Marching Men. Sherwood Anderson

Beaut McGregor was disturbed. He saw his father’s money being spent for flour which when baked into loaves went out of the shop under the arms of the miners who shuffled as they walked. One night a man whose name appeared on their books followed by a long record of charged loaves came reeling past the bakery. McGregor went to his mother and protested. “They have money to get drunk,” he said, “let them pay for their loaves.”

      Nance McGregor went on trusting the miners. She thought of the women and children in the houses on the hill and when she heard of the plans of the mining company to evict the miners from their houses she shuddered. “I was the wife of a miner and I will stick to them,” she thought.

      One day the mine manager came into the bakery. He leaned over the showcase and talked to Nance. The son went and stood by his mother’s side to listen. “It has got to be stopped,” the manager was saying. “I will not see you ruin yourself for these cattle. I want you to close this place till the strike is over. If you won’t close it I will. The building belongs to us. They did not appreciate what your husband did and why should you ruin yourself for them?”

      The woman looked at him and answered in a low tone full of resolution. “They thought he was crazy and he was,” she said; “but what made him so—the rotten timbers in the mine that broke and crushed him. You and not they are responsible for my man and what he was.”

      Beaut McGregor interrupted. “Well I think he is right,” he declared, leaning over the counter beside his mother and looking into her face. “The miners don’t want better things for their families, they want more money to get drunk. We will close the doors here. We will put no more money into bread to go into their gullets. They hated father and he hated them and now I hate them also.”

      Beaut walked around the end of the counter and went with the mine manager to the door. He locked it and put the key into his pocket. Then he walked to the rear of the bake shop where his mother sat on a box weeping. “It is time a man took charge here,” he said.

      Nance McGregor and her son sat in the bakery and looked at each other. Miners came along the street, tried the door and went away grumbling. Word ran from lip to lip up the hillside. “The mine manager has closed Nance McGregor’s shop,” said the women leaning over back fences. Children sprawling on the floors of the houses put up their heads and howled. Their lives were a succession of new terrors. When a day passed that a new terror did not shake them they went to bed happy. When the miner and his woman stood by the door talking in low tones they cried, expecting to be put to bed hungry. When guarded talk did not go on by the door the miner came home drunk and beat the mother and the children lay in beds along the wall trembling with fright.

      Late that night a party of miners came to the door of the bakery and beat upon it with their fists. “Open up here!” they shouted. Beaut came out of the rooms above the bakery and stood in the empty shop. His mother sat in a chair in her room and trembled. He went to the door and unlocking it stepped out. The miners stood in groups on the wooden sidewalk and in the mud of the road. Among them stood the old crone who had walked beside the horses and shouted at the soldiers. A miner with a black beard came and stood before the boy. Waving his hand at the crowd he said, “We have come to open the bakery. Some of us have no ovens in our stoves. You give us the key and we will open the place. We will break in the door if you don’t want to do that. The company can’t blame you if we do it by force. You can keep account of what we take. Then when the strike is settled we will pay you.”

      A flame shot into the eyes of the boy. He walked down the steps and stood among the miners. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he peered into their faces. When he spoke his voice resounded through the street, “You jeered at my father, Cracked McGregor, when he went into the mine for you. You laughed at him because he saved his money and did not spend it buying you drinks. Now you come here to get bread his money bought and you do not pay. Then you get drunk and go reeling past this very door. Now let me tell you something.” He thrust his hands into the air and shouted. “The mine manager did not close this place. I closed it. You jeered at Cracked McGregor, a better man than any of you. You have had fun with me—laughing at me. Now I jeer at you.” He ran up the steps and unlocking the door stood in the doorway. “Pay the money you owe this bakery and there will be bread for sale here,” he called, and went in and locked the door.

      The miners walked off up the street. The boy stood within the bakery, his hands trembling. “I’ve told them something,” he thought, “I’ve shown them they can’t make a fool of me.” He went up the stairway to the rooms above. By the window his mother sat, her head in her hands, looking down into the street. He sat in a chair and thought of the situation. “They will be back here and smash the place like they tore up that garden,” he said.

      The next evening Beaut sat in the darkness on the steps before the bakery. In his hands he held a hammer. A dull hatred of the town and of the miners burned in his brain. “I will make it hot for some of them if they come here,” he thought. He hoped they would come. As he looked at the hammer in his hand a phrase from the lips of the drunken old oculist babbling of Napoleon came into his mind. He began to think that he also must be like the figure of which the drunkard had talked. He remembered a story the oculist had told of a fight in the streets of a European city and muttered and waved the hammer about. Upstairs his mother sat by the window with her head in her hands. From the saloon down the street a light gleamed out on the wet sidewalk. The tall pale woman who had gone with him to the eminence overlooking the valley came down the stairway from above the undertaker’s shop. She ran along the sidewalk. On her head she wore a shawl and as she ran she clutched it with her hand. The other hand she held against her side.

      When the women reached the boy who sat in silence before the bakery she put her hands on his shoulders and plead with him. “Come away,” she said. “Get your mother and come to our place. They’re going to smash you up here. You’ll get hurt.”

      Beaut arose and pushed her away. Her coming had given him new courage. His heart jumped at the thought of her interest in him and he wished that the miners might come so that he could fight them before her. “I wish I could live among people as decent as she,” he thought.

      A train stopped at the station down the street. There came the sound of tramping of men and quick sharp commands. A stream of men poured out of the saloon onto the sidewalk. Down the street came a file of soldiers with guns swung across their shoulders. Again Beaut was thrilled by the sight of trained orderly men moving along shoulder to shoulder. In the presence of these men the disorganized miners seemed pitifully weak and insignificant. The girl pulled the shawl about her head and ran up the street to disappear into the stairway. The boy unlocked the door and went upstairs and to bed.

      After the strike Nance McGregor who owned nothing but unpaid accounts was unable to open the bakery. A small man with a white moustache, who chewed tobacco, came from the mill and took the unused flour and shipped it away. The boy and his mother continued living above the bakery store room. Again she went in the morning to wash the windows and scrub the floors in the offices of the mine and her red-haired son stood upon the street or sat in the pool room and talked to the black-haired boy. “Next week I’ll be going to the city and will begin making something of myself,” he said. When the time came to go he waited and idled in the streets. Once when a miner jeered at him for his idleness he knocked him into the gutter. The miners who hated him for his speech on the steps, admired him for his strength and brute courage.

      CHAPTER IV

      In a cellar-like house driven like a stake into the hillside above Coal Creek lived Kate Hartnet with her son Mike. Her man had died with the others during the fire in the mine. Her son like Beaut McGregor did not work in the mine. He hurried through Main Street or went half running among the trees on the hills. Miners seeing him hurrying along with white intense face shook their heads. “He’s cracked,” they said. “He’ll hurt some one yet.”

      Beaut saw Mike hurrying about the streets. Once encountering him in the pine woods above the town he walked with him and tried to get him to talk. In his pockets Mike carried books and pamphlets. He set traps in the woods and brought home rabbits and squirrels. He got together collections of birds’ eggs which he sold to women in the trains that stopped at Coal Creek and when he caught birds he stuffed them, put beads in their