“If you ever do anything like that again, so help me—.” He broke off as he couldn’t seem to find a threat bad enough.
He stood over Blair very quietly as she sewed the man’s chin and bandaged it, and when she had put on the last bit of adhesive plaster, he grabbed her arm and pulled her upright.
“We’re getting out of here this minute. They can all shoot each other for all I care. I’ll not risk you for any of them.”
Blair barely had time to grab her bag before Lee pulled her out of the cabin.
“Your union man came last night,” Reed greeted his son as soon as Lee walked into the house.
As Leander rubbed a sore place on his back where a wooden plank had gouged it all night, he looked up at his father in alarm. “You didn’t let anyone see him, did you?”
Reed gave his son a withering look. “All he’s done is eat and sleep, which looks to be something that you haven’t done in days. I hope you didn’t keep Blair out all night. Gates is after your hide as it is.”
Lee wanted nothing more than to eat and take a nap before he had to be at the hospital, but it didn’t look as if he were going to have time. “Is he ready to go?”
Reed was quiet for a moment, watching his son, feeling that this might be the last time he ever saw him alive. He always felt this way before Lee left to take one of the unionists into the mine camps. “He’s ready,” was all Reed said at last.
Wearily, Lee went to the stables and sent the stableboy on an errand while he hitched a horse to his carriage. His appaloosa was too tired after being out all night, so Lee took one of his father’s horses. Watching to see that no one could see them, he went to the door to get the man waiting beside his father. Lee only glanced at the young man, but he had the same light in his eyes that all the unionists had: a light of fire, an intensity that burned with such heat that you knew there was no need to talk to the men about the danger that they faced, because these men wouldn’t care. What they were doing, the cause they were fighting for, was more important than their lives.
Leander had removed most of the implements of his profession from the compartment in the back of his carriage —the big space that Blair had been so curious about—and now the man slipped inside. There was no talking, because all three men were too aware of the possibilities of what could happen today. The coal-camp guards would shoot to kill first, then ask questions of the dead men.
Reed handed Lee a papier-mâché cast that slipped into grooves in the sides of the compartment above the level of the man, a cast that at quick glance looked like a pile of blankets, a shotgun, rope, and a saw—things that any man might have in his carriage. On top, Lee put his medical bag.
For a moment, Read touched his son’s shoulder, then Lee was in the carriage and off.
Leander drove as quickly as he could without causing the hidden man too much pain. Two weeks ago, he and his father had had another discussion about what Lee was doing, Reed saying that Lee shouldn’t risk his life to get these unionists into the camps, that even if he were caught and somehow managed to live, no court in the country would uphold what he was doing.
As Lee drove closer to the road that turned off to the coal camps, he went slower, watching about him as best he could to see that no one was near who shouldn’t be. With a smile, Lee remembered when he’d defended the man who owned the coal mines around Chandler, Jacob Fenton, to Blair. He’d made excuses for Fenton and said that the man had to answer to stockholders, that he wasn’t fully responsible for the miners’ plight. Lee often said things like that to throw people off the track. It wouldn’t do for them to find out how deeply he felt about the mistreatment of the miners.
Coal miners were given two choices: they either obeyed the company rules or they were out of work. It was as simple as that. But the rules were not for men, they were for prisoners!
Everything to do with the mines was owned by the company. The men were paid in currency that could be exchanged only at the company stores, and a man could be fired if he were found to have bought something at a store in town. Not that the men were allowed out of the camps to go into town. The mine owners argued that the coal camps were towns, and that the miners and their families didn’t need anything from the surrounding town. And the owners said that the guards at the gates, who allowed no one in or out, were keeping out unscrupulous thieves and fast-talking men; the guards were “protecting” the miners.
But the truth was, the guards were there to keep out agitators. They were there to keep away all possibility of union organizers coming into the camps and talking to the miners.
The owners couldn’t abide the possibility of a strike, and they had the legal right to post armed guards at the entrances and to search the vehicles that went in or out.
There were very few carriages that were allowed inside: some old women in town brought in fresh vegetables, a couple of repairmen were allowed in now and then, the mine inspectors, and there was a company doctor who made rounds, a man who was so poor a doctor that he couldn’t support himself in private practice. The company paid him mostly in whiskey and, in gratitude, he ignored most of what he saw, declaring the company not at fault in every accident case, so that no benefits were due the widow and orphaned children.
A year ago Lee had gone to Fenton and asked permission to go into the camps—at no expense to the mine owner—to examine the health of the miners. Fenton had hesitated, but then he’d given permission.
What Lee had seen had horrified him. The poverty was such that he could barely stand it. The men struggled all day under the earth to make a living, and at the end of the week they could barely feed their families. They were paid by the amount of coal they brought out, but a third of their time was spent on what the miners called “dead work,” work for which they received no pay. They themselves had to pay for the timbers that they used for shoring the mines, because the owner said that safety was the miners’ responsibility, not his.
After the first days in the coal camps, Lee’d gone home and not been able to say much for days. He looked at the rich little town of Chandler, saw his sister come home from The Famous with fifteen yards of expensive cashmere, and he thought of the children he’d seen standing in the snow with no shoes on. He remembered the men standing in line for their pay and hearing the paymaster tell them what they were being charged for for that week.
And the more he thought, the more he was sure that he had to do something. He had no idea what he could do until he began to see articles in the newspaper about the organization of unions in the East. Aloud, he wondered to his father whether unionists could be persuaded to come to Colorado.
Reed, as soon as he realized what his son was thinking about, tried to dissuade him, but Lee kept going to the camps, and the more he saw, the more he knew what he had to do. He took the train to Kentucky and there met his first union organizers and talked to them about what was happening in Colorado. He learned about the early unsuccessful attempts at unionization in Colorado, and he was warned that his involvement could get him killed.
Leander remembered holding an emaciated little three-year-old girl in his arms as she died from pneumonia, and he agreed t
o help however he could.
So far, he’d managed to bring three unionists into the camps, and the owners were aware that they’d been there and that someone was helping the miners, so they were more and more on guard.
Last year, a big coal miner by the name of Rafe Taggert had begun to hint that he was the one to blame, that he was the one who was bringing the organizers into the camps. For some reason, the man believed that neither the guards nor the owner would harm him, that no “accidents” would be arranged to get him out of the way. There were rumors that Taggert’s brother was once married to Fenton’s sister, but no one was sure. Since coal miners had to move around a great deal as one mine after another closed, not many people had been in this area long enough to remember something that may or may not have happened over thirty years ago.
But whatever the reason, the suspicion was on Rafe Taggert, and no one had so far suspected the handsome young doctor who so kindly offered his time to help the miners.