SECTION 25.
Hal had promised Alec Stone to keep a look-out for trouble-makers; and
one evening the boss stopped him on the street, and asked him if he had
anything to report. Hal took the occasion to indulge his sense of
humour.
"There's no harm in Mike Sikoria," said he. "He likes to shoot off his
head, but if he's got somebody to listen, that's all he wants. He's just
old and grouchy. But there's another fellow that I think would bear
watching."
"Who's that?" asked the boss.
"I don't know his last name. They call him Gus and he's a 'cager.'
Fellow with a red face."
"I know," said Stone--"Gus Durking."
"Well, he tried his best to get me to talk about unions. He keeps
bringing it up, and I think he's some kind of trouble-maker."
"I see," said the boss. "I'll get after him."
"You won't say I told you," said Hal, anxiously.
"Oh, no--sure not." And Hal caught the trace of a smile on the
pit-boss's face.
He went away, smiling in his turn. The "red-faced feller. Gus," was the
person Madvik had named as being a "spotter" for the company!
There were ins and outs to this matter of "spotting," and sometimes it
was not easy to know what to think. One Sunday morning Hal went for a
walk up the canyon, and on the way he met a young chap who got to
talking with him, and after a while brought up the question of
working-conditions in North Valley. He had only been there a week, he
said, but everybody he had met seemed to be grumbling about short
weight. He himself had a job as an "outside man," so it made no
difference to him, but he was interested, and wondered what Hal had
found.
Straightway came the question, was this really a workingman, or had Alec
Stone set some one to spying upon his spy. This was an intelligent
fellow, an American--which in itself was suspicious, for most of the new
men the company got in were from "somewhere East of Suez."
Hal decided to spar for a while. He did not know, he said, that
conditions were any worse here than elsewhere. You heard complaints, no
matter what sort of job you took.
Yes, said the stranger, but matters seemed to be especially bad in the
coal-camps. Probably it was because they were so remote, and the
companies owned everything in sight.
"Where have you been?" asked Hal, thinking that this might trap him.
But the other answered straight; he had evidently worked in half a dozen
of the camps. In Mateo he had paid a dollar a month for wash-house
privileges, and there had never been any water after the first three men
had washed. There had been a common wash-tub for all the men, an
unthinkably filthy arrangement. At Pine Creek--Hal found the very naming
of the place made his heart stand still--at Pine Creek he had boarded
with his boss, but the roof of the building leaked, and everything he
owned was ruined; the boss would do nothing--yet when the boarder moved,
he lost his job. At East Ridge, this man and a couple of other fellows
had rented a two room cabin and started to board themselves, in spite of
the fact that they had to pay a dollar-fifty a sack for potatoes and
eleven cents a pound for sugar at the company store. They had continued
until they made the discovery that the water supply had run short, and
that the water for which they were paying the company a dollar a month
was being pumped from the bottom of the mine, where the filth of mules
and men was plentiful!
Hal forced himself to remain non-committal; he shook his head and said
it was too bad, but the workers always got it in the neck, and he didn't
see what they could do about it. So they strolled back to the camp, the
stranger evidently baffled, and Hal, for his part, feeling like the
reader of a detective story at the end of the first chapter. Was this
young man the murderer, or was he the hero? One would have to read on in
the book to find out!
