Shadows in the Coal: Spy Letters from 1920s Harlan

• Chapter 1 The Black Mountain Telegrams
• Chapter 2 A Stranger in the Company Store
• Chapter 3 Intercepted: Shipment 404
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Drifts
• Chapter 5 The Deputy's Ledger
• Chapter 6 Code Name: Canary
• Chapter 7 Midnight at the Tipple
• Chapter 8 The Red Necktie
• Chapter 9 Transcript of the Sheriff’s Wiretap
• Chapter 10 Dynamite and Double Agents
• Chapter 11 A Letter from No Man’s Land
• Chapter 12 The Union Organizer's Shadow
• Chapter 13 Incident at Bloody Creek
• Chapter 14 The Postmaster’s Secret
• Chapter 15 Blueprints of the Powder House
• Chapter 16 The Operator’s Ledger
• Chapter 17 Ink and Coal Dust
• Chapter 18 The Interrogation of Agent Davis
• Chapter 19 Signal Fires on the Ridge
• Chapter 20 Deciphering the Pay Envelope
• Chapter 21 The Strike Committee Minutes
• Chapter 22 Betrayal at Shaft Number Four
• Chapter 23 The Detective’s Confession
• Chapter 24 The Night Rider's Trail
• Chapter 25 Blacklisted in Harlan
• Chapter 26 The Final Dispatch

DOCUMENT NO. 01-A
WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY
Received at Depot Office, Harlan, Kentucky
Date: October 14, 1921 — 6:14 AM
Origin: Bluefield, West Virginia

TO: T. J. VANCE, CHIEF OF GUARDS, BLACK MOUNTAIN COAL CORP, HARLAN KY
STOP ORDER ON TIMBER SHIPMENT CANCELLED STOP EXPECT THREE CRATES HARDWARE VIA L&N NOON FREIGHT STOP HANDLE WITH CARE CONTAINS DELICATE GLASSWARE STOP REPLACEMENT CHECKER ARRIVES THURSDAY NAMED CARTER STOP INSTRUCT HIM TO WATCH THE LOAD WEIGHTS STOP
BALDWIN-FELTS DETECTIVE AGENCY, BLUEFIELD OFFICE

The yellow paper smelled of stale tobacco and soot before Thomas Vance even smoothed it flat against his pine desk. It was an ordinary enough slip to any clerk tapping the brass key down at the depot, but Vance knew the vernacular of the agency well enough to translate it without a cipher key. "Delicate glassware" meant Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotguns, packed in grease and cedar shavings to keep the firing pins from rattling against the wood during the climb over Pine Mountain. "Carter" was an operative with a clean slate, a soft step, and an eye for men whose eyes wandered too long toward handbills.

Vance ran a heavy thumb over the embossed seal of the telegraph company. Outside, the valley was just shaking off a damp, bitter fog that tasted of burning slack and wet shale. The Black Mountain works sat deep in the gut of the hollow, caught between two rising ridges of hemlock and chestnut oak that never let the sun hit the tipple floor before nine in the morning. When the steam whistles sounded their six-thirty blast, the noise didn't echo so much as bounce brutally between the cliff faces, rattling the corrugated iron roofing of the repair shacks and shaking loose the crows perched on the headframe cables.

He reached for his fountain pen, dipped it into an inkwell stained with soot from the stove, and scribbled across the bottom of the form: Advise depot agent to store crates in freight shed locker B. Keep local draymen clear. Vance.

DOCUMENT NO. 01-B
INTERCEPTED POSTAL DISPATCH (COPY)
Confiscated by Harlan County Sheriff’s Patrol
Intercept Location: Mail Pouch, Clover Fork Rural Delivery No. 3
Date: October 15, 1921

Dear Brother,

We got into the hollow Tuesday without no trouble from the deputies at the crossing, though they was checking satchels on the afternoon coach from Corbin. Tell Uncle Jesse that the garden patch he asked about is full of weeds. The corn is poor, and the men who work the hoe are getting tired of eating turnip tops while the cribs up at the big house are bursting with dry grain.

A fellow from over in Mingo come through two nights back. He didn’t use his right name, but we knowed him by the limp he took from the machine gun work down at Matewan last spring. He says the folks up there are holding out in tents along the river and eating lard and flour furnished by the international brotherhood, but the cold weather is coming on fast and the babies are coughing bad. He told us not to sign no yellow-dog papers if the superintendent brings them around with the scrip envelopes this coming Saturday.

Keep your ears open down at the depot. They say Black Mountain has ordered twenty more deputy stars from the hardware firm in Louisville, and every man who wears one has got a Winchester and a permit to clear the road.

Yours in hope,
A. P.

Vance set the letter down next to the telegraph strip. The sheriff had brought it over himself, still sealed with a thumb of cheap wax, though the edge had been split neatly with a pocketknife before being pressed back together over a hot kerosene chimney. The sheriff, a man named Ed Noe who had spent thirty years letting his stomach grow out over a silver-buckled gun belt, took a seat on the corner of the woodbox.

"That's Art Pender," Noe said, fishing a plug of Day's Work from his pocket and biting off a corner with a wet snap. "Lives up past the drift mouth at Number Three. Got two boys working the low coal, both of them red-headed and sullen as mules. If he’s writing to Jesse down in Knoxville, he’s trying to line up circuit riders from the union to hold meetings in the brush."

