I

XVIII

MARY LIZ IN THE OLD MOGUL'S DEN

T all happened through the fault of the clerks in

the railroad office; Mary Liz was sure of that.

If they had not teased her, she never would have seen Mr. Hatton, the President of the Anthrax Valley Railroad, and of course she never would have insulted him. But now she was disgraced, and was being sent in charge of the messenger from the office to Mr. Warne.

The messenger had done his best to impress upon her that she ought to be thankful she was not on her way to the station house. She did not believe a word he said to her, so far as that was concerned, but she felt she would have much preferred being sent to jail to being sent to the rector's. She did not know what happened to people who were sent to ministers, while she knew a great deal about the ways of policemen. She would have darted away from the messenger, if he had been older; but as he was little. more than a boy, she knew he would catch her and she wanted no more tales to be told to Mr. Warne. For some minutes after the messenger handed her over to Rector Warne, she cried so when he tried to talk to her that the minister had not the slightest

notion what had happened. So when he had dismissed the messenger and had comforted her, he asked her to begin again at the very beginning and tell him everything.

"You see, it was about Mr. Breece," began Mary Liz. "The doctor says he'll die, if he don't get out to the country."

"Yes, I know all about Mr. Breece," said the rector, bowing his head on his hand and groaning inwardly. He had exhausted both the resources and the patience of every charitable supporter of the mission in behalf of other cases like that of Breece. It is no wonder that he groaned.

The summer had been a most trying season. Day after day the sun blazed from a cloudless sky upon the bare mountain sides. Long years ago these mountains had been covered with trees. They had then been famous for their beauty. But the trees had been sacrificed to make props for the roof in the coal mines and the mountains were shorn of every sign of green. There was nothing to rest the eye.

The sides of the mountains were so steep that when the forests were cut down the scanty soil soon washed away, leaving nothing but utter barrenness. If it had not been for the intolerable heat, one might have thought it was winter, so absolutely had every vestige of green disappeared from the landscape. Gray shale and black culm towered above the narrow valley on every hand. Even the waters of the creek were black with the waste from the coal washeries. The only relief from the sombre blackness of the place, was

where the sulphur water from the mines had coloured the stones of the creek-bed and the garbage from the city above, a rusty red.

At one point a bend in the creek had enclosed a swampy tract of land, where a few birches had for a time managed to maintain a precarious existence. These had furnished a yellowish-green spot of colour. But the coal company, being in need of ground for a new culm dump for the new breaker, had built a barrier about the swamp to keep the desolating flood of grimy mud from totally obstructing the bed of the creek, and now the birches were dead, strangled to death by six feet of black slime. Their gaunt, weatherbeaten branches were lifted like the arms of a drowning man in a vain struggle for life.

The town crowded in between the steep mountain side and the creek. In many places the houses were built along a single street. Where the creek ran nearer to the base of the mountain, the houses were built on one side of the street only. The railroad occupied the other side, tunnelling here and there to avoid the sharp turns made by the creek. There was almost one continuous town from the city of Carbonville on the mountain top clear down to where the creek fell into the river and the coal measures disappeared.

In this narrow valley, with its great masses of rock and culm on every side, the heat was almost unbearable. As if it were not enough that the sun blazed in the sky above, a fire burned also beneath the surface of the earth. Not that it really heated the air to any great degree, except in the neighbourhood of the

fan house, where the smoke and gases were pumped out of the mine. But somehow it made the place seem hotter when one thought that there was a raging volcano of flame eating its way through the vein of coal only sixty feet below the cinder sidewalks.

It would only be a few days until the water from the creek would be piped to the scene of the conflagration and then it would soon be quenched. Meanwhile, from the bore-hole which had been driven from the surface through the intervening rock to let out the air so that the water could be forced in, a six inch stream of flaming gas roared forth day and night. This blazing torch flamed and swayed without resting, sometimes thrusting its tongue full twenty feet into the air.

Although the mountains were on every hand, the conditions of life were very much the same as in the slum districts of the great cities. The people gasped for breath, the children sickened and the feeblest succumbed.

The rector had sorrowed over the many fresh screw holes in the doors that summer. There were few houses in that part of Coalton where he went most frequently which were not thus marked. This was especially true of the company houses, where the poorer people lived. These screw holes are left in the door when the undertaker removes the eyelet which holds the white ribbon from the day of death until after the funeral.

Rector Warne did not regret the loss of his wealth, which had been swept away after he entered the

ministry, except when he saw such sights as these and found himself unable to help all the sufferers.

He sat so long thinking about these things, that Mary Liz thought he had forgotten about her. She was beginning to plan to slip out of his study, when he looked up again and said, "What had Mr. Breece to do with your trouble and Mr. Hatton's sending you to me?"

"I went out collectin' for Mr. Breece so's he could go to the country. I was doin' beautiful while I stuck. to the Patch. I wisht I'd never gone to the old railroad office in Carbonville!" she said, beginning to cry again. “We had it all fixed so nice: Mrs. Dolan was goin' to take me in with her an' mother was goin' to take the two youngest of the Breece boys. Of course Janet would have to go with her father to take care of him."

Mr. Warne explained gently to Mary Liz that it would take a great deal more money to send even Mr. Breece and Janet to the country than the amount she showed him tied in the corner of her handkerchief. "But tell me what you did at the office," he said, "and why you were sent to me?"

"It was after their dinner time, I guess, when I got there; for the men was havin' a daisy time. They were just mean to me, that's what they were! It was my fault, I suppose, but they ragged me an' I sassed 'em back. They wouldn't give me a cent,only one man who give me that quarter-that was the most I got. All the rest said they was goin' to Bar Arbor or Tucksido or somewhere on their vaca