Page:Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925).djvu/74

Rh you hear what trouble they had up in Stanford Mountain last night?"

"I think you are mistaken," I answered, "for I just came down from there myself last night."

"Well," he said, "they have had some trouble there, all the same."

"Anyone hurt?"

"Yes; I was taking the railway messages and couldn't get all the details. Some shooting."

I said, "Take back my ticket. I must go up to those boys."

I took the short trail up the hillside to Stanford Mountain. It seemed to me as I came toward the camp as if those wretched shacks were huddling closer in terror. Everything was deathly still. As I came nearer the miners' homes, I could hear sobbing. Then I saw between the stilts that propped up a miner's shack the clay red with blood. I pushed open the door. On a mattress, wet with blood, lay a miner. His brains had been blown out while he slept. His shack was riddled with bullets.

In five other shacks men lay dead. In one of them a baby boy and his mother sobbed over the father's corpse. When the little fellow saw me, he said, "Mother Jones, bring back my papa to me. I want to kiss him."

The coroner came. He found that these six men had been murdered in their beds while they peacefully slept; shot by gunmen in the employ of the coal company.