"Ben Spence, our lawyer, says there isn't. In the last street-car strike we tried the law; the courts wouldn't enforce it." "How do the boys feel?" "They want to fight like hell. They'll stop the scabs." "Got to be careful there. That sort of thing is dynamite; it blows both ways. Company won't hear the committee?" "Young Judson's father's the reason. Says he won't allow a union man in his shop hereafter. No committees, nor nothing." "Let's see the place." They walked from the end of the car line. The roads through the property had been made city streets, when Hillcrest Addition was thrown open to the public, and the party could not be stopped. Dawson paused to shake hands with the groups of pickets on the various cross roads. He had a personal word for each, and a concentrated way of getting the details he needed out of the incoherent members of the working body. Joined by Ben Wilson and several of the pickets, they passed into the company estate, and by the entrances to the gap drifts and the second ramp. Only a few negroes were at work in the gap; it was not until the second big slope that the white workers appeared. Dawson looked a question at stocky Wilson, hardly up to his vest pocket. "Convicts. Almost three hundred of them." "Any niggers go out?" "Half a dozen. You met one, Ed Cole, picketing by Thirtieth Street." A red-faced Irishman walked out of a knot of workers and greeted the tall organizer. "Hello, Dawson. Remember me?" "Your mug's familiar. Lemme see--your name's Hewin, ain't it?" The superintendent grinned. "You ought to remember it. You beat hell out of me in the Coalstock strike for staying on as foreman." "Scab then, eh, and still at it." Dawson's tolerance had a touch promising danger. "That's what you'd call it. I'm in charge here. Mind your own business, or I'm not the one who'll get beat up this time." He turned with grinning ugliness and climbed back to the opening. They cut over to the railroad track, and entered Hewintown by the back way. Dawson studied the land carefully. "That's the way they'd bring the train from Pittsburgh, of course. And that's a pretty narrow cut beyond that dinky little house. Who lives there?" "Mr. Judson, the vice-president." "This ain't no place for a mine-owner." Dawson's comment on the shack town was a string of profanity. "Even in West Virginia they had better dumps than those! I wouldn't let my pig live there. Company houses, as always." "Yes." "This crew out?" "All but two or three. The convict stockade is on the next hill; the niggers live in Adamsville, or in Lilydale, over yonder." His pudgy fingers pointed through the trees to the south. They passed company detectives and guards, in clusters of two or three, at every corner. "These always here?" "Most of them new." "We'll help 'em earn their money.... Take me by number three, and the hospital you mentioned. I want to see it all."