"Let him write," Vance said, his voice flat and dry as chalk. "Letters give us the names. If he talks in the churchyard, people forget what was said. If he puts it on blue-lined pad paper, we have it in the safe. Who was the rider from Mingo?"

"Don't know yet," the sheriff spat into the coal bucket. "Could be anyone. Half of Tug River is scattered across these hills like quail after a bird dog breaks. They walk the tracks at night and sleep in abandoned tram tunnels. You can't fence off sixty miles of mountain, Vance."

"You don't have to fence the mountain," Vance said, looking out through the greasy glass at the long lines of two-room board-and-batten houses that stretched along the creek like gray dominoes. "You just have to fence the pay window. A man can sleep in the laurel all summer, but come November he wants grease in his skillet and lard on his bread. When he comes to get it, we take his name."

DOCUMENT NO. 01-C
NIGHT WATCHMAN’S LOG — BLACK MOUNTAIN TIPPLE
Entry by: S. G. Kroll, Guard #4
Shift: 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, October 16–17, 1921

8:15 PM — Empties shunted onto siding six. Train crew from L&N reports three men seen walking the ballast near Milepost 241 with bundles under their coats. Sounded whistle to disperse them. No trespass on company right-of-way observed.

11:40 PM — Faint light observed on opposite ridge, above the timber line on Old Man Hensley’s grant. Appeared to be a kerosene lantern moved twice in a vertical line, then covered. Waited thirty minutes. No return signal from the valley floor.

2:10 AM — Checked seal on Powder Magazine No. 2. Lock intact. Footprints in the mud outside the wire fence belong to a hound dog and one pair of heavy brogans, size ten or eleven, with the left heel worn down on the outside timber. Measured depth of track; man was unburdened when he walked past.

4:55 AM — Telegram boy arrived on mule from depot with priority message for Mr. Vance. Instructed him to wait in the boiler house until daylight. Boy was shivering and claimed he heard a rifle shot down by the railroad bridge. I checked the perimeter with the carbide torch; found nothing except an old sow rooting in the brier patch.

DOCUMENT NO. 01-D
WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY
Received at Black Mountain Mine Office
Date: October 17, 1921 — 5:02 AM
Origin: Charleston, West Virginia

TO: T. J. VANCE, CARE OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COAL, HARLAN KY
RED BIRD HAS FLOWN THE COOP STOP HEADING SOUTH BY C&O CONNECTING WITH L&N AT WINCHESTER STOP TRAVELS AS BOOK CANVASSER FOR METHODIST BIBLE SOCIETY STOP SMALL LEATHER VALISE CONTAINS NOT SCRIPTURE BUT CARBON SHEETS AND ENROLLMENT CARDS STOP DO NOT ARREST ON SIGHT STOP ALLOW HIM TO MAKE HIS ACQUAINTANCES AND LOG EVERY DOOR HE KNOCKS UPON STOP CONFIRM RECEIPT BY WIRE TO BLUEFIELD UNDER CODE NINE STOP
FELTZ

Vance read the second telegram twice, then walked across the office to the coal stove and lifted the round iron lid with an ash lifter. He dropped the paper into the yellow heart of the hickory chunks, watched it curl into gray lace, and tapped the lid back down with the flat of his palm.

A knock sounded at the heavy plank door before the soot had settled. It was not the depot boy—the boy knocked like a bird pecking a fence post. This was three measured raps, heavy and knuckle-solid, delivered with the mechanical rhythm of a man who didn't like to wait for permission.

"Come inside, Carter," Vance said, without turning around.

The man who stepped into the office looked less like a detective and more like an assistant cashier from a dry-goods store in Lexington. He was thirty-five, perhaps forty, with a clean-shaven jaw that had missed the mountain sun for several months and a bowler hat that had seen its nap brushed thin along the brim. His suit was dark wool, grayed slightly by the cinders of the passenger coach, and he carried a flat leather bag under his arm that had neither company stamps nor brass corners.

"You have the ears of an owl, Mr. Vance," the man said. His voice was light, nasal, and entirely free of the long, slow vowels of the Cumberland plateau. "The boy at the depot said you were up. Said the Chief doesn't sleep much during the autumn quarter."

"Sleep is an expensive habit in this county," Vance said, turning around and leaning against the edge of his table. "Did the crates come through on the noon freight?"

"They're sitting behind the scale house now," Carter said, setting his bag on the single ladder-back chair across from the desk. "The stationmaster wanted to charge three dollars demurrage on account of the crates being labeled as agricultural machinery and weighing twice what the bill of lading showed. I gave him two dollars and told him the Black Mountain Coal Corporation doesn't pay demurrage to men who like to keep their jobs."

"He took it?"

"He took it and asked if we had any extra coal oil to spare for his lamp. People in this hollow don't look hard at labels when they smell lead, Vance. They know what's in the boxes."

Vance grunted. He reached into his vest pocket, produced a brass key on a loop of greasy cord, and tossed it onto the desk between them.

"The small office at the rear of the commissary belongs to you," Vance said. "The sign on the door says Assistant Superintendent of Accounts. That means you sit by the window with a ledger full of column lines and look at the men who come in to draw their scrip before the weekend. If a man draws five dollars on Wednesday and ten dollars on Friday, he’s buying lard and coffee. If he draws nothing all week and his woman comes in only to buy salt and lamp wicks, he’s getting his groceries from a pantry down the creek. That means someone is feeding him from outside."

