A COLUMN OF UNIFORMED men marched down a dark road between the hills. Three hundred troopers and lawmen advancing into the territory north of Blair Mountain, where the Rednecks were known to hold sway. Their heavy boots rose and fell within a pale cloud of road dust, their spurs ringing beneath the stars.
They were on a special mission for the Czar.
The men were nervous, their eyes flitting left and right. They’d been given a list of several miners to arrest—men suspected of clashing with state police weeks ago. But the hills were full of hundreds of armed miners now. Thousands. The road crunched like gunpowder beneath their boots and violence hovered around them like firedamp, awaiting a spark. Some traded sips from hip flasks or jelly jars, whispering between their teeth.
You ever feel like a goat on a string?
Damn sure. And with the wolves and panthers loose.
Just when Mother Jones is urging them home, too.
Before them walked a group of miners they’d already arrested during the advance. The prisoners shuffled down the road in the new-fallen darkness, their manacled hands clasped before them like men on a religious pilgrimage, heading for high temples or holy caverns in the hills.
Least if we get bushwhacked, those poor sons of bitches will be first to get it.
Now the prisoners looked back over their shoulders, seeing the hard face of Captain Brockus, stony and pale beneath his campaign hat. The man noticed nothing amiss, it seemed. No lights had ignited against the quick clawing of darkness over the land. No lanterns, no candles, no electric bulbs. The coal-camp cabins sat silent beside the road, dark-windowed despite the black wires strung roof to roof.
Too dark.
The holler grew narrower as the column proceeded, deeper. The skeletal fortress of a mine rose before them, darker than the surrounding night. The coal tipples and silos and headhouse made eerie silhouettes against the sky, like the remnants of an abandoned civilization. A tiny industrial outpost on the frontier, zigzagged with catwalks and conveyor belts. Their boots crunched toward the place, marching between the cheap, dark cabins spread before it.
They were nearly to the mine when the prisoners glanced toward a boardinghouse beside the road and then looked quickly away, too quickly, as if they’d seen something they shouldn’t. Captain Brockus widened his eyes in the darkness to see a line of men on the porch of the house, the blued steel of their rifles just visible, like drawn swords. He raised his fist, halting the column in the road.
“Who goes there?”
A voice from the porch: “We that live here. State ye business.”
Before Captain Brockus could reply, someone shouted from the back of the column. “We come for you, you God-damned Rednecks!”
The night shattered with gunshots, great roars of flame crisscrossing before the eyes of troopers and deputies and miners, slugs of lead goring bellies and ribs.
The electric lights of the mine exploded to life, blasting the road with light, and the human shield had worked. Manacled prisoners lay bloodied and screaming in the road, loud enough for all the hills to hear.