He was a big, heavy-set man, and there was a lot of talk about him as he went down the line, feeling muscles and looking at hands and feet and teeth, like we were a bunch of mules at a stock auction. He came from Ohio, one man said, but had been a slave dealer in Memphis up to 1858, when he did things that were too much even for that place, and when a couple of mulatto girls died in his barracks he got run out and came west. Even the mine-owners couldn’t stand him, and he kept getting fired, but could always get a new job because though he treated the miners bad he could get out the ore, and there was generally somebody that needed him. He picked about a dozen of us and took us inside, and the timekeeper fixed us up with overalls, tools, hat, and candles, and booked us with them, around fifty dollars, and then we were brought in to the owner and the superintendent. The owner was named Hale, and he was a little man around fifty with a pale skin, black mustache, and expensive clothes, that looked like a dignified rat. The super was a big rawboned man named Lew Williams that was dressed in corduroys and talked with a brogue. He made us a speech and said he came up from the face of the rock himself, back in Cardiff, Wales, and asked nothing from a man but good work, in return for which he expected to give him fair treatment. Then he shook hands all around, but when he came to me asked my name. “And what part of the world do you come from, Duval?”
“Annapolis, Md.”
“And what did you do there?”
“Went to college, mostly.”
“Ah, the naval school?”
“No. There’s a college there too, St. John’s.”
“And you took the diploma?”
“Yes sir. A.B.”
“But you worked as well as studied?”
“I was a page for the legislature a couple of sessions. Then, when I was in college, I worked a bugeye three summers.”
“A bug—?”
“It’s a boat. Pointed at both ends, raked masts, leg-o’-mutton rig, centerboard. Really, it’s an oversize, decked-over canoe. In the ocean they’d slide all around, but in the bay, with the board coming up for the sandbars, they handle all right. The oyster-men use them, and my boat I rented to naval officers when they felt like a sail down the bay for some fishing. They said it was fishing. From where
I stayed, at the tiller, it sounded more like poker-playing.”
“And whisky-drinking, no doubt.”
“Plenty of that.”
“What’s your weight, my lad?”
“One eighty, sir.”
“Drop in and see me, Duval.”
Going to the cage, the rest of them had plenty to say about teacher’s pet and the boy on the burning deck, but Paddy shook my arm and I let them get away with it.
They tell you Virginia was laid out for hell but the devil’s health couldn’t stand it, and it’s easy to believe once you’ve been there. It’s on the side of a big mountain with a flag on top of it, called Mount Davidson. Half the streets run almost straight up and down, and they have names. The other half, they run level but they’re tilted on one side, and they have letters. All over the place dust rises from the stamping mills that break up the ore, and in between the dust are big clouds of brown, yellow, and green chemicals they use to amalgamate the silver, depending on which formula they’re using, and practically every mill has a different one, because the process peddlers are in every saloon, and they’ve got everything from sulphuric acid to cyanide. The houses are made of everything there is, brick or shingle or frame or tin or sheet iron, but not one has a tree or flower or blade of grass near it, or even some moss in the chinks of the front walk. Some of the stores are big, three or four stories high and covering a whole block, but they’re ugly and you have to push and shove to get to a counter. The mines, they’re everywhere, with fences around them and signs that say Keep Out and guards walking up and down, and back of every mine is a tailings dump, and to one side is a pile of busted cars and rails and machinery. Practically any time you look on C Street, which is where the big stores and offices are, is a traffic jam, with coaches and wagons and cattle and pigs all snarled up together, and the muleteers shooting dice while the peace officers straighten it out, and the cussing and whip-cracking and mooing and hee-hawing are so loud you can hear it a mile. The hee-hawing they’ve got a name for. They call it the soft warble of the Washoe canary, meaning a jackass. The Washoe part I didn’t get straight for a while, but it’s the name of some mountains up the line a little way, and some Indians too, and some people use it for all of that end of Nevada, so that’s why they holler Washoe and mean anything from the town to the silver bricks to the mountains to the Indians to the state, or maybe nothing but they’re drunk and feeling a little high. Then everywhere you look are Chinamen, that work all around and jam the streets. Then, down Six-Mile Canyon they’ve got a cemetery, but it’s a hell of a civic problem, because what with sudden death from lead poisoning in the saloons, and smallpox and mine fires and falling cages and one thing and another, they can’t ever get the cemetery big enough. The undertaker parlors, they’re always complaining, but I never could see why, because even if they didn’t do anything but rent out their tin flowers they still would be getting along all right. The tin flowers are in place of real ones that don’t grow so well in Virginia, and after the funeral they collect them and use them on the next fellow — that is, if they got time to rush them around to the next fellow’s residence, because they fall fast, and sometimes the funerals conflict.
I had seen all that stuff, but I didn’t know the hundredth part of what they meant by the devil and his health till I dropped down in the cage that morning to the thousand-foot level and saw what men would do for four dollars a day. That steam that comes out of the shafts and scares you to death comes from boiling springs down under, and those boiling springs are what the miners have all around them while they get out the ore. Practically every tunnel has hot water running between the rails, under the square sets, to the shaft, and at the bottom of that is a sump, and into the sump runs the suction ends of the pipes that run to the pumps. It didn’t take me any week to hate Hale, or any other owner that would let men work in a place like that, or Trapp, who stood over us like some overseer on a cotton plantation, and had men dragged out by the heels when they fainted in the heat, and set me to throwing water on them, because I was new at the work and there wasn’t much else I was good for until I learned my way around. By the time Paddy took me to a crosscut where it was cooler, and we had our first jackbite, I was willing to pitch powder into the place and light it, I was so sore. Paddy said what we needed was blowers, but they’d require a bigger boiler and more transmission belts, and Hale was too cheap to put them in.
At night we held street meetings, but right away we hit a snag: we had to find some way to get Americans to listen to it, because they wouldn’t stop for Paddy and his guitar. After a while he remembered a fellow named Newt, that loaded ore on weekdays but on Sundays he played the cornet in church. We looked him up, and if you ask me he thought the union was some kind of a fraternal organization like the Odd Fellows, but on an offer to play his cornet, all he could say was yes. So that night he came with us and played Listen to the Mocking Bird with curlicue variations, but Paddy could chord along on the guitar, and the miners stopped to listen and I began handing it out. I asked them how much longer they were going to stand for it, to be treated like so many mules on a picket line. I asked them did they think the owners were going to do something for them just from love, or because somebody made them do it. I asked them did they like to get burned up in fires, or were they going to organize and compel the owners to put in the things that would make the mines safe. I asked them plenty, and I had never made any speeches, but I was surprised to find I was pretty good at it. Sometimes they would grunt at you like they thought you had it figured out right, and sometimes they’d cut in on you with mean questions. But even then you knew they were interested in what you said.