Word went out on August 22. At dawn of the next day, Rondal took me by Dr. Booker’s little red brick house with the white porch posts. Dr. Booker carried his black bag and a roll of blankets. He wore his old gray suit and wide-brimmed hat and a red bandana knotted around his neck instead of a tie.

“Where’s the rest of your uniform?” He pointed at my overalls and plaid shirt.

“Uniform’s in my bedroll. I didnt want to git it dirty yet.”

“She’s got on her redneck uniform,” Rondal said. He pulled a bandana from his back pocket with a flourish. “I even got her one of these here.”

He tied it around my neck, touched my earlobe and then my chin.

“Aint she one hell of a brave girl?” he said.

“I always did think it,” Dr. Booker replied.

We walked with our bundles down Hale Street. The streets were sticky from a recent rain. On the sidewalk, gray pigeons with pink bills poked at a mound of shattered peanut shells. The downtown buildings closed in over our heads, like mountains near the head of a holler. We paid the toll and walked up the long curve of the bridge. An early morning streetcar clattered by. Rondal waved his bandana at the moustachioed conductor, who tipped his hat.

“You know we got to win,” Dr. Booker said. “You know what will happen if we dont.”

Rondal took my hand. “Be a relief to have it done with, one way or the other.”

We took the train to Marmet, the jumping-off point for the road to the southwest. At Marmet thousands of armed men milled around outside the depot. Most were clad in overalls, but some wore faded military uniforms. Each man sported a red bandana tied jauntily about his neck. Some were already armed. One group of rawboned mountain men carried long rifles that Rondal said dated back to the Revolutionary War, and I even saw a Greek with a curved sword. A Ukrainian man wore a faded painting of St. Vladimir on his back, sewn there by his wife as a talisman of good luck. Welshmen, camped along the railroad track, sang of building Jerusalem among dark satanic mills. Trains kept arriving with men standing in the aisles, and trolley cars from Charleston so full that passengers hung outside on the steps. They gathered around the brightly hued banners of their union locals, formed companies in the main street of the town and marched off. Some were Justice County men who had escaped to safety, but most of them were union miners from the Kanawha and New River coalfields. Rondal left us at the station and we waited until Talcott came from the ferry with three hundred Point Lick men.

Rondal returned soon with a big grin on his face.

“We’re set up at the mouth of the creek,” he reported. “They’re checking passwords and handing out guns. They even sent two machine guns through that they stole from company stores. And there’s ammunition and medical supplies waiting in Danville. I got to check when we git there.”