among the men who are all risking their lives every minute of every working day, even as her husband risked his.  Dispossess proceedings do not come under the supervision of Harvey Trueman, but he has ever been observant.  A blind man may not remain in ignorance of the human suffering in the coal regions of Pennsylvania.  Men in the general offices of the Paradise Coal Company see only the papers and receive the returns.  They ask not “Who put the widow of our latest victim in the street?”

The sheriff sees to the rest.  All hail to the Sheriff of Luzerne!  But Harvey Trueman knows of these things.  He has a mind that pierces the thin walls of the miners’ cabins and sees beyond the papers placed in the sheriff’s hands.

“I suppose she will be hungry for three or four days,” he tells himself, “except for the crusts the other women give her.  But in a month she will be married again.  If she had recovered a thousand dollars damages for the life of her husband, one of the other miners would have had it in a week.”

He picks up the check and glances at it for the third time.  Then he folds it and places it in his pocketbook.

“I am paid the thousand dollars,” he continues, “for keeping her from getting it—­for two months of my life spent in throwing up legal barricades to prevent the miners from approaching too near to the coffers of the Paradise Coal Company.  If the Magyar’s widow had collected damages for her husband’s death, there would be twenty more suits filed in a fortnight.”

And so he appeases his conscience.  He tries to be flippant, as he has seen the officers of the great corporation flippant about such matters, but in spite of himself his heartstrings tighten.  Harvey Trueman is acting a lie, and his heart knows it, though his brain has not yet found it out.

The office door swings open.  A man of fifty-five enters—­a short man with a stubby red beard, a round face, and hair well sprinkled with gray.  He is dressed in a gray cutaway business suit and wears a silk hat.  His neckscarf is of English make, his collar is of the thickest linen and neatest pattern, and his general appearance that of the aristocratic business man whose evenings in a provincial city are spent at a club, and in the metropolis at the opera.

It is Gorman Purdy.  Trueman’s fondest hope—­next to the one that at some distant day, say ten or fifteen years in the future, he may sit in the United States Senate—­is that this man’s daughter, Ethel Purdy, renowned in more than one city for her beauty, may become his wife.  Indeed, the hope of the Senate and of Ethel go hand in hand.  With either, he would not know what to do without the other, and without the one he would not want the other.

“Trueman, we are going to have trouble with the men.”  Purdy draws a chair up to Trueman’s desk.

“I’ve just been talking over the telephone to the mine boss at Harleigh.  The men there and at Hazleton hold a meeting to-night to decide whether or not they will strike in sympathy with the Carbon County miners, because of the shut-down.