"And the Bible salesman?" Carter asked, untying the string around his leather bag. "The wire from Charleston caught me at the depot in Corbin before I boarded the branch line."

"He hasn't showed his face yet," Vance said. "He’ll likely get off at Wallins Creek or Baxter to keep from walking past the depot platform here. He’ll come up the bed of the river, where the sycamores are thick, or he’ll hire a rig from one of the livery men who don't like the company."

"Which livery men?"

"There aren't many left," Vance said with a faint twitch of his mouth that served as a smile. "Old man Blanton down by the river fork still has three mules and an old buckboard. He hates the coal company because we condemned twenty yards of his bottom land back in '16 to put down the spur tracks to the coke ovens. He’d haul the Devil himself up this valley if he thought the Devil was coming to dynamite the roundhouse."

Carter pulled a thin, black-bound notebook from his bag, along with three sharpened pencils tied together with an elastic band. He laid them out with deliberate precision, aligning the spine of the book with the edge of the cedar table.

"I need the names of the checkweighmen," Carter said. "The ones the men elected themselves, not the ones you pay."

"There's only one checkweighman on this tipple that the company didn't hire," Vance replied. "Name is Sam Hall. He was in the 149th Infantry over in France. Got hit with gas at the Argonne, so he breathes like an old bellows, but his eyes are clear enough. The miners trust him because his daddy cleared the timber off this mountain forty years ago before there was an iron rail within twenty miles of the court house. If Sam says the hopper holds two thousand pounds, the loader believes him. If our man says it holds eighteen hundred, the loader looks at Sam."

"Has Hall taken the pledge?"

"He hasn't signed with the union, if that’s what you mean," Vance said. "He knows what happens to men who sign. But he doesn't throw rocks at them either. When the organizer came through last spring, Hall let him sleep on the bench in the weigh shack during the noon hour while the engine was being coaled."

"That’s enough to start," Carter said, dipping his head toward his notebook and writing three small lines of shorthand. "In West Virginia, we didn't let them sleep in the weigh shack. We found that once a man shares a dry floor with an organizer, he starts thinking about twelve-hundred-pound tons and clean coal deductions. It’s an infection of the mind, Vance. It moves faster than the rot in hemlock ties."

"Harlan isn't West Virginia," Vance said, looking out the window toward the first car of the morning shift now rumbling over the iron trestle above the creek. "Over there, you had the state police and the Governor’s commissions. Here, you have eight miles of mud between this office and the courthouse, and the sheriff’s deputies don't leave the town limits unless we pay their horse hire and buy their cartridges. You be careful with Sam Hall. If you shoot him, the whole drift walks out before the smoke clears. If you frame him, his cousins will sit on the ridge with thirty-thirty rifles and pick off every mule on the haulage line."

Carter didn't look up from his small black book. His pencil moved with an irritating, rhythmic scratching that sounded like a mouse behind the wainscoting.

"No one is going to shoot Sam Hall," the detective said mildly. "A martyr is too expensive to maintain on the payroll. We’ll just find out what his sister's husband owes at the company store, or we'll find three sticks of Hercules powder hidden under the porch of his church house. A mountain man can stand up against a gun, Vance, but he can't stand up against his neighbors when they think he’s stealing from the collection plate."

DOCUMENT NO. 01-E
BLACK MOUNTAIN COAL CORPORATION
Internal Correspondence — Confidential
Date: October 17, 1921
From: Office of the General Manager
To: T. J. Vance, Chief of Police Services

Vance:

The directors in Philadelphia have reviewed the tonnage reports for September. We are down four hundred tons on the Clover Fork side. The superintendent claims the coal seam is pinching out near the fault line, but our surveyor’s maps show eight feet of clean splint coal running straight through to the Virginia border.

The trouble is not the rock. The trouble is the rhythm of the work. The loaders are leaving the rooms at three o'clock instead of five. They spend the last two hours of the day gathered around the blacksmith’s fire talking about the settlement at Cabell County.

Do not allow these men to assemble under any pretext. If the blacksmith shop is a gathering place, remove the bellows and order all picks sharpened at the central shop under your personal supervision. Furthermore, the new detective, Carter, is to be given unrestricted access to the pay envelopes before they are sealed on Friday evening. Any envelope showing a deduction for "Benevolent Dues" or unauthorized credit transfers is to be impounded and brought to my residence.

We cannot afford a work stoppage with winter contracts pending for the Cincinnati gas works. If the coal does not move, the trains will not run, and if the trains do not run, neither you nor I will be required in Harlan come the new year.

Respectfully,
C. W. Hallowell
General Manager

The whistle at the tipple blew again—seven o'clock. The morning was breaking gray and thin, like skimmed milk poured over the black ridges. Down the hill, through the steam that rose from the condenser ponds, the first shift of miners was moving toward the man-trip cars. They looked identical in the half-light: small, hunched men in blue denim jackets gray with dried mud, carrying five-pound tin lard buckets in their left hands and carbide lamps hooked to the cloth caps on their heads. They did not speak to each other as they lined up by the drift mouth; they moved with the heavy, dragging gait of men who spent ten hours a day walking bent double through thirty-inch seams.

