"Be not so busy with your own career, However noble, that you cannot hear -DUER. When we are poor, we always have very clear ideas of the duties of the rich; but when we gain money, we are experts in the science of showing the poor how to behave."-PUCK. I I THE SOULLESS CORPORATION T was the day when the strike was declared. The Old Mogul was relieving his feelings by the use of picturesque profanity. Everybody about the office of the Anthrax Valley Railroad knew that the President was mad. It was a fact which he made no effort to conceal. He was in truth in a most villainous temper; not so much at the unfortunate victims of his ill-humour, or even the persons who were the authors of his trouble. The Old Mogul was mad at himself. "Of all the infernal, single-tracked, narrow-gauged, local freight tom-fools, I am the worst." He had allowed himself to be forced into a false position towards his employees. As a result the men who worked in the mines of the company had struck, and now the men who were on the railroad were going on strike. The Old Mogul had never before in all his life had a strike on his hands. It was all on account of the "gentlemen's agreement." As if half-a-dozen New York bankers, who would not know a mine-mule from a goat, could settle the trouble without hearing the men's side of the case! A gentlemen's agreement forsooth! The Old Mogul had cursed the aforesaid agreement both si 16 THOSE BLACK DIAMOND MEN lently and audibly, out of the office and in the office, across the velvet-carpeted floors and up and down the halls. But all his objurgations failed to free him from the consequences of the agreement, or to relieve his feelings. The fault was his own. It is well-known that the coal-roads are the most prosperous corporations under the sun and the Old Mogul's road was the most brutally prosperous of them all. This magnate kept his office in the city of Carbonville instead of in New York, where all the railroad presidents go. If he had only been willing to move, and thus taken himself out of the range of the pitiful people whom his company fed by giving them work in the mines, and, incidentally killed, he would have avoided many an uncomfortable interview with the survivors. But Hatton, as a boy, had tramped over the Pennsylvania mountains and drudged as a youth on the towpath of the canal, which he had afterwards bankrupted; and he loved the land of his birth more than the cities of the stranger. Furthermore, he was obstinate. His road controlled the anthracite market and he would not go to the city to sell his coal. Let the brokers come to him and sue for a reduction in freight rates. He knew when he had a cinch. So the city of Carbonville grew larger and the railroad office buildings waxed higher and broader as the profits of the coal baron increased. Yet in spite of its enormous and increasing enterprises, the Anthrax Valley Railroad was involved in continual, petty dis putes with the aggrieved owners of deceased livestock, especially cows which had come to their death through persistent determination to cross from one narrow meadow to another by way of the track. The cows had had their rights on the rocky banks of the creek for a far longer period of time than the railroad. But such rights were not respected very highly by engineers when they came skating down the grades with a hundred coal cars behind them. As a result, the department of claims and damages ran on full time, and the "mourner's bench" where the claimants sat was seldom vacant. So long as the amounts paid out for losses were kept below a certain figure, all went well. But if the road had been compelled to go into court to pay for the life of some human victim, then the Old Mogul was apt to refuse to pass the applications for damage done to cattle. That meant trouble for the department. Not all the cases were tragedies. There was the celebrated case of Angela's cow." Angela Jindy was an old Italian woman. She seemed very old, for she was a grandmother with a wrinkled face and knotted hands, although only forty. She was a widow who had followed her son to America. In Italy she had toiled in the fields, but in the Anthrax Valley there was no farm land to cultivate; so, while the daughterin-law kept the house, Angela picked coal from the dumps and carried it home on her head, sometimes carrying one of her son's babies on her hip besides. It happened that Angela had visited the department of claims and damages at the same time that the Old Mogul was telling the labour union men that he would stand by the "gentlemen's agreement." The men could have understood the uncomplicated wrath of the Old Mogul. They were used to that. But they were puzzled by his efforts at self-restraint, and his refusal to arbitrate. "This is not my day to thresh this thing out with you," he said when they had stated their case. "I'll stand by the gentlemen's agreement. We have decided not to discuss this thing with the men at all. I'm talking to you fellows now only as private individuals and it might as well stop right here. I've about run out of conversation." "But, Mr. Hatton, we're willing to arbitrate—” "There's nothing to arbitrate, I say," said the President with something of his natural testiness. “I stand by the gentlemen's agreement." "Mr. Hatton, you've always been willing to do the fair thing. Why not arbitrate this? Bishop Vaux has agreed to be one "Let him go to blazes and arbitrate the case of the men that made the agreement!" shouted the Old Mogul. "I've got no time for all this talk about arbitration. You can either handle the soft coal which this road intends to haul, or you can strike right here on the carpet, and then go to the paymaster and get your time. That's all. Now there's room for you on the sidewalk!" When the Old Mogul had somewhat exhausted his stock of expletives he visited the department of claims and damages himself to consult certain files that could |