"
He sat on a log beside the road near where he had met her and watched
her go down the hill. "I'm quite a fellow to have talked to her all
afternoon like that," he thought and pride in his growing manhood
crept over him.
CHAPTER III
The town of Coal Creek was hideous. People from prosperous towns and
cities of the middle west, from Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, going east
to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books
they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men
and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all
they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern
life.
The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged
to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the
officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who
was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by
the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived
in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the
train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the
offices of the mine.
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