Marching Men | Page 9

the hill far
away at the other end of the valley. "We'd better be getting along back,"
he said.

The woman remained seated on the log. "Sit down," she said, "I'll tell
you something--something it's good for you to hear. You're so big and
red you tempt a girl to bother you. First though you tell me why you go
along the street looking into the gutter when I stand in the stairway in
the evening."
Beaut sat down again upon the log, and thought of what the black-
haired boy had told him of her. "Then it was true--what he said about
you?" he asked.
"No! No!" she cried, jumping up in her turn and beginning to pin on her
hat. "Let's be going."
Beaut sat stolidly on the log. "What's the use bothering each other," he
said. "Let's sit here until the sun goes down. We can get home before
dark."
They sat down and she began talking, boasting of herself as he had
boasted of his father.
"I'm too old for that boy," she said; "I'm older than you by a good many
years. I know what boys talk about and what they say about women. I
do pretty well. I don't have any one to talk to except father and he sits
all evening reading a paper and going to sleep in his chair. If I let boys
come and sit with me in the evening or stand talking with me in the
stairway it is because I'm lonesome. There isn't a man in town I'd
marry--not one."
The speech sounded discordant and harsh to Beaut. He wished his
father were there rubbing his hands together and muttering rather than
this pale woman who stirred him up and then talked harshly like the
women at the back doors in Coal Creek. He thought again as he had
thought before that he preferred the black-faced miners drunk and silent
to their pale talking wives. On an impulse he told her that, saying it
crudely so that it hurt.
Their companionship was spoiled. They got up and began to climb the
hill, going toward home. Again she put her hand to her side and again

he wished to put his hand at her back and push her up the hill. Instead
he walked beside her in silence, again hating the town.
Halfway down the hill the tall woman stopped by the road-side.
Darkness was coming on and the glow of the coke ovens lighted the
sky. "One living up here and never going down there might think it
rather grand and big," he said. Again the hatred came. "They might
think the men who live down there knew something instead of being
just a lot of cattle."
A smile came into the face of the tall woman and a gentler look stole
into her eyes. "We get at one another," she said, "we can't let one
another alone. I wish we hadn't quarrelled. We might be friends if we
tried. You have got something in you. You attract women. I've heard
others say that. Your father was that way. Most of the women here
would rather have been the wife of Cracked McGregor ugly as he was
than to have stayed with their own husbands. I heard my mother say
that to father when they lay quarrelling in bed at night and I lay
listening."
The boy was overcome with the thought of a woman talking to him so
frankly. He looked at her and said what was in his mind. "I don't like
the women," he said, "but I liked you, seeing you standing in the
stairway and thinking you had been doing as you pleased. I thought
maybe you amounted to something. I don't know why you should be
bothered by what I think. I don't know why any woman should be
bothered by what any man thinks. I should think you would go right on
doing what you want to do like mother and me about my being a
lawyer."
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood crept
over him.

CHAPTER III

The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns
and cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east
to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books they
had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men and
women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished the
journey would come to an