“Oh, dear,” said Theron Wynne.
“Well, it was true, and I don’t think we ever get anywhere by not facing the truth about ourselves. / didn’t shoot two men. That was done before I was born. Before my father was born, I think. But in those days—I’m not making excuses for my grandfather—but in those days they lived more primitively, you might say. Men carried guns all the time because they had to. We have farmers that had grandfathers who wouldn’t think of going out to plough a field unless they had their rifles with them. Really. I don’t know about up here, but there were Indians living in the woods during my father’s boyhood days, and sometimes they’d kill a farmer and make off with his wife and children.”
“They were desperate, those Indians,” said Theron Wynne, the man who had wanted to be a missionary.
“Desperate or not, you know it’s true, Mr. Wynne.”
“Yes, I’ve heard tell of Indians still living in the woods over in Nesquehela County.”
“And white men, too. Not only in Nesquehela, but in Lantenengo County. In the Blue Mountains there are families living there that don’t even speak Pennsylvania Dutch. They speak High German, same as they did a hundred years ago. They live like Indians, never come to town. I know that for a fact. The farmers know about them and they’re deathly afraid of them because they’re wild. They even look peculiar—you know why.”
“Why?” said Agnes.
“Never mind why, Agnes,” said Bessie Wynne.
“I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Inbreeding,” said Agnes.
“Agnes!” said Bessie Wynne. “We don’t speak of such things in polite society.”
“It was my fault,” said George Lockwood. “Anyway, I was saying if we don’t face the truth about ourselves, how can we learn about other people? For instance, knowing about my grandfather. If I didn’t know that, I’d be liable to think your cousin was a terrible villain.”
“Cousin Tom Wynne?” said Theron Wynne.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the Irish think he had a hand in hanging those Mollie Maguires.”
“The Irish are notorious liars, Mr. Lockwood,” said Theron Wynne. “How could they be otherwise? They confess their sins and promise to mend their ways, but the drunkards among them go right back to their drinking, the brawlers to their brawling, and so forth and so on. They’re like children, naughty children, and you can’t reason with them because when you try to they look at you with that half smile as though they considered you hopelessly—what’s that French word, Agnes?”
“Naïve.”
“Naïve. I’ve tried to be patient with them, the way you would be with a child, and I used to be very fond of them. For instance, you can leave money lying around and they’ll never touch a cent of it. And when we’ve had illness in the family they’ve been just as worried and attentive as they would be about one of their own.”
“Mrs. Ryan when Agnes had that croup,” said Bessie Wynne.
“I remember Mrs. Ryan. She wrapped a flannel thing around my neck, and covered my chest with some sticky stuff.”
“Now how on earth do you remember that? You were only three years old,” said Bessie Wynne.
“It smelled like oatmeal.”
“I think it was oatmeal,” said Bessie Wynne. “An oatmeal poultice.”
“At times like that they can be kindness itself,” said Theron Wynne. “But we were young then, and not much better off than they were. As soon as I began to get somewhere with the Company— how could anybody in his right mind blame Cousin Tom for hanging those desperadoes? They were tried in a court of law, and convicted.”
“I don’t know,” said George Lockwood. “But I wasn’t shocked. I mean, even if your cousin did have them hanged, from all I’ve ever heard about the Mollie Maguires they deserved it. I’m sure my grandfather would have given them just as good as they sent. You have to protect what’s yours or people like that will take it away from you.”
“I see what you’re aiming at,” said Theron Wynne. “Cousin Tom Wynne and your grandfather, the similarity. Well—we’ll never know. Cousin Tom never shot anyone that I know of, but he always goes armed.”
“You used to too, Father,” said Agnes Wynne.
“When I was in the paymaster’s office.”
“Would you have shot a holdup man?” said Agnes Wynne.
“In self-defense.”
“In defense of the payroll?” said George Lockwood.
Theron Wynne smiled. “You know, every time we took a pay to one of the collieries I’d ask myself that question. We had these heavy tin boxes with the cash in them, bills and coins, nothing larger than a twenty-dollar bill, of course, and not many of them, I assure you. So it was quite a lot of cash money, as much as $3000 in one pay, and very inviting to a bandit, I should think. We’d go by train to the larger collieries and stay in the pay car, which had iron bars on the doors and windows. But when we were paying one of the smaller collieries we’d be met at the station by a mule team drawing the colliery ambulance and we’d get in that and ride to the colliery office. There’d be three, four, five of us, depending on the size of the payroll, and we’d all have shotguns. And I’d sit there with my sawed-off shotgun across my lap and wonder what I’d do if we were held up. I guess I would have done whatever the other men did. It would have been a dreadful thing to shoot a man with one of those shotguns. There wouldn’t have been much left of him at close range, and I guess that’s what kept them from trying to rob us. You didn’t have to take aim with one of those guns. Just point the gun in their direction and pull the trigger. I don’t know, I guess I’d have shot a highwayman. And answering your question, yes. In defense of the payroll. In self-defense, but also in defense of the payroll, because in that case it would have been one and the same. A bandit wouldn’t be attacking the payroll. He’d be attacking me to get at the payroll, so whether I defended myself or the money in those tin boxes, who’s to say? In either case the man would have been just as dead whether I was defending myself or the Company funds. I was glad when I was taken off the pay crew.”
“So was I,” said Bessie Wynne.
“Were you, my dear? You never said anything.”
“Didn’t want you to know how worried I’d been, because after all they might have put you back on the pay crew.”
“Well, now isn’t that strange, that you had a secret worry that I never knew about till this minute?”
“I was never worried,” said Agnes Wynne.
“You weren’t?” said her father.
“No, I thought the gun was just there for show. I never for a minute thought you’d have to shoot anyone. And I certainly never thought anyone would shoot you.”
“We have several payrolls, none as large as $3000, but I’d shoot a holdup man if he didn’t shoot me first. Not that I ever do the actual paying, but the payrolls are all kept in our office. We have one main office for all of my father’s business ventures, and our bookkeepers handle all our accounting there. Now that I think of it, we often do have $3000 in the vault, and it’s in small bills and coins. I have a revolver in my desk drawer, and so does my father, and I wouldn’t hesitate to shoot a man that tried to rob us. Neither would my father. Of course you might say it’s in the blood.” He smiled wryly, defiantly.
“I would never shoot a man over $3000,” said Agnes Wynne. “I’d tell him to take the money and be gone.”