Marching Men | Page 5

cave-like hollows in her face climbed the embankment and sat
upon the ground below the boy and his mother. "The fire is in the old
McCrary cut," she said, her voice quivering, a dumb hopeless look in
her eyes. "They can't get through to close the doors. My man Ike is in
there." She put down her head and sat weeping. The boy knew the
woman. She was a neighbour who lived in an unpainted house on the
hillside. In the yard in front of her house a swarm of children played
among the stones. Her husband, a great hulking fellow, got drunk and

when he came home kicked his wife. The boy had heard her screaming
at night.
Suddenly in the growing crowd of miners below the embankment
Beaut McGregor saw his father moving restlessly about. On his head he
had his cap with the miner's lamp lighted. He went from group to group
among the people, his head hanging to one side. The boy looked at him
intently. He was reminded of the October day on the eminence
overlooking the fruitful valley and again he thought of his father as a
man inspired, going through a kind of ceremony. The tall miner rubbed
his hands up and down his legs, he peered into the faces of the silent
men standing about, his lips moved and his red beard danced up and
down.
As the boy looked a change came over the face of Cracked McGregor.
He ran to the foot of the embankment and looked up. In his eyes was
the look of a perplexed animal. The wife bent down and began to talk
to the weeping woman on the ground, trying to comfort her. She did
not see her husband and the boy and man stood in silence looking into
each other's eyes.
Then the puzzled look went out of the father's face. He turned and
running along with his head rolling about reached the closed door of
the mine. A man, who wore a white collar and had a cigar stuck in the
corner of his mouth, put out his hand.
"Stop! Wait!" he shouted. Pushing the man aside with his powerful arm
the runner pulled open the door of the mine and disappeared down the
runway.
A hubbub arose. The man in the white collar took the cigar from his
mouth and began to swear violently. The boy stood on the embankment
and saw his mother running toward the runway of the mine. A miner
gripped her by the arm and led her back up the face of the embankment.
In the crowd a woman's voice shouted, "It's Cracked McGregor gone to
close the door to the McCrary cut."
The man with the white collar glared about as he chewed the end of his

cigar. "He's gone crazy," he shouted, again closing the door to the
mine.
Cracked McGregor died in the mine, almost within reach of the door to
the old cut where the fire burned. With him died all but five of the
imprisoned miners. All day parties of men tried to get down into the
mine. Below in the hidden passages under their own homes the
scurrying miners died like rats in a burning barn while their wives, with
shawls over their heads, sat silently weeping on the railroad
embankment. In the evening the boy and his mother went up the hill
alone. From the houses scattered over the hill came the sound of
women weeping.
* * * * *
For several years after the mine disaster the McGregors, mother and
son, lived in the house on the hillside. The woman went each morning
to the offices of the mine where she washed windows and scrubbed
floors. The position was a sort of recognition on the part of the mine
officials of the heroism of Cracked McGregor.
Nance McGregor was a small blue-eyed woman with a sharp nose. She
wore glasses and had the name in Coal Creek of being quick and sharp.
She did not stand by the fence to talk with the wives of other miners
but sat in her house and sewed or read aloud to her son. She subscribed
for a magazine and had bound copies of it standing upon shelves in the
room where she and the boy ate breakfast in the early morning. Before
the death of her husband she had maintained a habit of silence in her
house but after his death she expanded, and, with her red-haired son,
discussed freely every phase of their narrow lives. As he grew older the
boy began to believe that she like the miners had kept hidden under her
silence a secret fear of his father. Certain things she said of her life
encouraged the thought.
Norman McGregor grew