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Then he spoke slowly, in a low, tense voice. "Look here, Messner, if you refuse to get out, I'll thrash you. This isn't California. I'll beat you to a jelly with my two fists." Messner shrugged his shoulders. "If you do, I'll call a miners' meeting and see you strung up to the nearest tree. As you said, this is not California.
Of course, when one thinks of the harshness which is often shown by the richer employers towards their employees, one feels inclined to take the most pessimist view of human nature. Many must remember the indignation which was aroused during the great Yorkshire strike of 1894, when old miners who had picked coal from an abandoned pit were prosecuted by the colliery owners.
Three great events, which came closely together, helped to clear the situation: The steel strike, the President's Industrial Conference, and the strike of the soft coal miners.
But for this we had plenty of precedents. What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles of luck were the usual thing in the Cripple Creek region.
The coal miners and the workers on the breakers, who eke out their lives in slavery, and who sleep in quarters that make the huts of the peasants of Europe seem actually inviting, constitute the vast majority. The most prosperous business of the town outside of the Coal industry, which is, of course, monopolized by the magnates, is the Undertaking business.
The country contained many valuable diamond mines, but these were unfortunately among mountains where serpents abounded; the miners had recourse to a strange device when collecting the precious stones, to protect themselves from these reptiles, which we may believe or not as we choose.
Farther up the street was a flaming theater decorated with gaudy lithographs of women in tights. That awoke a familiar echo. The grimy figures headed thither might well be miners just in from Eldorado or Anvil Creek.
From the slender treasury, which is enriched only by the pennies of the miners during their weeks of employment, the money is drawn to purchase the rations that must be had to keep the miners and their families from actually starving when they can no longer buy from the company store. To supplement the rations distributed by the Union, the Hazleton miners have a small supply of medicine.
They were honest, kindly faced miners, roughly dressed and heavily bearded, but it could be seen that they had hearts of gold. The beautiful young girl, who wore a simple dress of blue calico, and whose hair hung about her fair face in curls of a radiant buff, now served them food and poured steaming coffee from a large pot. The miners seemed loth to eat, being excited by the gold nuggets.
'They are the ghosts, the miners hold, of the old Jews, sir, that crucified our Lord, and were sent for slaves by the Roman emperors to work the mines; and we find their old smelting-houses, which we call Jews' houses, and their blocks of tin, at the bottom of the great bogs, which we call Jews' tin; and there's a town among us, too, which we call Market-Jew but the old name was Marazion; that means the Bitterness of Zion, they tell me.
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