering a whole block, but they’re ugly and you have to push and shove to get to a counter. The mines, they’re everywhere, with fences around them and signs that say Keep Out and guards walking up and down, and back of every mine is a tailings dump, and to one side is a pile of busted cars and rails and machinery. Practically any time you look on C Street, which is where the big stores and offices are, is a traffic jam, with coaches and wagons and cattle and pigs all snarled up together, and the muleteers shooting dice while the peace officers straighten it out, and the cussing and whip-cracking and mooing and hee-hawing are so loud you can hear it a mile. The hee-hawing they’ve got a name for. They call it the soft warble of the Washoe canary, meaning a jackass. The Washoe part I didn’t get straight for a while, but it’s the name of some mountains up the line a little way, and some Indians too, and some people use it for all of that end of Nevada, so that’s why they holler Washoe and mean anything from the town to the silver bricks to the mountains to the Indians to the state, or maybe nothing but they’re drunk and feeling a little high. Then everywhere you look are Chinamen, that work all around and jam the streets. Then, down Six-Mile Canyon they’ve got a cemetery, but it’s a hell of a civic problem, because what with sudden death from lead poisoning in the saloons, and smallpox and mine fires and falling cages and one thing and another, they can’t ever get the cemetery big enough. The undertaker parlors, they’re always complaining, but I never could see why, because even if they didn’t do anythin
g but rent out their tin flowers they still would be getting along all right. The tin flowers are in place of real ones that don’t grow so well in Virginia, and after the funeral they collect them and use them on the next fellow—that is, if they got time to rush them around to the next fellow’s residence, because they fall fast, and sometimes the funerals conflict.
I had seen all that stuff, but I didn’t know the hundredth part of what they meant by the devil and his health till I dropped down in the cage that morning to the thousand-foot level and saw what men would do for four dollars a day. That steam that comes out of the shafts and scares you to death comes from boiling springs down under, and those boiling springs are what the miners have all around them while they get out the ore. Practically every tunnel has hot water running between the rails, under the square sets, to the shaft, and at the bottom of that is a sump, and into the sump runs the suction ends of the pipes that run to the pumps. It didn’t take me any week to hate Hale, or any other owner that would let men work in a place like that, or Trapp, who stood over us like some overseer on a cotton plantation, and had men dragged out by the heels when they fainted in the heat, and set me to throwing water on them, because I was new at the work and there wasn’t much else I was good for until I learned my way around. By the time Paddy took me to a crosscut where it was cooler, and we had our first jackbite, I was willing to pitch powder into the place and light it, I was so sore. Paddy said what we needed was blowers, but they’d require a bigger boiler and more transmission belts, and Hale was too cheap to put them in.
At night we held street meetings, but right away we hit a snag: we had to find some way to get Americans to listen to it, because they wouldn’t stop for Paddy and his guitar. After a while he remembered a fellow named Newt, that loaded ore on weekdays but on Sundays he played the cornet in church. We looked him up, and if you ask me he thought the union was some kind of a fraternal organization like the Odd Fellows, but on an offer to play his cornet, all he could say was yes. So that night he came with us and played Listen to the Mocking Bird with curlicue variations, but Paddy could chord along on the guitar, and the miners stopped to listen and I began handing it out. I asked them how much longer they were going to stand for it, to be treated like so many mules on a picket line. I asked them did they think the owners were going to do something for them just from love, or because somebody made them do it. I asked them did they like to get burned up in fires, or were they going to organize and compel the owners to put in the things that would make the mines safe. I asked them plenty, and I had never made any speeches, but I was surprised to find I was pretty good at it. Sometimes they would grunt at you like they thought you had it figured out right, and sometimes they’d cut in on you with mean questions. But even then you knew they were interested in what you said.
After the street meetings we’d go in the mines. Those that were in bonanza worked three shifts, and Paddy knew every drift and shaft, and how to get in and how to get out. Around jackbite time we’d slip into the Savage or the Sierra Nevada or the Kentuck, and the men would hear the guitar and slip in a dead entry or wherever we were, and we’d douse the lights and for twenty minutes I’d shoot it. They didn’t cut in on me then. Time meant too much and the steam was too near. It was coming our way, you could see that, so pretty soon we came down to brass tacks. We set a date for a meeting, a real one, with every miner in town expected to attend, on Sunday night, when they’d be free. We appointed captains and committees and wrote down names and really worked. And at the Dakota, from the way Trapp acted and Hale acted and Williams acted, you could see they were worried. One night, as I was coming out, the timekeeper said Williams wanted to see me. I went in there, and he looked me over close and asked me to sit down. “Duval, you’re one of the leading spirits in this union, is that right, my boy?”
“I don’t say I’m not.”
“You could be the leading spirit.”
“We got plenty of leading spirits.”
“Not like you. I attended your boardwalk meeting last night. You didn’t see me, but I was there. You seem to have a talent for gab, my boy.”
“If I have, you gave it to me. You and Hale.”
“How so?”
“By giving me plenty to gab about.”
“And quite a wit you have too. Now, let’s be frank, what are your complaints with this company? You seem to be a reasonable young fellow, intelligent, educated, well-born—what’s the real reason for this thing you’re doing?”
