King Coal | Page 9

to patronise the libraries and
colleges endowed by the philanthropic owners of coal mines.
Supper was nearly over at Reminitsky's when he arrived; the floor
looked like the scene of a cannibal picnic, and what food was left was
cold. It was always to be this way with him, he found, and he had to
make the best of it. The dining-room of this boarding-house, owned
and managed by the G. F. C., brought to his mind the state prison,
which he had once visited--with its rows of men sitting in silence,
eating starch and grease out of tin-plates. The plates here were of
crockery half an inch thick, but the starch and grease never failed; the
formula of Reminitsky's cook seemed to be, When in doubt add grease,
and boil it in. Even ravenous as Hal was after his long tramp and his
labour below ground, he could hardly swallow this food. On Sundays,
the only time he ate by daylight, the flies swarmed over everything, and
he remembered having heard a physician say that an enlightened man
should be more afraid of a fly than of a Bengal tiger. The
boarding-house provided him with a cot and a supply of vermin, but
with no blanket, which was a necessity in the mountain regions. So
after supper he had to seek out his boss, and arrange to get credit at the
company-store. They were willing to give a certain amount of credit, he
found, as this would enable the camp-marshal to keep him from
straying. There was no law to hold a man for debt--but Hal knew by
this time how much a camp-marshal cared for law.

SECTION 6.
For three days Hal toiled in the bowels of the mine, and ate and
pursued vermin at Reminitsky's. Then came a blessed Sunday, and he
had a couple of free hours to see the sunlight and to get a look at the
North Valley camp. It was a village straggling along more than a mile
of the mountain canyon. In the centre were the great breaker-buildings,
the shaft-house, and the power-house with its tall chimneys; nearby

were the company-store and a couple of saloons. There were several
boarding-houses like Reminitsky's, and long rows of board cabins
containing from two to four rooms each, some of them occupied by
several families. A little way up a slope stood a school-house, and
another small one-room building which served as a church; the
clergyman belonging to the General Fuel Company denomination. He
was given the use of the building, by way of start over the saloons,
which had to pay a heavy rental to the company; it seemed a proof of
the innate perversity of human nature that even in spite of this
advantage, heaven was losing out in the struggle against hell in the
coal-camp.
As one walked through this village, the first impression was of
desolation. The mountains towered, barren and lonely, scarred with the
wounds of geologic ages. In these canyons the sun set early in the
afternoon, the snow came early in the fall; everywhere Nature's hand
seemed against man, and man had succumbed to her power. Inside the
camps one felt a still more cruel desolation--that of sordidness and
animalism. There were a few pitiful attempts at vegetable-gardens, but
the cinders and smoke killed everything, and the prevailing colour was
of grime. The landscape was strewn with ash-heaps, old wire and
tomato-cans, and smudged and smutty children playing.
There was a part of the camp called "shanty-town," where, amid
miniature mountains of slag, some of the lowest of the newly-arrived
foreigners had been permitted to build themselves shacks out of old
boards, tin, and sheets of tar-paper. These homes were beneath the
dignity of chicken-houses, yet in some of them a dozen people were
crowded, men and women sleeping on old rags and blankets on a cinder
floor. Here the babies swarmed like maggots. They wore for the most
part a single ragged smock, and their bare buttocks were shamelessly
upturned to the heavens. It was so the children of the cave-men must
have played, thought Hal; and waves of repulsion swept over him. He
had come with love and curiosity, but both motives failed here. How
could a man of sensitive nerves, aware of the refinements and graces of
life, learn to love these people, who were an affront to his every
sense--a stench to his nostrils, a jabbering to his ear, a procession of

deformities to his eye? What had civilisation done for them? What
could it do? After all, what were they fit for, but the dirty work they
were penned up to do? So spoke the haughty race-consciousness of the
Anglo-Saxon, contemplating these Mediterranean hordes, the very
shape of whose heads was objectionable.
But Hal