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with Ben Holt.
    â€œYou think he’s a big man? A comer?”
    â€œMy editor seems to.”
    The doctor pursed his lips and nodded. “It could be. There never was no union down here. My own opinion is there never will be. Sure, I’ll take you along to Ben Holt, and let him bitch about it and be damned! He’s at McGrady’s place up on Fenwick Crag.”

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    7
    It was a beautiful country of flat-sided mountains covered with a mat of verdant forest, and it was clad in the pale green of spring. It was a country that reminded me of the pictures I had seen of the Scottish Highlands, but without the damp and the mists; and the people who lived there were the descendants of others who had in the beginning come from the Scottish Highlands, bringing their own names and their place names with them. And if not for the pits and the piles of slag near them, the country would have been as wild as it ever had been; for it was bad farming country and almost no way for a man to squeeze a living out of it except to mine coal.
    The doctor drove a Franklin, a good car for the mountains with its air-cooled motor—as he explained—and in it we labored up into the hills, up a dirt road past the red brick miners’ houses, where the locked-out miners sat on their front steps sullenly watching us, and past other company houses naked and empty, where the Fairlawn operatives had dispossessed the tenants, down into a valley scarred with idle pits, and up again into the hills they called Fenwick Crag. This road was as bad as a cart track, and it taxed the Franklin’s powers to the utmost. We were moving slowly up a sharp grade, when a man with a rifle stepped out into the road and motioned for us to halt.
    He was a tall, skinny man, like so many of the men in that area, dressed in faded work pants and a cotton shirt. As cheap as the cotton pants and shirt were, they were patched all over; and he wore the badge of the miner, reddened eyes and dark lines of soot permanently engraved in his skin. He called out for us to stop, and when we did, he walked over to the car, looked at us carefully, and then said to Phelps,
    â€œYou the doctor?”
    â€œI am. And what kind of damn nonsense is this, stopping us with that gun in your hands?”
    â€œWho’s he?” motioning with the gun at me.
    â€œFriend of mine. He’s a newspaperman, going to interview Ben Holt.”
    Without taking his eyes off us, he shouted for Charlie, and in a minute or so, Charlie appeared from up the road and around a bend. He gave Charlie the facts, and then continued to cover us with his rifle while Charlie, enough like him to be his brother and similarly armed, went back to get Ben Holt’s opinion of the whole matter.
    It was midafternoon now, the sun warm and pleasant, the little glade where the doctor had stopped the car full of the sweet smell of growing things and forest decay and the hum of insects and the pattern of insects dancing in the bars of sunlight. I wondered what would happen to me if Benjamin R. Holt had emphatic feelings against newspapermen, and considering what I had experienced of tempers and guns in West Virginia so far, I was not cheered by the thought. But from what I had learned, this was also Ben Holt’s first venture into West Virginia. He had been born in eastern Pennsylvania, in a small coal town called Ringman, and he had built his union and fought his way into its command in Pennsylvania and Illinois. Conceivably, he was reasonably civilized, yet I had some uneasy moments before Charlie returned and said that it was all right and that we could go ahead.
    We drove about half a mile more before the road leveled off onto a sort of cleared plateau, a space of a dozen acres with an old frame house set in the middle of it, a small cornfield, a pen of pigs, and a garden. There was also a rough pasture, where eight army-surplus tents had been pitched. Two big cook fires were going, a whole