Vance stood at the window, watching the line move into the black square of the drift opening. As the men reached the timbers, each one reached out and touched a small brass tag hung on a timber board—checking his number onto the board so the company would know who was down in the dark if the slate fell or the gas blew.

"There's eighty men in that shift," Vance said, his hand resting on the brass latch of the casement. "Sixty of them owe their souls to Hallowell for the beds they sleep in and the lard they fry their pork in. But twenty of them don't owe nothing. Those are the ones that keep me awake."

"The ones with no debts?" Carter asked, closing his book with a soft snap.

"The ones who own three acres of rocky hillside two miles back in the brush," Vance replied. "They don't live in company houses. They don't buy company meal. If Hallowell fires them, they just go back to their corn patches and their squirrel rifles. They don't give a damn about the company scrip because their women spin their own wool and their young ones go barefoot until the frost bites. You can't squeeze a man who doesn't want anything you've got to sell."

Carter rose, adjusted his bowler hat, and picked up his leather bag. His movements were neat, almost delicate, like a schoolmaster preparing to take the roll.

"Everyone wants something, Mr. Vance," Carter said, walking toward the door with an easy, unhurried stride. "The ones who don't want money usually want quiet. And if you make the mountain noisy enough, they’ll pay whatever price you ask to make it still again."

The detective turned the knob and stepped out onto the porch of the office, his polished shoes clicking sharply on the rough-hewn oak planks before the thick mud of the road swallowed the sound entirely. Vance watched him until he disappeared behind the corner of the company store, then reached into his desk drawer for the log of the night wires.

There was one more slip tucked at the bottom of the drawer, delivered at midnight by a track-walker from Pineville who had been paid fifty cents to keep his mouth shut. It had not come through the Western Union wire at Harlan; it had been relayed through the small railroad depot at Evarts on a scrap of yellow manifold paper.

DOCUMENT NO. 01-F
TELEGRAPHIC INTERCEPT — UNREGISTERED WIRE
Origin: Evarts Station (Trackside Booth)
Received: October 16, 1921 — 11:42 PM
To: "CANARY" — CARE OF GENERAL DELIVERY, EVARTS KY

PACKAGE WILL ARRIVE WITH THE FIRST HARD FROST STOP BE PREPARED TO UNLOAD AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN STOP DO NOT TRUST THE MAN WITH THE LEATHER VALISE STOP HE IS NOT FROM THE BIBLE SOCIETY STOP TELL THE MEN AT NUMBER FOUR TO KEEP THEIR COATS BUTTONED STOP
S.

Vance laid his palm flat on the manifold paper, pressing it down against the ink-stained grain of his desk. The room was cold now; the fire in the small stove was dying down to a bed of gray clinkers, and the smell of the creek—sulfur water, rotting hemlock, and the perpetual wet dust of three hundred tons of coal being dumped from the monitors into the shaking screens—settled into the corners of the office like an unwelcome guest who had nowhere else to go.

He took his pen again, dipped it in the purple ink, and wrote across the corner of the yellow paper: Hold for Carter. Find out who has the key to box forty-two at the Evarts post office.

Outside, the tipple began its morning rattle—an iron-on-iron shriek that would not stop until the five o'clock whistle told the mountain that the day's tonnage had been bought, weighed, and cleared for the furnaces down the line. Vance pulled his coat from the peg behind the door, checked the cylinder of the Colt .38 that hung under his left arm, and walked out into the gray mountain mud to meet the noon train.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-A
OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT OF ACCOUNTS
Black Mountain Coal Corporation, Harlan County, Kentucky
Daily Ledger Observations — October 19, 1921
Record Keeper: J. Carter, Operative #14 (Bluefield)

A quiet day in the ledger room, though the silence in this hollow is never peaceful. It is merely the pause between the grinding of the shaker screens and the rumble of the loaded gondolas. I have spent the last twelve hours analyzing the credit sheets of the eighty-four families registered under the Number Three drift line.

My predecessor in this office, a tubercular clerk named Miller who was sent back to the Blue Grass to die, kept these books with a sloppy hand. He recorded scrip advances as simple cash equivalents, failing to note the critical ratios between a family’s starch consumption and their gunpowder purchases. A man who buys three sacks of white flour and five pounds of salt pork on a Monday is preparing to feed a household. A man who buys nothing but five pounds of dried navy beans, a gallon of kerosene, and three boxes of Remington centerfire cartridges is preparing to leave his house for the ridges.

Three accounts of note have been marked with red ink in the margin:

First: Pender, Arthur (Check No. 312). Balance outstanding: $14.12. His credit is frozen by order of the General Manager, yet his family has not visited the dry-goods counter since last Thursday. His wife, a quiet woman with the yellow skin of the mountain ague, came in yesterday only to return a pair of brass shoe eyelets. She did not look at the salt fish or the lard tubs. My inquiries indicate she has been seen carrying a basket of dried apples toward the cabin of Sam Hall.

