Page:Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).djvu/197

188 ing a miner's song. They sang at the top of their lungs till the silent, old mountains seemed to prick up their ears. They swarmed into the train.

"God bless you, Mother!"

"God bless you, my boys!"

"Mother, is your coat warm enough? It's freezing cold in the hills!"

"I'm all right, my lad." The chap had no overcoat—a cheap cotton suit, and a bit of woolen rag around his neck.

Outside in the station stood the militia. One of them was a fiend. He went about swinging his gun, hitting the miners, and trying to prod them into a fight, hurling vile oaths at them. But the boys kept cool and I could hear them singing above the shriek of the whistle as the train pulled out of the depot and wound away through the hills.

From January on until the final brutal outrage—the burning of the tent colony in Ludlow—my ears wearied with the stories of brutality and suffering. My eyes ached with the misery I witnessed. My brain sickened with the knowledge of man's inhumanity to man.

It was, "Oh, Mother, my daughter has been assaulted by the soldiers—such a little girl!"

"Oh, Mother, did you hear how the soldiers entered Mrs. Hall's house, how they terrified the little children, wrecked the home, and did worse—terrible things—and just because Mr.