Chapter Four
Invasive, Foreign Parasites

Eastenes feels his body thrown from the back of the van, landing 
in hard dirt. Wind whistles under the bag that covers his face. 
He's pulled to his feet and is pushed forward by something jabbing 
into his back. He hears dry grass crunch beneath his feet until a 
gruff voice calls out:

"That's far enough."

Eastenes stops; behind him comes the *snik* of a pocketknife 
opening. His blood runs cold for a second, and then he feels the 
rope binding his hands come loose. He lifts his arms and removes 
the bag from his head. He blinks away harsh sunlight, until he 
sees Ortega, Bell, and Jacques next to him, just as confused. 
Eastenes spins around, first taking in the grassland extending far 
to the horizon, and then the uniformed men with guns in front of 
him. The shortest and squattest of the armed men, and the one with 
the shiniest badge, holds his revolver out at hip-height. The gun 
seems tiny in his fat hands. 

Bell squints through his glasses and smiles in recognition at the 
lawman. "Whaddaya know, Sheriff Ben Robinson! How's the gout?"

"You're washed up, Adam," says the Sheriff.

Eastenes' eyes turn westward, and stares, mouth-open at the 
shimmering white shapes just above the horizon line. "Are those... 
are those the Rockies? How far way have you taken us?"

Robinson pushes his revolver into his holster, and raises a big, 
round finger to the east. "Kansas is a three-hour's walk that-a-
way. I suggest you get moving."

Eastenes looks over at Bell with eyes full of shock. "Bell, what's 
going on?"

"We've been *white capped*, John," says Bell, pointing at the 
distant, snow-tipped summits. "A free trip to the state line, 
courtesy of our local law enforcement."

Sheriff Robinson grunts. "And a free trip to jail if you come 
back."

Ortega kicks up a cloud of dirt. "*Hijas de Putas*", you kidnap us 
from our families!"

"Shut up!" snaps Robinson. "I won't let a bunch of socialist, 
anarchist, communist agitators threaten the safety of Weld County. 
Go ahead, Bell, call it tyranny, call it a violation of your 
rights. If you ask me, the only time I hear someone invoke their 
'rights' is when I'm slappin' the cuffs on 'em."

Bell ignores the bait. "Are you familiar with the Hastings Mine, 
Sheriff?"

"What of it?" asks Robinson.

"Ten years ago," says Bell, "the Hastings Mine, near Ludlow, had 
to blow the three whistles. One hundred and twenty-one men were 
killed in a single explosion. Basic safety regulations, the kind 
most other mining districts in the country see as routine, would 
have prevented it."

Sheriff Robinson leans back and raises an eyebrow and grin for his 
deputies; they smirk back.

"Hey!" yells Eastenes, "I pray every night I'll come back to my 
wife and little ones in one piece, and they do the same for me. 
But I'm starting to think that just doing my job shouldn't require 
the Lord's constant oversight!"

"That's all we're asking for," says Bell. "Not champagne and 
caviar in our lunch buckets, just some peace of mind, a living 
wage, and a union to bring our concerns to the companies."

"You know what I see?" growls Robinson. "Four men with no good 
English, without two pennies to rub together, who want nothing 
more than to drink, gamble, whore, and fill the streets with your 
screaming brats. And on top of all that, you want us to foot the 
bill for ya!" The Sheriff snots and spits, and a long strand of 
snot dangles from a stalk of prairie grass. "Socialists!" he 
hollers. "Malcontents! *Provo-cators!*"

Bell rubs his glasses on his shirt and says, "Actually, Sheriff, 
it's *provocateurs*--"

The Sheriff balls his hands into fists. "Bell, if I hear one more 
word come outta that mouth..."

"Now wait just a minute!" says Jacques. "You think we left our 
lives and lands behind because we hate America? One of my buddies, 
Mike Vidovitch, he's sure a foreigner, but in the Great War, he 
signed up to fight the Kaiser before anyone else in Erie! And my 
big brother Frank, he fought in the war, too!"

The Sheriff laughs. "Your brother fought in the Great War, ha! 
Probably some plea deal to avoid jail for a drunken brawl!"

Jacques raises a fist, French curses streaming from his mouth. In 
an instant, the deputies have their hands on their holsters. Bell, 
old but fast for his age, leaps between the factions, one hand 
extended to either side. 

"Enough!" shouts the Wobbly. "They're not worth it, Jay-coo. I'm 
sorry, Sheriff, my French comrade forgets the Wobblies are a non-
violent union. We fight with ideas and reason. You might try it 
sometime, Sheriff."