Second: Hall, Samuel (Check No. 101, Checkweighman). Balance outstanding: $0.00. This is the most dangerous ledger in the book. A miner with no debt is a miner with no leash. Hall draws his pay in cash on the second Saturday of each month, refusing the company’s paper scrip altogether. When the clerk offered him the standard ten percent premium to take his earnings in metal tokens redeemable at our store, Hall told him he preferred his money "in the green paper that has the picture of the president who won the war, not the copper that has the face of the man who owns the dirt." I have instructed the paymaster to delay Hall's cash envelope by three hours this coming Friday under the pretext of a clerical audit. We must see how his patience holds when the evening train is whistle-wetting at the siding.

Third: Blanton, Silas (Non-employee, Livery Operator). This man’s name does not appear on our payroll, but his sister's grandson, a boy of fifteen named Clay, is registered as a trapper-boy in Shaft Number Four. The boy’s account shows a sudden, unexplained credit of eight dollars, marked as "miscellaneous labor." When I asked the mine boss what extra work a fifteen-year-old could perform in the return-air courses to earn eight dollars, he told me the boy had been "helping the stableman clean the mule stalls after hours." I visited the mule barn myself at noon. The head stableman, a one-eyed veteran named Clutts, told me he hasn't let a boy near his stock since a three-year-old mare was kicked to death in the harness room last August. The eight dollars came from another source.

At 2:15 PM, a stranger entered the store. He did not come by the county road, which is monitored by Vance’s deputies at the bridge. He arrived from the creek path, his boots covered in the gray, greasy clay that collects where the tail-race from the washery dumps into the fork. He carried a flat leather bag under his arm, its strap mended with a piece of binder twine. He did not look like a man of the hills; his shoulders were round in the manner of a clerk who has spent his youth leaning over a desk, and his teeth, when he smiled at the clerk behind the counter, were too white and too even for a man who has lived on a diet of limestone water and salt pork.

He introduced himself as Brother Silas Thorne, traveling representative of the Southern Methodist Tract Society. He asked if he might have permission to leave a dozen copies of the Methodist Messenger on the counter for the use of the miners' families.

I watched him from behind the frosted glass of the ledger office. He did not ask for the superintendent. He did not ask for the manager. He asked if the "man who weighs the coal" was still on the tipple, as he had a letter of greeting for him from a cousin in Kanawha County.

I have his likeness fixed in my memory. He is five feet, eight inches tall. Weight, approximately one hundred and forty pounds. He has a small mole just below the outer corner of his left eye, and his fingernails, though clean of coal dust, are stained with the purple ink used by the mimeograph operators in the regional offices of the United Mine Workers in Charleston.

I did not arrest his progress. I allowed him to leave his tracts on the counter. After he departed, I gathered them up. Underneath the cover of the third booklet, tucked between the pages of a sermon on the virtue of temperance, was a double-folded sheet of carbon paper.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-B
TRANSCRIPT OF CONVERSATION — COAL SALES ROOM
Recorded via Dictograph Device No. 3 (Installed behind the post office boxes, Harlan Company Store)
Date: October 19, 1921 — 3:10 PM
Speakers: "Brother Thorne" (Subject A) and Arthur Pender (Subject B)

SUBJECT A: The water is cold in the valley, brother.

SUBJECT B: It’s colder where the stream starts, stranger.

SUBJECT A: I have a letter here from the congregation at Mingo. They send their regards to the men who work the low seams. They say the wind is blowing hard from the north, but the oak trees are still standing.

SUBJECT B: The oak trees have deep roots, but the wind has got an axe in its hand. Did you bring the blue paper?

SUBJECT A: The blue paper is safe. But we cannot distribute it while the man with the bowler hat is sitting in the office behind the salt barrels. He has eyes like a hawk, and he’s been turning over the pages of the ledger book since Monday morning.

SUBJECT B: That’s Carter. He come in from West Virginia on the noon freight last week. Vance brought him here to replace the fellow who went home sick. The men are saying he’s a Baldwin man from the Bluefield office.

SUBJECT A: He is more than a detective, Arthur. He’s the one who drew the map of the cabins at Cabin Creek before the guards put the machine guns on the train. He knows every man who ever signed a card between here and the Ohio River. If he sees you speaking to me, your name will be on the blacklist before the five o'clock whistle.

SUBJECT B: My name’s been on their list since my boy took the fever in the tent colony at Matewan. They can't make me any blacker than I am, mister. Where is the meeting tonight?

SUBJECT A: At the foot of the old incline, where the track was torn up in '18. Tell Sam Hall to bring his watch. We need to know the schedule of the night guards on the trestle.

SUBJECT B: Sam won't go to no meeting in the brush. He says he’s a church-going man and he won't have no part in secret signs or night-riding.

SUBJECT A: He’ll come if you tell him the company is going to deduct three hundred pounds from every car that comes out of the Number Four drift starting next Monday. I have the new schedule here in my pocket. It was copied from the manager’s desk in Cincinnati by a girl who believes in the gospel of the eight-hour day.

SUBJECT B: If that’s true, the boys won't need no meeting to start the trouble. They’ll start it with their picks.

SUBJECT A: No. That’s what Vance wants. He has sixty deputies with Winchester rifles sitting in the boarding house, and they’re eating company beef at three dollars a day. They want a target, Arthur. We must give them nothing but silence until the frost is on the ground and the coal bins in Chicago are empty.

