f the mine on the hook whereon he hung his coat at
night, and if he felt uneasy at the trend of the day's events, his
uneasiness did not come to him at home. He had heard it whispered
about--once by the men and once in a directors' meeting--that the clash
with Grant Adams was about to come. If Nathan had any serious wish in
relation to the future, it was the ardent hope that the clash would come
and come soon.

For the toll of death in the Wahoo Valley was cruel and inexorable. The
mines, the factories, the railroads, the smelters, all were death traps,
and the maimed, blind and helpless were cast out of the great industrial
hopper like chaff. Every little neighborhood had its cripple. From the
mines came the blind--whose sight was taken from them by cheap powder;
from the railroad yards came the maimed--the handless, armless, legless
men who, in their daily tasks had been crushed by inferior car
couplings; the smelters sent out their sick, whom the fumes had
poisoned, and sometimes there would come out a charred trunk that had
gone into the great molten vats a man. The factories took hands and
forearms, and sometimes when an accident of unusual horror occurred in
the Valley, it would seem like a place of mourning. The burden of all
this bloodshed and death was upon the laborers. And more than that,--the
burden of the widows and orphans also was upon labor. Capital charged
off the broken machinery, the damaged buildings, the worn-out equipment
to profit and loss with an easy conscience, while the broken men all
over the Valley, the damaged laborers, the worn-out workers, who were
thrown to the scrap heap in maturity, were charged to labor. And labor
paid this bill, chiefly because capital was too greedy to provide safe
machinery, or sanitary shops, or adequate tools!

Nathan Perry, first miner, then pit-boss and finally superintendent, and
always member of Local Miners' Union No. 10, knew what the men were
vaguely beginning to see and think. When some man who had been to court
to collect damages for a killed or crippled friend, some man who had
heard the Judge talk of the assumed risk of labor, some man who had
heard lawyers split hairs to cheat working men of what common sense and
common justice said was theirs, when some such man cried out in hatred
and agony against society, Nathan Perry tried to counsel patience, tried
to curb the malice. But in his heart Nathan Perry knew that if he had
suffered the wrongs that su