"You know what I call that?" says the Sheriff, "*Caca... de 
vaca!*"

*   *   *

At that very moment, two hundred miles away in Boulder, at the 
foot of the Rockies, a man sits in front of a typewriter, chomping 
on a cigar. His fingers beat a staccato rhythm on the typewriter, 
and his eyes gleam seeing his own words struck onto the paper.

The door opens, and Lucius Carver Paddock, editor-in-chief of the 
*Boulder Daily Camera*, doesn't even look up from his writing.

"Yes?"

"Mister Paddock," says the secretary, "you have a phone call from 
CF&I."

Paddock stops typing. As he thinks, his teeth work the cigar from 
one side of his mouth to the other.

"Tell them I'm very busy. When he insists a second time, send it 
through to my office." Paddock yanks a finished page away from the 
typewriter platen, and rolls in a fresh sheet.

A half-minute later, Paddock's office phone rings, and he picks up 
the receiver. 
"*Boulder Daily Camera*, editor speaking."

"Good morning, Mister Paddock."

Paddock recognizes the voice on the other end: razor-sharp, cool, 
and as measured as druggist's medicine. "Well if it isn't Mister 
Welburn, Rockefeller's right-hand man in the Pueblo-land!"

"That's *Wel-born*, Mister Paddock."

"My mistake," says Paddock. "How goes things in the coal trade, 
sir?"

On the other end of the telephone, Jesse Welborn takes a sip of 
whiskey. He looks out on the concrete canyons of Denver from his 
office in the nine-story Boston Building.

"Let me see..." says Welborn, "we've got twelve thousand miners on 
strike, and counting, various divisions of management in despair, 
and stockholders wanting my head, so how do you think it's going?"

Back in Boulder, Paddock pulls the cigar out of his mouth. "I 
think this strike is outrageous! Seditious! Subversive! 
Treasonous! And it's *rude*, too!"

"Mister Paddock," says Welborn, "I've been asked by Mister 
Rockefeller himself to rectify this... situation. I speak with the 
Governor this afternoon, but we need to be sure that we can count 
on the regional press. What do you say to a new ad campaign in the 
*Camera*, about the dangers posed by radical foreign agents to the 
state's coal industry? Daily, *full-page* ads, of course."

Paddock leans back in his chair, computing the numbers in his 
head. "Daily, full page ads, you say?" He'd known this strike was 
getting serious, and now the mine companies were calling his 
number.

The editor leans forward again. "Mister Welborn, I always 
appreciate the support of our faithful advertisers, but I'm afraid 
your money's no good here. You see, I run radical foreign agents 
out of town for free. These pathetic picketers pose a pernicious 
peril to our very way of life. The full force of my editorial 
section will be wielded against these invasive, foreign parasites, 
and this rebellion they call a *strike*."

Back in Denver, Welborn takes another sip of whiskey. His faith in 
an impartial press, conscious of industry concerns, has not been 
misplaced.

"Much obliged, Mister Paddock," says Welborn. "I salute a fellow 
captain of industry." He puts the receiver back on its hook, 
pleased to have saved his stockholders the expense of buying up a 
newspaper. 

Ten minutes later, Welborn is in his Packard limousine, headed for 
the State Capitol. *What a complete and utter mess this has been*, 
he thinks.

Like untold multitudes, Jesse Welborn owes his job to John D. 
Rockefeller, a name known to every man, woman, and child on the 
continent. Rockefeller's life had leapt straight out of a Horatio 
Alger novel: born of modest means to an absent, con-artist father 
and a pious mother in the obscurities of New England, Rockefeller 
had built his company, Standard Oil into the largest on Earth. 
Standard Oil, with its network of wells and refineries, commanded 
a ninety-percent market share for oil, and the modern age ran on 
oil. His fortune puts kings and rajas to shame, commanding a power 
that made presidents and premiers look like children playing 
checkers. 

The key to Rockefeller's success was his talent for buying out a 
failing company and introducing it to the concept of efficiency. 
This is what he had done long ago for a little outfit called CF&I: 
Colorado Fuel & Iron. Rockefeller had made CF&I efficient for the 
steel-making business.

CF&I's main product was steel; its steel mill in Pueblo was the 
largest west of the Mississippi. Steelmaking requires immense 
heat, only a purified form of coal known as *coke* burned hot 
enough. CF&I owned the ovens necessary to turn coal into coke, and 
the surrounding town of Cokedale, where the coke-oven laborers 
lived. The coal to make coke came from CF&I's mines, with laborers 
who worked at towns CF&I owned, paid with CF&I scrip that could 
only be used at CF&I stores. True, CF&I's business was steel, but 
to make it they owned half of the coal mines in Colorado (or 52%%, 
Welborn would clarify).

