for a beast of burden, by the richest coal corporation on earth. Why?
Because her abject misery is a lesson too graphic in its horrible
details to be constantly before the miners. Allowed to remain there, the
widow will breed trouble 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 t