"Шервуд Андерсен. Марширующие люди (engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

to New York or Philadelphia, looked out of the car windows and seeing
the poor little houses scattered along the hillside thought of books
they had read of life in hovels in the old world. In chair-cars men
and women leaned back and closed their eyes. They yawned and wished
the journey would come to an end. If they thought of the town at all
they regretted it mildly and passed it off as a necessity of modern
life.

The houses on the hillside and the stores along Main Street belonged
to the mining company. In its turn the mining company belonged to the
officials of the railroad. The manager of the mine had a brother who
was division superintendent. It was the mine manager who had stood by
the door of the mine when Cracked McGregor went to his death. He lived
in a city some thirty miles away, and went there in the evening on the
train. With him went the clerks and even the stenographers from the
offices of the mine. After five o'clock in the afternoon no white
collars were to be seen upon the streets of Coal Creek.

In the town men lived like brutes. Dumb with toil they drank greedily
in the saloon on Main Street and went home to beat their wives. Among
them a constant low muttering went on. They felt the injustice of
their lot but could not voice it logically and when they thought of
the men who owned the mine they swore dumbly, using vile oaths even in
their thoughts. Occasionally a strike broke out and Barney Butterlips,
a thin little man with a cork leg, stood on a box and made speeches
regarding the coming brotherhood of man. Once a troop of cavalry was
unloaded from the cars and with a battery paraded the main street. The
battery was made up of several men in brown uniforms. They set up a
Gatling gun at the end of the street and the strike subsided.

An Italian who lived in a house on the hillside cultivated a garden.
His place was the one beauty spot in the valley. With a wheelbarrow he
brought earth from the woods at the top of the hill and on Sunday he
could be seen going back and forth and whistling merrily. In the
winter he sat in his house making a drawing on a bit of paper. In the
spring he took the drawing, and by it planted his garden, utilising
every inch of his ground. When a strike came on he was told by the
mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He
thought of the garden and the work he had done and went back to his
routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the
hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined
the striking miners.

In a little one-room shack on the hill lived an old woman. She lived
alone and was vilely dirty. In her house she had old broken chairs and
tables picked up about town and piled in such profusion that she could
scarcely move about. On warm days she sat in the sun before the shack
chewing on a stick that had been dipped in tobacco. Miners coming up
the hill dumped bits of bread and meat-ends out of their dinner-pails
into a box nailed to a tree by the road. These the old woman collected