“The whole system’s wrong.”
“Nothing personal?”
“Like what?”
“Ah—Trapp, for instance.”
“He’s a dirty, cruel, son of a bitch.”
“If that difficulty were adjusted, would that take care of whatever you expect to deal with by means of a union?”
“It would help, but we’d still organize.” He studied me, and I expected him to lash out with something hot, and fire me, but he didn’t. He nodded and said he just wanted to get straightened out, and when I told Paddy, he was proud I had handed it back just as good as I got, and told the other Mexicans, and we had a little celebration, with vino, before we slipped in the mines for our night’s work.
Saturday before the big meeting, at lunch time, I called our gang together in the Dakota. It kind of choked me up a little, the way they looked to me to tell them the way it was to be done, and I looked them all in the eye before I began to talk. There were Lee and Cam, the two colored strikers, that were wizards at sinking a drill with six-pound hammers; Olesen, a big blond Swede, one of the strongest men I ever saw; Hook, a one-armed fellow that got his hand mashed off when he was a hand on a boat in the Erie Canal, and has a hook in its place; Gator, a fellow from Cairo, that claims he used to be an alligator man on a flatboat, and Ronnie, a sixteen-year-old boy. I made it quick, when I did begin to talk, and said the main thing was to get the men there, we’d do the rest after the meeting started. Paddy, he made a little speech too, then Ronnie got up and started to say something, some kid speech that didn’t mean much, but when Gator tried to shut him up everybody hollered to let him talk.
It was just about that time that something jumped out from behind the water barrel, and before we could even move, Trapp was in the middle of the entry, laying right and left with a tamping iron, and he’d got a couple of them on the head in the first couple of swipes. All the time he was swinging he was screaming: “Get out of here! Get back to work, you yellow-bellied rats! I know what you’re doing! I heard every word that was said!”
With that I reached him, and he began swinging at me. “And you, Duval, the ringleader! You think you’ll ever work again in this town? You needn’t even stop for your time! You’re fired without pay, and—”
“You’ll pay me or you’ll wish you had!”
“Out! Out of here! Or I’ll—”
He’d been swinging with the tamping iron, but I’d been too close to him for him to hit me solid. He jumped back now, drew the iron back like it was a rifle with a bayonet, and tightened up to drive it. I caught his chin with everything I had, and when he went down I jumped on him and banged his head up and down on the rail and smashed my fist down on his face, then got up and kicked him. But in a minute it made me sick and I stood there blowing. Then I looked around and I was the only one except Trapp in the entry. The candles were all there, where we had stuck them on the timber to give us plenty of light, but not one man. In a minute the picking started, away over in the crosscut, and lights began to flicker, and the sound of rock hitting mine cars. They had run out on me.
But the word had gone out somehow, because down the entry a light showed, and by its wobble I knew it was the super. He came and looked at Trapp, then for a minute at me, and then he called the men. His voice sounded like the crack of a muleteer’s whip. “Who did that?”
“... I did.”
I didn’t answer him till he asked it two or three times and they had a chance to say something if they were going to. “J
ust you?”
“That’s right.”
“You didn’t have any help?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“And what for?”
“You want to find that out suppose you begin cussing me out and treating me worse than a dog the way he did.”
“You mean that?”
“You heard me.”
“All right. Take charge.”
“... What?”
“I said, take charge and begin loading ore. Men, Duval’s foreman from now on. Get this man washed up, put him on a car, and send him to the shaft, where I’ll have him taken up in the cage. Well, Duval?”
“Yes sir. I’ll do my best.”
They sluiced off Trapp, and rolled him to the shaft on a car and came back, and started for the face of the rock. Then Ronnie came back to me. “Are you taking that job, Roger?”
“Mr. Duval.”
“And how about the union?”
“I’m holding a company job, now.”
“You two-faced son of a bitch.”
“Ronnie, you’re fired. Get out, and quick.”
Paddy tried to tell them it was something any man ought to feel free to do, take a company job if they offered it to him. But they hated me for it, and they didn’t hate me any more than I hated myself. Because Paddy could talk all he pleased, but if I didn’t owe the men, I owed my country, or what I called my country, to stick with something that might help it win. But when I heard the word foreman, my head began to pound with the thought of the thousand dollars it would give me, and what I meant to do with it.
6
THEY HELD THEIR MEETING, and instead of me for president they elected a fellow named Ferguson, and then they held some more meetings, and rumors began going around about what they were going to do, but they didn’t call any strike because it turned out they didn’t have to. The territory was to be a state soon, with an election for everything with a salary attached to it, and the politicians were so hot for votes they began putting the squeeze on the owners to treat the miners right. So everywhere you heard talk about blowers and fire buckets and even a tunnel from the mouth of Six-Mile Canyon to drive under the mountain and drain the hot water into the canyon mouth. But in my mine the men had nothing to say, and while they did like I told them, they didn’t look at me, they didn’t say good morning and they didn’t say good night. And then some things happened. One day a mine car came rolling down an entry and almost mashed me against the rib. Another day a timber crashed down from the top ledge of a stope and missed me about three inches. Another day I went flat on my face from a shot, but nobody had warned me it was lit.