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young pig roasting over one of them, and here and there around the place were at least twenty men.
    Some of the men at this place were native West Virginia miners, and others were union organizers that Ben Holt had brought in with him. Even apart from the way they dressed, you could not possibly mistake the one for the other. The miners’ features were etched with sadness and defeat. It was not anything of the moment, but out of their lives and the way they stood and the slow way they moved. They were stooped men, bent men. Their lives were spent working with their bodies bent and they had forgotten how to stand straight, and their heads were bent from the angry words of their wives and the rapacious appetites of their children. They were victims of a particular kind of starvation—something I learned much later—for a miner’s body burns food like a furnace burns coal, and what another man will fatten on, a miner will starve on. On and off through the years, I have watched working miners eat and never ceased to wonder at the enormous quantities of protein-rich food they needed for plain survival. I suppose that some of Ben Holt’s organizers had been miners once, but in a different world than Hogan County.
    Phelps stopped his car in front of the frame house, and we got out. Some of the men moved toward us, and then the door of the frame house opened and Ben Holt came out onto the porch. That was the first time I saw Benjamin Renwell Holt, and it was a long, long time ago, a long time before people got into the habit of opening their morning paper to see what Ben Holt had done or what he intended to do. It is possible that he had a sense of the future then. I didn’t. He glanced at me with that quick, searching, half-contemptuous look that was to become so familiar to so many, and then his eyes passed by me to the doctor. For myself, I saw a big man of about thirty years—no, he was twenty-eight then—broad-shouldered, heavy, a large, square head on a bull neck, wide mouth, full lips, large, fleshy nose, and blue eyes as clear and placid as water. The expression was in the mouth, the tilt of head, the tension of the cheeks; only in moments of great anger did the eyes change. His hands were enormous, hamlike, one of them bandaged.
    Even such a cursory glimpse of the man is retrospective, of necessity bolstered by hindsight. You see someone for the first time, and you see a large, heavy-fleshed man in motion, and not much more than that. His hand hurt him, and he was interested in the doctor then; pain can wall you away from anything. The doctor went inside with him, and I stood by the car and smoked a cigarette and looked around me at the headquarters that Ben Holt had made for himself in that curious West Virginia world that was half primeval wilderness and half coalpits and company towns where the miners worked and lived. This was the wilderness part of it, with the mountains looming above us on every side, walled in by a silence and beauty as old as the ages.
    It was a big camp, the tents, piles of cut cordwood, boxes of canned goods heaped six feet high, and behind the frame house, four automobiles parked neatly side by side. There was an old barn behind the house; it leaned crazily from disuse and lack of repair. The McGradys were miners, not farmers.
    McGrady’s wife and daughter were in the house; there were no other women at the camp. The men went about what they were doing, cooking, splitting wood, sitting around and chewing tobacco and talking or pacing aimlessly—but ignoring me. No one spoke to me or approached me. I realized that there were guards all around the camp, for men with rifles came in from the forest and other men with rifles went out to take their places; and it moved easily if raggedly, with no one giving orders or instructions.
    In about twenty minutes, Phelps came out of the house, Ben Holt with him, Holt’s hand in a sling and with a clean bandage on it.