________________________________________________
_ In a cellar-like house driven like a stake into the hillside above
Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with
the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor
did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half
running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along
with white intense face shook their heads. "He's cracked," they said.
"He'll hurt some one yet."
Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in
the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him
to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps
in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together
collections of birds' eggs which he sold to women in the trains that
stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put
beads in their eyesockets and sold them also. He proclaimed himself an
anarchist and like Cracked McGregor muttered to himself as he hurried
along.
One day Beaut came upon Mike Hartnet reading a book as he sat on a log
overlooking the town. A shock ran through McGregor when he looked over
the shoulder of the man and saw what book he read. "It is strange," he
thought, "that this fellow should stick to the same book that fat old
Weeks makes his living by."
Beaut sat on the log beside Hartnet and watched him. The reading man
looked up and nodded nervously then slid along the log to the farther
end. Beaut laughed. He looked down at the town and then at the
frightened nervous book-reading man on the log. An inspiration came to
him.
"If you had the power, Mike, what would you do to Coal Creek?" he
asked.
The nervous man jumped and tears came into his eyes. He stood before
the log and spread out his hands. "I would go among men like Christ,"
he cried, pitching his voice forward like one addressing an audience.
"Poor and humble, I would go teaching them of love." Spreading out his
hands like one pronouncing a benediction he shouted, "Oh men of Coal
Creek, I would teach you love and the destruction of evil."
Beaut jumped up from the log and strode before the trembling figure.
He was strangely moved. Grasping the man he thrust him back upon the
log. His own voice rolled down the hillside in a great roaring laugh.
"Men of Coal Creek," he shouted, mimicking the earnestness of Hartnet,
"listen to the voice of McGregor. I hate you. I hate you because you
jeered at my father and at me and because you cheated my mother, Nance
McGregor. I hate you because you are weak and disorganised like
cattle. I would like to come among you teaching the power of force. I
would like to slay you one by one, not with weapons but with my naked
fists. If they have made you work like rats buried in a hole they are
right. It is man's right to do what he can. Get up and fight. Fight
and I'll get on the other side and you can fight me. I'll help drive
you back into your holes."
Beaut ceased speaking and jumping over the logs ran down the road.
Among the first of the miner's houses he stopped and laughed
awkwardly. "I am cracked also," he thought, "shouting at emptiness on
a hillside." He went on in a reflective mood, wondering what power had
taken hold of him. "I would like a fight--a fight against odds," he
thought. "I will stir things up when I am a lawyer in the city."
Mike Hartnet came running down the road at the heels of McGregor.
"Don't tell," he plead trembling. "Don't tell about me in the town.
They will laugh and call names after me. I want to be let alone."
Beaut shook himself loose from the detaining hand and went on down the
hill. When he had passed out of sight of Hartnet he sat down on the
ground. For an hour he looked at the town in the valley and thought of
himself. He was half proud, half ashamed of the thing that had
happened.
* * * * *
In the blue eyes of McGregor anger flashed quick and sudden. Upon the
streets of Coal Creek he walked, swinging along, his great body
inspiring fear. His mother grown grave and silent worked in the
offices of the mines. Again she had a habit of silence in her own home
and looked at her son, half fearing him. All day she worked in the
mine offices and in the evening sat silently in a chair on the porch
before her house and looked down into Main Street.
Beaut McGregor did nothing. He sat in the dingy little pool room and
talked with the black-haired boy or walked over the hills swinging a
stick in his hand and thinking of the city to which he would presently
go to start his career. As he walked in the streets women stopped to
look at him, thinking of the beauty and strength of his maturing body.
The miners passed him in silence hating him and dreading his wrath.
Walking among the hills he thought much of himself. "I am capable of
anything," he thought, lifting his head and looking at the towering
hills, "I wonder why I stay on here."
When he was eighteen Beaut's mother fell ill. All day she lay on her
back in bed in the room above the empty bakery. Beaut shook himself
out of his waking stupor and went about seeking work. He had not felt
that he was indolent. He had been waiting. Now he bestirred himself.
"I'll not go into the mines," he said, "nothing shall get me down
there."
He got work in a livery stable cleaning and feeding the horses. His
mother got out of bed and began going again to the mine offices.
Having started to work Beaut stayed on, thinking it but a way station
to the position he would one day achieve in the city.
In the stable worked two young boys, sons of coal miners. They drove
travelling men from the trains to farming towns in valleys back among
the hills and in the evening with Beaut McGregor they sat on a bench
before the barn and shouted at people going past the stable up the
hill.
