He
hated them. In a way he sympathised with the soldiers. His blood was
stirred by the sight of them marching shoulder to shoulder. He thought
there was order and decency in the rank of uniformed men moving
silently and quickly along and he half wished they would destroy the
town. When the strikers made a wreck of the garden of the Italian he
was deeply touched and walked up and down in the room before his
mother, proclaiming himself. "I would have killed them had it been my
garden," he said. "I would not have left one of them alive." In his
heart he like Cracked McGregor nursed his hatred of the miners and of
the town. "The place is one to get out of," he said. "If a man doesn't
like it here let him get up and leave." He remembered his father
working and saving for the farm in the valley. "They thought him
cracked but he knew more than they. They would not have dared touch a
garden he had planted."
In the heart of the miner's son strange half-formed thoughts began to
find lodgings. Remembering in his dreams at night the moving columns
of men in their uniforms he read new meaning into the scraps of
history picked up in the school and the movements of men in old
history began to have significance for him. On a summer afternoon as
he loitered before the town's hotel, beneath which was the saloon and
billiard room where the black-haired boy worked, he overheard two men
talking of the significance of men.
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