Marching Men | Page 6

into a tall broad-shouldered boy with strong
arms, flaming red hair and a habit of sudden and violent fits of temper.
There was something about him that held the attention. As he grew
older and was renamed by Uncle Charlie Wheeler he began going about

looking for trouble. When the boys called him "Beaut" he knocked
them down. When men shouted the name after him on the street he
followed them with black looks. It became a point of honour with him
to resent the name. He connected it with the town's unfairness to
Cracked McGregor.
In the house on the hillside the boy and his mother lived together
happily. In the early morning they went down the hill and across the
tracks to the offices of the mine. From the offices the boy went up the
hill on the farther side of the valley and sat upon the schoolhouse steps
or wandered in the streets waiting for the day in school to begin. In the
evening mother and son sat upon the steps at the front of their home
and watched the glare of the coke ovens on the sky and the lights of the
swiftly-running passenger trains, roaring whistling and disappearing
into the night.
Nance McGregor talked to her son of the big world outside the valley
and told him of the cities, the seas and the strange lands and peoples
beyond the seas. "We have dug in the ground like rats," she said, "I and
my people and your father and his people. With you it will be different.
You will get out of here to other places and other work." She grew
indignant thinking of the life in the town. "We are stuck down here
amid dirt, living in it, breathing it," she complained. "Sixty men died in
that hole in the ground and then the mine started again with new men.
We stay here year after year digging coal to burn in engines that take
other people across the seas and into the West."
When the son was a tall strong boy of fourteen Nance McGregor
bought the bakery and to buy it took the money saved by Cracked
McGregor. With it he had planned to buy a farm in the valley beyond
the hill. Dollar by dollar it had been put away by the miner who
dreamed of life in his own fields.
In the bakery the boy worked and learned to make bread. Kneading the
dough his arms and hands grew as strong as a bear's. He hated the work,
he hated Coal Creek and dreamed of life in the city and of the part he
should play there. Among the young men he began to make here and
there a friend. Like his father he attracted attention. Women looked at

him, laughed at his big frame and strong homely features and looked
again. When they spoke to him in the bakery or on the street he spoke
back fearlessly and looked them in the eyes. Young girls in the school
walked home down the hill with other boys and at night dreamed of
Beaut McGregor. When some one spoke ill of him they answered
defending and praising him. Like his father he was a marked man in the
town of Coal Creek.

CHAPTER II
One Sunday afternoon three boys sat on a log on the side of the hill that
looked down into Coal Creek. From where they sat they could see the
workers of the night shift idling in the sun on Main Street. From the
coke ovens a thin line of smoke rose into the sky. A freight train
heavily loaded crept round the hill at the end of the valley. It was
spring and over even that hive of black industry hung a faint promise of
beauty. The boys talked of the life of people in their town and as they
talked thought each of himself.
Although he had not been out of the valley and had grown strong and
big there, Beaut McGregor knew something of the outside world. It
isn't a time when men are shut off from their fellows. Newspapers and
magazines have done their work too well. They reached even into the
miner's cabin and the merchants along Main Street of Coal Creek stood
before their stores in the afternoon and talked of the doings of the world.
Beaut McGregor knew that life in his town was exceptional, that not
everywhere did men toil all day black and grimy underground, that not
all women were pale bloodless and bent. As he went about delivering
bread he whistled a song. "Take me back to Broadway," he sang after
the soubrette in a show that had once come to Coal Creek.
Now as he sat on the hillside