SOMETHING STRANGE WAS AFOOT at the Mingo County courthouse. Men began to turn up in the streets of the county seat. Unfamiliar faces. Men from out of town. No one knew where they came from, who’d sent or summoned them. They dismounted from trains or arrived in automobiles. Some appeared overnight, as if they’d walked down out of the hills or risen from chambers underground. They spoke little. They smoked cigarettes or chewed toothpicks. They were every color of man, every size. They spoke in various accents and tongues. They had thick knuckles and callused hands, broad backs and brutal forearms—the muscle of working men.
They accumulated in the streets, as if called to this place. They wore small white badges of solidarity pinned to their chests. They were watching the courthouse, all of them, from every side and street. From every corner and sidewalk and storefront. They were watching, waiting.
Union men.
The jurors became fidgety in their hard wooden chairs, glancing again and again toward the doors and windows of the courtroom. The judge called the counsel to the bench, demanding to know what was the meaning of the men gathered in the streets. “I will not be intimidated, nor have my courthouse besieged.” He stabbed his finger down on the bench. “The rule of law will prevail in West Virginia.”
One of the defense attorneys spread his arms wide, as if to show the judge the size of a very large fish. “Perhaps they want to ensure the safety of the defendants in case of an acquittal, Your Honor. After all, this town is swarming with Baldwin-Felts agents who won’t be happy to see Sid Hatfield go free.”
“It is the duty of the state to protect the defendants,” said the judge. “Anything else is vigilantism.”
The last of the Army Regulars had withdrawn two weeks ago, loading up their canvas-topped trucks and wagons and rumbling out of coal country, so the burden of maintaining order fell back to the state police. At the judge’s order, the troopers turned the county courthouse into a citadel, a mountain fortress.
They hauled in sandbags and established shooting emplacements, mounting a belt-fed heavy machine gun on the front steps to deter the men milling in the streets. Men who dug coal and welded ships and swung sledges in stockyards, crushing the skulls of cows whose meat was ground into the hamburger that sizzled on griddles across the country. Men like Big Frank and the Hellfighter twins, who stood and watched, unarmed, staring unconcerned at the guns aimed in their direction, waiting as the jurors retired for their deliberations.