Hal found Jerry Minetti with the two officials in their hotel-room: Jim Moylan, district secretary, a long, towering Irish boy, black-eyed and black-haired, quick and sensitive, the sort of person one trusted and liked at the first moment; and Johann Hartman, local president, a grey-haired miner of German birth, reserved and slow-spoken, evidently a man of much strength, both physical and moral. He had need of it, any one could realise, having charge of a union headquarters in the heart of this “Empire of Raymond”! Hal first told of the kidnapping of the committee. This did not surprise the officials, he found; it was the thing the companies regularly did when there was threat of rebellion in the camps. That was why efforts to organise openly were so utterly hopeless. There was no chance for anything but a secret propaganda, maintained until every camp had the nucleus of an organisation.
“So you can't back this strike!” exclaimed Hal.
Not possibly, was Moylan's reply. It would be lost as soon as it was begun. There was no slightest hope of success until a lot of organisation work had been done.
“But meantime,” argued Hal, “the union at North Valley will go to pieces!”
“Perhaps,” was the reply. “We'll only have to start another. That's what the labour movement is like.”
Jim Moylan was young, and saw Hal's mood. “Don't misunderstand us!” he cried. “It's heartbreaking—but it's not in our power to help. We are charged with building up the union, and we know that if we supported everything that looked like a strike, we'd be bankrupt the first year. You can't imagine how often this same thing happens—hardly a month we're not called on to handle such a situation.”
“I can see what you mean,” said Hal. “But I thought that in this case, right after the disaster, with the men so stirred—”
The young Irishman smiled, rather sadly. “You're new at this game,” he said. “If a mine-disaster was enough to win a strike, God knows our job would be easy. In Barela, just down the canyon from you, they've had three big explosions—they've killed over five hundred men in the past year!”
Hal began to see how, in his i............