SUBJECT B: I’ll tell him. But you keep clear of the creek road after dark. The deputies have been shooting at shadows since Sunday night.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-C
MEMORANDUM FOR THE CHIEF OF GUARDS
From: J. Carter, Assistant Superintendent of Accounts
Date: October 19, 1921 — 4:30 PM

Vance:

The Bible agent is our man. His name is not Thorne; it is likely Arthur Vance or Arthur Vance’s nephew, but in the West Virginia files he was known as "The Deacon." He was active in the Fairmont district during the trouble there two years ago. He is a organizer of the third class—not a speaker who pulls a crowd to the courthouse steps, but a whisperer who works the kitchen tables and the garden patches.

He is currently staying at the boarding house kept by the widow McCreary, which lies outside the company property line on the county road. This is convenient for him, as we cannot legally evict him from her premises without an order from the circuit judge, and the circuit judge is currently in Pineville attending a murder trial.

I have examined the carbon paper I took from his tracts. It is of a specialized grade—thin, blue-dyed, and manufactured by the Carter’s Ink Company of Boston. When held to the light, it reveals the impressions of three letters written within the last forty-eight hours.

The first was addressed to a man named "S." in Evansville, Indiana. It contains an order for twenty-four "shovels of the heavy pattern." In our business, "shovels of the heavy pattern" do not mean tools for moving coal. They mean Springfield rifles, caliber .30-06, surplus from the war department.

The second letter was addressed to the postmaster at Evarts, requesting him to hold all mail for "Box 42" until the Wednesday evening train arrives.

The third is a list of fourteen numbers, corresponding to the check numbers of our loaders at the Number Four drift. At the top of the list is the number 101—Sam Hall.

We must not move against Hall yet. If we arrest him now, the men will believe he was taken because of the checkweighing disputes, and we will have the whole shift on our hands before the weekend. Instead, I suggest we allow the "Deacon" to meet him at the old incline tonight.

I have instructed Guard Kroll to take his position in the rocks above the drum-house at seven o'clock. He will carry the long-range rifle with the Lyman telescope sight. He is not to shoot unless he receives a signal from my whistle, but he is to record every man who crosses the old roadbed.

We must also look into the matter of the post office at Evarts. The postmaster there, a man named Jesse Combs, is an uncle of the Pender boys. He was appointed during the Wilson administration and has no love for the coal operators. If he is allowing his office to be used as a drop for the union’s correspondence, we cannot touch him under state law, but we can have a federal inspector down from Cincinnati within forty-eight hours if we can prove he is handling unregistered packages containing explosives or seditious literature.

I am returning to the store now to finish the payroll audit. The men are coming off the four o'clock shift, and their boots make a sound like a marching army in the wet gravel outside my window.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-D
FIELD REPORT — DEPUTY SHERIFF PATROL
Harlan County Road No. 4 (Clover Fork District)
Date: October 19, 1921 — 8:15 PM
Officer: Deputy G. W. Skidmore

At approximately 7:45 PM, while patrolling the county road near the entrance to the old timber slide, I observed a mule-drawn buckboard parked in the laurels about fifty yards off the right-of-way. The mule was tied to a young hickory and had its head covered with a burlap sack to prevent it from nickering.

I approached the vehicle with my electric torch extinguished. Upon reaching the buckboard, I found it to be the property of Silas Blanton of the river fork livery. The vehicle was empty, but in the rear bed was an empty wooden crate that had recently held six gallons of "Monongahela Rye" whiskey. The wood was fresh-split and smelled strongly of spirits, though there was no liquor left in the container.

While examining the crate, I heard the sound of footsteps coming down the mountain from the direction of the old incline. I retreated into the brush and waited.

Two men came down the trail. One was Silas Blanton, whom I recognized by his limp and his gray beard. The other was a younger man, dressed in a city-style coat and carrying a flat leather bag. They were speaking in low tones, but the wind was coming down the hollow and I was able to distinguish several sentences.

The young man said: "The shipments must come through the gap by wagon. The L&N conductors are checking every passenger coach at Corbin, and they have three company detectives at the Winchester junction. If we try to bring the crates by rail, they’ll be sitting in the freight locker at Harlan before we can turn the keys."

Blanton replied: "The road over the gap is nothing but mud and boulders this time of year. A team can't haul more than five hundred pounds without throwing a shoe or breaking an axle. And the deputies have a chain across the road at the county line."

The young man then said: "The chain can be dropped. We have two men on the patrol who have taken our obligation. When the wagon comes through, the lantern on the wagon will be covered with a red handkerchief. If the deputy at the chain sees the red light, he will let the team pass without checking the boards."

Blanton asked: "Who’s paying for the team hire? My mules don't walk thirty miles through the mud for nothing but the promise of a union card."

The young man replied: "The money is coming from the Evansville local. You’ll get ten dollars when the wagon leaves the gap and another ten when the crates are delivered to the cellar under the church house at Clover Fork."

At this point, my boot slipped on a wet hemlock root, causing a sharp crack. Both men stopped speaking immediately. The young man reached into his coat pocket and withdrew what appeared to be a small-caliber automatic pistol. Blanton grabbed the mule’s bridle and began backing the wagon onto the road.

I did not attempt to detain them, as I was alone and my service revolver was wet from the mist. I remained in the brush until the buckboard had turned toward the river road and was out of hearing.

