“He’s out there,” I told the club proudly. “He’s in Ludlow workin for the union. He even met Mother Jones and Eugene V. Debs.”

“Hot damn!” Isom said. “So my banjer picker’s all right.”

“He’s all right so far,” I agreed. “This here letter is near two weeks old.”

I read the letter out loud. Rondal’s last words were, “You better get ready. This is coming your way some day.” When I finished reading, my fingers trembled.

We followed the news from Colorado every day, and featured it on the front page of the Free Press. When the miners took Trinidad, we threw a party. Isom, drunk, sent a telegram to Mr. Felts of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, telling him “what a fine job your gun thugs is doing stop keep up the good work stop John D. Rockefeller.” But we sobered up considerable when word come out of Ludlow. The gun thugs and the U.S. Army attacked the tent colony there, shot people, set tents on fire and burnt women and children to death.

We fretted about Rondal, but they was nothing we could do. It was after the strike failed that another letter come and we knew he was safe. He was downhearted, he wrote, he was going to Chicago to see the city of Haymarket and Pullman, of Jane Addams and Altgeld and Clarence Darrow. We wasn’t to fret, he said. He had in mind to watch the Chicago White Sox and stay out of trouble.

“He wouldnt go to school in Huntington because he didnt want to go far away,” I said, “and now he’s in Chicago. What’s goin to happen to that boy?”

“He aint a boy no more,” Doc said gently. “He must be twenty-four by now. And he always had a good head on his shoulders. You see if he dont come back.”

I knew Doc was right. These mountains has got a powerful pull. They let a man wander so far and then they yank him back like a fish on a line. I knew Rondal would sleep uneasy as long as he was away, and the hills would bring him home.

The Annadel Political and Social Club began to talk less and less about the world outside and more about Justice County. We all knew we had to do something, but we disagreed on how to do it.

Ermel was deep into the Democrat party. He was connected with every bootlegger and roadhouse owner in the county. Me and Doc wasn’t too happy about it, and not only because we was socialist. It just seemed to us like a bootlegger wouldn’t have no principles. The Republicans got their votes when the operators looked over the shoulders of the miners in the voting booths. Ermel’s crowd took in everybody else by promising a school board job for cousin Myrtle or threatening a busted still for brother Otis, or buying votes. Nobody never talked about getting back the land. It was just grab this and grab that.