death. He knew his work was perilous. In the law, it is a question whether or not the case can be successfully defended by the coal company.
Trueman's trip to the Clerk's office has been for the purpose of ascertaining the miner's standing with reference to his citizenship at the time of his death. With his experience in the practice, the lawyer surmised that the Magyar was never naturalized. If he was not naturalized, his widow has no standing in the court where the suit has been brought. In that case, it belongs to the Federal Court, and his widow and orphan, as well as the impecunious lawyer who has taken the widow's case on a contingent fee, will not have the means nor the fortitude to begin action in the higher court.
Trueman discovers after a few moments of investigation in the Clerk's office that his suspicion is well founded. The miner had never taken out naturalization papers.
Cruel? In the concrete, perhaps. The law is made for the multitude.
"It is a legitimate defense!" Trueman murmurs to himself, as he passes
down the stairs. "The Magyar bore none of the burdens of citizenship.
Neither should he or his, share in the protection which the State of
Pennsylvania affords her citizens."
"Will the Magyar's widow get anything?" asks O'Connor, one of the half-Irish, half-Italian miners, whose elbow Trueman brushes as he walks towards the court room.
Trueman befriended O'Connor once in the matter of rent.
"No. He was not naturalized!"
"His blood be on old Purdy's head, then!" says O'Connor. "The mine boss has said he will put her out in the street. She's already months back in her rent."
Trueman passes on as if he has not heard O'Connor, who is at the Court
House as one of the witnesses.
As the young lawyer pushes his way into the court room his quick glance catches the bent form of the woman in the front seat, clad in the cheapest of black, and the open-eyed boy at her side.
The proceedings are short. Trueman sits down at one of the tables inside the bar enclosure and hastily dashes off an affidavit containing the facts he has discovered, and a formal motion to dismiss. The Judge hears the motion, which is opposed to in a half-hearted way by the lawyer on the other side. The suit is dismissed.
When she is finally made to understand what has happened, the widow burst into tears. The boy, at sight of his mother's distress, sets up a wailing that echoes through the whole Court House. In the hallway, the bunch of miners from Shaft Fifteen gather about the weeping woman as she comes out. One more instance of the heartlessness of the law which is made by the men elected by the Coal Barons, is brought home to them.
To these ignorant men, to whom the first principle of self-preservation is that limit of erudition set by the coal barons themselves, whose first and last lessons in life are to read correctly the checks of the time-keeper and the figures on the "company store" checks which they receive in payment for their work, what difference does it make that the dead miner was a Magyar—not a full fledged American?
He lost his life down in a coal mine where he went to dig coal that some American, way off beyond the hills, might toast his toes on a winter's evening. His life's work was to help keep the American public warm. In return, all he asked was very poor food, a straw bed in a hovel, and a crust for his wife should he be killed in the undertaking.
There is much grumbling already on account of the company stores. The walking delegate of the miners' union has ordered a strike in Carbon County, adjoining, unless the Paradise Company shall reduce the price of blasting powder sold to the miners, fifteen cents a pound.
The miners leave the Court House grumbling. Soothing the Magyar's widow in their rough way, they form a grim procession and trudge back over the dusty road to the breaker and the row of hovels on either side of it.
CHAPTER III.
CONFLICTING OPINIONS.
An hour afterward Trueman is seated in his office, in the Commerce building, on the public square of Wilkes-Barre, in the middle of which is situated the Court House. On the same floor with his office are the general offices of the Paradise Coal Company.
Besides giving him distinction as a "corporation lawyer," which has its effect in drawing outside clients, this proximity to the general offices of the Coal Barons' syndicate relieves the young lawyer from the payment of rent. For the convenience of having a shrewd attorney always at his beck and call, Gorman Purdy, president of the company, is willing that Trueman shall occupy the office rent free in addition to the liberal salary which is paid him.
While Trueman is successfully managing the legal affairs of the Paradise Coal Company and achieving a brilliant reputation at the bar of Pennsylvania, Gorman Purdy is "trying him out" with an entirely different object in view. He desires to test the young man's mettle as a man even more than as a lawyer. To accomplish this end it is most important that Trueman shall occupy the office next the suite of the great coal corporation.
Lying on the lawyer's desk is an open envelope, by the side of which is a check for one thousand dollars, being the amount of his salary from the coal company for two months. In his ears still ring the plaintive sobs of the Magyar's widow and the denunciation of O'Connor.
"The mine boss will put her in the street!"
In his mind's eye he pictures the dusty road separating the two rows of miners' huts, down around the bend in the Susquehanna. He sees the mountain beyond and the column of steam rising from a more distant breaker, half way up the slope—a beautiful vision from the distance, but how squalid in its dull gray misery to those who spend their lives in its midst.
At this moment the miners who were in attendance at court are trudging along this highway, chattering their grievances to one another. The widow and her boy bring up the rear, while the men march solemnly on ahead, talking of their right to live—just to live.
Across these mountains, in the city of Philadelphia, six score years and more ago a convention once uttered the identical sentiments being voiced by these serfs of the coal seams. Harvey Trueman has been a deep student of the teachings of that convention. On the shelves of his library are the well-thumbed writings of Washington and the Adamses and Thomas Jefferson. He is a firm believer of the doctrines enunciated at Faneuil Hall, and by Henry in Virginia.
To-morrow, perhaps to-night, the widow's paltry chattels will be set in the middle of that road by the sheriff. She will be dispossessed by the Paradise Coal Company. A frail woman, pale with poverty of the blood, shrinking with every breath she draws, because she knows the very air she breathes comes to her over the lands of the Coal Barons—a haggard widow of the mines will be deprived of her miserable shelter, not fit for a beast of burden, by the richest coal corporation on earth. Why? Because her abject misery is a lesson too graphic in its horrible details to be constantly before the miners. Allowed to remain there, the widow will breed trouble among the men who are all risking their lives every minute of every working day, even as her husband risked his. Dispossess proceedings do not come under the supervision of Harvey Trueman, but he has ever been observant. A blind man may not remain in ignorance of the human suffering in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.