I recommend that we establish a permanent guard post at the county line bridge on the gap road. If Blanton is bringing wagons through at night, he must use that route, as there is no other way over the mountain that will support a loaded vehicle.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-E
PERSONAL DIARY OF T. J. VANCE
Entry: October 19, 1921 — Midnight

The fog has come down so thick that I cannot see the light on the tipple from my porch. It smells of the old slack-heaps—that slow, sour burn that has been smoldering in the bottom of the hollow since the strike of '14. You can’t put it out with water; it just digs deeper into the mountain, eating the coal from the inside out until the ground sinks under your feet and the trees tilt over like drunken men.

Carter is too smart for his own good. He thinks this county is like the Kanawha field, where you can run a man out of town by showing him a warrant signed by a coal-company judge. He doesn't know that half the deputies we pay would shoot him for his shoes if they met him on the ridge after dark and didn't know his name.

I looked at his ledger report this evening. He has Arthur Pender marked down as a "red." Pender isn't a red. He’s just a man whose grandfather owned three hundred acres of this valley when there was nothing here but deer and wild turkeys. He sold that land to the Philadelphia lawyers for fifty cents an acre and a barrel of flour, and now his boys have to ask permission from a twenty-year-old clerk to cut a stick of firewood from the hillside where their own mother is buried. That doesn't make a man a socialist; it just makes him mad.

But Carter doesn't understand the difference between a man who wants his land back and a man who wants to run the world from a committee room in Chicago. He sees everything through those little blue columns in his ledger. To him, a human soul is just a balance sheet that hasn't been balanced yet.

I went down to the freight shed at ten o'clock to check the three crates that came in on the noon train. They’re sitting under a pile of damp grain sacks in the back corner of locker B. I unlocked the largest one with a crowbar.

They aren't Winchester shotguns. They’re Lewis machine guns, model 1917, chambered for the British .303 cartridge. They still have the cosmoline on the cooling jackets and the inspection tags from the Birmingham small arms factory. There are six drum magazines in each box, along with two thousand rounds of ammunition in zinc-lined cases.

The directors in Philadelphia aren't preparing for a strike. They’re preparing for a war.

I didn't tell Carter about the Lewis guns. He has enough to do with his Bible salesman and his ledger balances. If he knew we had those guns in the shed, he’d have them mounted on the roof of the company store before the weekend, and then we’d have three hundred men from the Clover Fork side coming down the mountain with their deer rifles to see what kind of toys the company has bought them.

I locked the crate back up and threw the key in the creek behind the pump house. If we need those guns, we can break the locks with an axe. If we don't need them, they’re better off in the dark where the damp can get to the springs.

I heard a shot about an hour ago from the direction of the old incline. Just one. It had the sharp, high crack of a thirty-thirty, not the heavy thud of a deputy’s Winchester. I waited for twenty minutes, but there was no answer.

The telegraph key in the office has been quiet since nine o'clock. The depot agent says the lines are down between here and Pineville. He thinks a tree fell across the wires during the windstorm at eight, but I know the men who live on the ridge. They don't wait for trees to fall when they want to have a private conversation. They use a pair of fencing pliers and a length of telephone wire to shunt the current into the ground.

We are cut off from the world tonight. Just us, the fog, and three hundred feet of black shale above our heads.

DOCUMENT NO. 02-F
INTERCEPTED POSTAL DISPATCH (COPY)
Confiscated by Harlan County Sheriff’s Patrol
Intercept Location: Mail Pouch, Evarts, Kentucky
Date: October 20, 1921 — 7:00 AM

Dear Mary,

The company has got a new man in the office. He has got a black hat and a way of looking at you like he knows what you had for breakfast before you even open your kettle. He’s been asking after Sam Hall and the boys at Number Four, wanting to know if we have been getting our mail from the Evarts box or if we have been sending the boys down to the depot at Pineville.

Don't write me no more letters to the company post office. If you have to send word, give the paper to the boy who drives the milk wagon from the dairy farm at Wallins Creek. He is a cousin of the Hensleys and he won't let the deputies see what he’s got in his pockets.

The work is getting very hard. The coal is low—not more than twenty-eight inches in the room where I am loading—and the water is up to our knees because the pump has been broken since Tuesday. The boss says they won't fix the pump until we get our tonnage up to fifty tons a day, but we can't load no fifty tons when we spend half our time bailing the water out with our coal buckets so we can see where the slate is cracked.

A man come through the house yesterday with some little books about the Lord. He seemed like a nice fellow, but he didn't stay long because the deputies was watching him from the road. He left a paper that says we have got a right to have our own man weigh the coal, and that the company is stealing five hundred pounds from every car because they are using the big scales that have been doctored with a lead weight under the platform.

I don't know if it’s true, but Sam Hall says the scale has got a bad swing to it when the loaded cars hit the iron. He told the superintendent about it on Monday, and the superintendent told him if he didn't like the scale he could go back to the timber woods and cut ties for sixty cents a day.

Keep the children in the house after dark, Mary. The deputies are riding the road with their headlights off, and they have been shooting at the hogs that run loose in the brush. They say they are looking for union men, but they look to me like they are just looking for something to kill.

I will send you some money on Saturday if the paymaster doesn't hold our envelopes again.

