“He’s not going to die any more,” he said. “Which way you going?”
“Any.”
We walked down the street together, turned a corner, aimlessly as far as I knew.
“What brought you in here, if you’re a sailor?” he asked casually.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“There’s the card.”
“I got another that proves I’m a timber beast,” I said. “If you want me to be a miner I’ll get one for that tomorrow.”
“You won’t. I run ’em here.”
“Suppose you got a wire from Chi?” I asked.
“Hell with Chi! I run ’em here.” He nodded at a restaurant door and asked: “Drink?”
“Only when I can get it.”
We went through the restaurant, up a flight of steps, and into a narrow second-story room with a long bar and a row of tables. Bill Quint nodded and said, “Hullo!” to some of the boys and girls at tables and bar, and steered me into one of the green-curtained booths that lined the wall opposite the bar.
We spent the next two hours drinking whiskey and talking.
The gray man didn’t think I had any right to the card I had showed him, nor to the other one I had mentioned. He didn’t think I was a good wobbly. As chief muckademuck of the I. W. W. in Personville, he considered it his duty to get the low-down on me, and to not let himself be pumped about radical affairs while he was doing it.
That was all right with me. I was interested in Personville affairs. He didn’t mind discussing them between casual pokings into my business with the red cards.
What I got out of him amounted to this:
For forty years old Elihu Willsson–father of the man who had been killed this night–had owned Personville, heart, soul, skin and guts. He was president and majority stockholder of the Personville Mining Corporation, ditto of the First National Bank, owner of the Morning Herald and Evening Herald, the city’s only newspapers, and at least part owner of nearly every other enterprise of any importance. Along with these pieces of property he owned a United States senator, a couple of representatives, the governor, the mayor, and most of the state legislature. Elihu Willsson was Personville, and he was almost the whole state.
Back in the war days the I. W. W.–in full bloom then throughout the West–had lined up the Personville Mining Corporation’s help. The help hadn’t been exactly pampered. They used their new strength to demand the things they wanted. Old Elihu gave them what he had to give them, and bided his time.
In 1921 it came. Business was rotten. Old Elihu didn’t care whether he shut down for a while or not. He tore up the agreements he had made with his men and began kicking them back into their pre-war circumstances.
Of course the help yelled for help. Bill Quint was sent out from I. W. W. headquarters in Chicago to give them some action. He was against a strike, an open walk-out. He advised the old sabotage racket, staying on the job and gumming things up from the inside. But that wasn’t active enough for the Personville crew. They wanted to put themselves on the map, make labor history.
They struck.
The strike lasted eight months. Both sides bled plenty. The wobblies had to do their own bleeding. Old Elihu hired gunmen, strike-breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army, to do his. When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker.
But, said Bill Quint, old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history. He won the strike, but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn’t get rid of them. He had given his city to them and he wasn’t strong enough to take it away from them. Personville looked good to them and they took it over. They had won his strike for him and they took the city for their spoils. He couldn’t openly break with them. They had too much on him. He was responsible for all they had done during the strike.