Rondal organized the men into small bands who took turns laying out on the hillside and firing at the scabs as they went to work. Some of the strikebreakers, especially the Negroes, deserted. They hadn’t been told that a strike was going on. Most of them had nothing to go back to, so they joined us in the tents.

Other strikebreakers stayed and tried to work. They were immigrants from the cities who believed they would make their fortunes digging coal, or they were farm boys from Kentucky. Oh, my Kentucky. Their families would be the poor ones, and they would have heard there was money in the mines. They didn’t know about how the companies had taken the land, for it hadn’t happened to them yet. They didn’t know about the union and they didn’t like being told they couldn’t work. They stayed on.

Albion lay on his cot with his long arms dangling over the side. He had just returned from shooting at scabs for the first time.

“They may have been Thornsberrys and Whitts and Slones out there,” he said.

I tried to feel hard about them. “They claim they’re just feeding their families,” I said. “They think we aint got to eat? They’ll break the strike. They’ll sink themselves and us along with them.”

“I fired over their heads,” he said. “I kicked up the dirt in front of them. Everyone else was doing the same. You know how well our boys shoot. But they werent a scab kilt, only one hit in the arm. Sam Gore said hit werent like shooting at gun thugs. These fellers is just ignorant. Let them work a while and they’ll learn. Anyway, I dont think I could never shoot one.”

I knew Albion would never even shoot a gun thug. When I said once that gun thugs deserved to get shot, he answered that if we got what we deserved, God would mash us all flat like a passel of bugs.

He was tired all the time and he coughed a lot. He developed the cough in the mines and sometimes he spit up black phlegm. His cough worsened after we moved into the tents. Although the days were warm, the tents were wet with dew in the mornings. I fretted about the consumption. Doc Booker offered to let us move into his house, but Albion wouldn’t hear of it. We must suffer what everyone else suffered, he insisted. We were all in this together.