The livery stable in Coal Creek was owned by a hunchback named Weller
who lived in the city and went home at night. During the day he sat
about the stable talking to red-haired McGregor. "You're a big beast,"
he said laughing. "You talk about going away to the city and making
something of yourself and still you stay on here doing nothing. You
want to quit this talking about being a lawyer and become a prize
fighter. Law is a place for brains not muscles." He walked through the
stables leaning his head to one side and looking up at the big fellow
who brushed the horses. McGregor watched him and grinned. "I'll show
you," he said.
The hunchback was pleased when he strutted before McGregor. He had
heard men talk of the strength and the evil temper of his stableman
and it pleased him to have so fierce a fellow cleaning the horses. At
night in the city he sat under the lamp with his wife and boasted. "I
make him step about," he said.
In the stable the hunchback kept at the heels of McGregor. "And
there's something else," he said, putting his hand in his pockets and
raising himself on his toes. "You look out for that undertaker's
daughter. She wants you. If she gets you there will be no law study
but a place in the mines for you. You let her alone and begin taking
care of your mother."
Beaut went on cleaning the horses and thinking of what the hunchback
had said. He thought there was sense to it. He also was afraid of the
tall pale girl. Sometimes when he looked at her a pain shot through
him and a combination of fear and desire gripped him. He walked away
from it and went free as he went free from the life in the darkness
down in the mine. "He has a kind of genius for keeping away from the
things he don't like," said the liveryman, talking to Uncle Charlie
Wheeler in the sun before the door of the post office.
One afternoon the two boys who worked in the livery stable with
McGregor got him drunk. The affair was a rude joke, elaborately
planned. The hunchback had stayed in the city for the day and no
travelling men got off the trains to be driven over the hills. In the
afternoon hay brought over the hill from the fruitful valley was being
put into the loft of the barn and between loads McGregor and the two
boys sat on the bench by the stable door. The two boys went to the
saloon and brought back beer, paying for it from a fund kept for that
purpose. The fund was the result of a system worked out by the two
drivers. When a passenger gave one of them a coin at the end of a day
of driving he put it into the common fund. When the fund had grown to
some size the two went to the saloon and stood before the bar drinking
until it was spent and then came back to sleep off their stupor on the
hay in the barn. After a prosperous week the hunchback occasionally
gave them a dollar for the fund.
Of the beer McGregor drank but one foaming glass. For all his idling
about Coal Creek he had never before tasted beer and it was strong and
bitter in his mouth. He threw up his head and gulped it then turned
and walked toward the rear of the stable to conceal the tears that the
taste of the stuff had forced into his eyes.
The two drivers sat on the bench and laughed. The drink they had given
Beaut was a horrible mess concocted by the laughing bartender at their
suggestion. "We will get the big fellow drunk and hear him roar," the
bartender had said.
As he walked toward the back of the stable a convulsive nausea seized
Beaut. He stumbled and pitched forward, cutting his face on the floor.
Then he rolled over on his back and groaned and a little stream of
blood ran down his cheek.
The two boys jumped up from the bench and ran toward him. They stood
looking at his pale lips. Fear seized them. They tried to lift him but
he fell from their arms and lay again on the stable floor, white and
motionless. Filled with fright they ran from the stable and through
Main Street. "We must get a doctor," they said as they hurried along,
"He is mighty sick--that fellow."
In the doorway leading to the rooms over the undertaker's shop stood
the tall pale girl. One of the running boys stopped and addressed her,
"Your red-head," he shouted, "is blind drunk lying on the stable
floor. He has cut his head and is bleeding."
The tall girl ran down the street to the offices of the mine. With
Nance McGregor she hurried to the stable. The store keepers along Main
Street looked out of their doors and saw the two women pale and with
set faces half-carrying the huge form of Beaut McGregor along the
street and in at the door of the bakery.
* * * * *
At eight o'clock that evening Beaut McGregor, his legs still unsteady,
his face white, climbed aboard a passenger train and passed out of the
life of Coal Creek. On the seat beside him a bag contained all his
clothes. In his pocket lay a ticket to Chicago and eighty-five
dollars, the last of Cracked McGregor's savings. He looked out of the
car window at the little woman thin and worn standing alone on the
station platform and a great wave of anger passed through him. "I'll
show them," he muttered. The woman looked at him and forced a smile to
her lips. The train began to move into the west. Beaut looked at his
mother and at the deserted streets of Coal Creek and put his head down
upon his hands and in the crowded car before the gaping people wept
with joy that he had seen the last of youth. He looked back at Coal
Creek, full of hate. Like Nero he might have wished that all of the
people of the town had but one head so that he might have cut it off
with a sweep of a sword or knocked it into the gutter with one
swinging blow. _
Read next: BOOK II: CHAPTER I
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER III
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