Your loving husband,
John

DOCUMENT NO. 02-G
NIGHT WATCHMAN’S LOG — BLACK MOUNTAIN TIPPLE
Entry by: S. G. Kroll, Guard #4
Shift: 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, October 19–20, 1921

7:00 PM — Took position in the rocks above the drum-house as directed by Mr. Carter. The weather was extremely poor, with a cold, heavy fog rolling in from the north ridge. Visibility was limited to approximately twenty yards.

8:30 PM — Observed a single individual walking along the old timber slide from the direction of the county road. The individual was wearing a dark overcoat and carrying a lantern that had been shielded with a dark cloth so that it cast only a narrow beam of light on the ground directly in front of his feet. He stopped near the old drum-house and waited.

8:45 PM — A second individual approached from the direction of the Number Three drift mouth. I recognized him by his walk and his stature as Sam Hall, the checkweighman. He did not carry a light.

9:02 PM — The two individuals began speaking near the remains of the old engine house. Due to the wind and the roar of the creek below, I was unable to hear their conversation, but I observed the first individual (whom I believe to be the Bible salesman, Thorne) hand a small, flat package to Hall. Hall took the package and placed it inside his shirt coat.

9:15 PM — While the two men were still speaking, I observed a movement in the brush about thirty yards to their left. It appeared to be a third individual, crouching low and moving toward them. I raised my rifle and attempted to sight through the telescope, but the fog was too thick to obtain a clear outline.

9:18 PM — A shot was fired from the brush. The bullet struck the iron drum of the old engine house with a loud clang, approximately three feet from where the two men were standing.

9:19 PM — Both individuals immediately fled. Hall ran toward the Number Three drift mouth, while the first man ran down the old timber slide toward the county road. I did not fire my weapon, as I could not distinguish either man from the shadows, and my instructions were to observe only.

9:45 PM — Searched the area where the shot was fired. Found one empty brass casing, caliber .30-30, Winchester make. The casing was warm to the touch, indicating it had been fired within the last half hour. The ground was too rocky to show footprints, but a branch of a laurel bush had been recently broken at a height of approximately four feet from the ground.

11:30 PM — Returned to the tipple office to report to Mr. Vance. Found him absent. Left this record on his desk.

The fog did not lift with the morning sun. It remained in the gut of the hollow, turning the yellow pine of the company store to a sodden, dark gray and slicking the iron rails of the siding with a grease of water and coal soot.

When Carter walked out of his office at eight o'clock, he found Vance sitting on the steps of the commissary, his hat pulled down over his eyes and his long legs stretched out into the mud of the road. Vance was scraping the dirt from his boot heel with a pocketknife, his movements slow and deliberate as if he had all the time in the world.

"Your man Kroll is a fool," Carter said, stopping on the second step. His bowler hat was dry, and his wool coat was brushed clean of cinders. "He had them both in his sights and he let them walk."

"He didn't have them in his sights," Vance said without looking up from his boot. "He had them in the fog. There's a difference. If he’d shot Sam Hall last night, you’d have twenty men down at the scale house this morning with their pockets full of dynamite. Instead, we have Sam Hall walking around with a package in his shirt and a bad case of the shakes. That’s better for us, Carter."

"What was in the package?"

"Don't know," Vance said, folding his knife with a click. "But whatever it was, it didn't come from the Bible society. The depot agent told me this morning that the mail pouch from Evarts was short two packages of registered print paper when the train came through at midnight. The carrier said he was stopped by two men near the bridge who told him they were looking for a stray cow. They didn't take the mail bag, but they had him open the locker under the wagon seat while they held his horse by the bit."

"Who were the men?"

"He didn't see their faces," Vance said, standing up and stretching his arms. "But he said one of them smelled of rye whiskey and had a bad limp. Old man Blanton’s got a limp, and he’s been buying his rye by the gallon from the moonshiners over on Bloody Creek since the state went dry."

Carter reached into his pocket and pulled out his black notebook. He flipped to a clean page and wrote down three words in his small, mechanical shorthand.

"The wagon will come through tonight," the detective said. "The deputy at the county line is Skidmore. He’s a cousin of the Penders, but he likes the look of a five-dollar gold piece more than he likes his family. I’ve already spoken to him. He’ll drop the chain when the wagon with the red lantern comes near, but he’ll have four of our men sitting in the brush behind him. When the wagon drops its wheels in the creek bed, we’ll take the team, the driver, and whatever is under the pine boards."

"And the Deacon?" Vance asked.

"He’ll be waiting at the church house at Clover Fork," Carter said. "He’s got a key to the cellar door that he got from the preacher’s wife. He thinks he’s going to spend tomorrow morning unpacking twenty Springfield rifles and six thousand rounds of ammunition. Instead, he’s going to spend it in the jail house at Harlan with a federal marshal sitting on his chest."

Vance looked down the road toward the company store. A group of women was standing by the porch, their shawls pulled tight around their heads against the damp wind. They were not talking; they were just waiting for the store to open so they could exchange their paper scrip for five pounds of meal and a quart of molasses.

"You've got a lot of plans, Carter," Vance said, his voice quiet. "But you don't know this mountain. When you start pulling on one wire, you don't always know what's tied to the other end of it. Sometimes you think you're pulling a rabbit out of a hole, and you find out you've got a bear by the tail."

"The bear is already in the trap, Mr. Vance," the detective said, and his mouth twitched into that cold, thin smile that had no warmth in it. "We just have to turn the screw until the iron bites."