At this moment the miners who were in attendance at court are trudging
along this highway, chattering their grievances to one another. The
widow and her boy bring up the rear, while the men march solemnly on
ahead, talking of their right to live--just to live.

Across these mountains, in the city of Philadelphia, six score years and
more ago a convention once uttered the identical sentiments being voiced
by these serfs of the coal seams. Harvey Trueman has been a deep student
of the teachings of that convention. On the shelves of his library are
the well-thumbed writings of Washington and the Adamses and Thomas
Jefferson. He is a firm believer of the doctrines enunciated at Faneuil
Hall, and by Henry in Virginia.

To-morrow, perhaps to-night, the widow's paltry chattels will be set in
the middle of that road by the sheriff. She will be dispossessed by the
Paradise Coal Company. A frail woman, pale with poverty of the blood,
shrinking with every breath she draws, because she knows the very air
she breathes comes to her over the lands of the Coal Barons--a haggard
widow of the mines will be deprived of her miserable shelter, not fit
for a beast of burden, by the richest coal corporation on earth. Why?
Because her abject misery is a lesson too graphic in its horrible
details to be constantly before the miners. Allowed to remain there, the
widow will breed trouble among the men who are all risking their lives
every minute of every working day, even as her husband risked his.
Dispossess proceedings do not come under the supervision of Harvey
Trueman, but he has ever been observant. A blind man may not remain in
ignorance of the human suffering in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.
Men in the general offices of the Paradise Coal Company see only the
papers and receive the returns. They ask not "Who put the widow of our
latest victim in the street?"