Steelmaking also requires limestone, supplied by CF&I's limestone 
quarries. Vast quantities of water were required to cool the 
molten metal. This water was obtained from a network of lakes and 
reservoirs in CF&I's portfolio. With the exception of a single 
ditch in the San Luis Valley, Colorado Fuel & Iron had first dibs 
on every drop of water that fell from the sky onto Colorado land. 

And yet, for their total dominance of industry in the state, CF&I 
was merely a tiny piece of an even bigger corporate empire. The 
purpose of all this steelmaking was to make railroad ties for the 
railroads Rockefeller owned, to ship his oil from ocean to ocean, 
from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes of the north. to 
Welborn, CF&I, in its marvelous complexity, resembled a fine Swiss 
clock. It was efficient and beautiful, in the way the arrangements 
of symphony or the moves of a chess match are beautiful.

This is why it disgusts Welborn that this company, a company that 
employed one out of every ten working laborers in Colorado, was 
now placed in grave danger by some ragtag strikers.

Back in the Long Strike, CF&I had dealt with another union, the 
United Mine Workers. The UMW had fought five years to make the 
coal companies pay attention, and were bankrupted for it. The 
embarrassment of Ludlow, which had been on CF&I's ledger, had all 
but faded from the consumer's memory. Now, these moronic, madcap 
Wobblies had swept through and done more in a month than the UMW 
had in a decade.

Welborn had tried to work with the miners; Lord knows he'd tried. 
He was proud of CF&I's newspaper, the *Industrial Bulletin*, which 
communicated management's ideas to the workforce. For example, it 
help to lay out in a column that CF&I couldn't put in an eight-
hour work day unless US Steel in Pittsburgh did it first; simple 
economics. It had been Rockefeller's idea to create a company-
owned union; that had failed, and Welborn was blindsided by that 
small strike in 1919. Even sitting in the limousine, the thought 
of that humiliation spread scarlet across Welborn's face.

Welborn shares Rockefeller's dream to build a better world for his 
workers: Rockefeller workers who read Rockefeller newspapers, 
whose children went to Rockefeller schools, praying in Rockefeller 
churches. Vaccines for diseases that had scourged humanity for so 
long, funded and developed by Rockefeller foundations.

Now the Wobblies are threatening that dream. They seem to feel 
that progress and equality are not gifts from generous 
businessmen, but rights, guaranteed to everyone. He could not deny 
the feeling of being sucker-punched, once again, by the miners who 
owed so much to CF&I. Welborn believe in progress and equality; he 
believes that corporations are a force for good, *the* force for 
good. A corporation is a paternal, guiding force pushing humanity 
forward. Sometimes, a paternal force means a firm hand. 

Inside his office at the State Capitol, Governor Billy Adams 
stares out at the jumbled streets and trolley lines of Denver, and 
the distant mountains, towering high above man's small designs. 
His older brother, former Governor Alva Adams, had warned him that 
the job offers no rest. It was a nonstop sprint, one election to 
the next.

Adams hears the door click open behind him.

"Governor Adams," says that measured voice.

Adams turns around to Welborn. "Mister Welborn," says Adams, 
"please give Rockefeller my regards, but my office is not ready to 
make a statement."

"Governor," says Welborn, "the situation in the coal fields 
demands leadership."

Adams steps out from behind his desk. "When I was a private 
citizen, back in Alamosa, I handled all of my business matters 
discretely. If an employee took issue with me, or I with them, I 
didn't go running off to city council. I tried to act like a 
businessman, understand?"

"I'm afraid we're far past that now, Governor," says Welborn. 
"It's my employees, but they are your electorate. Are you going to 
tolerate your citizens chanting *bum work for bum pay*? Will you 
have them jeering at coworkers who cross the picket lines? Our 
stockholders expect more from the state's highest office."

"And what are these striker's demands?" asks Adams.

"They want a wage of seven and a half dollars."

"Good Lord!" says Adams. "Seven dollars an *hour*?"

"No, per day," says Welborn.

"Oh..." says Adams, "that's in keeping with inflation, I believe."

"That's not all, Governor. They want us, *us*, to pay for their 
safety, and say they want us to be *accountable* when we pay 
them."

"I would say it's in a company's best interest that their 
employees can work a shift without injury or death."

Welborn throws his arms up in the air. "Worst of all, they want to 
unionize!"

"Every other mining state in the Rockies is unionized," says 
Adams. He sits back in his chair, looking at Welborn contemplating 
the view from the window. "They found a way to make it work. 
Just... what is it you want from my office?"

Welborn's request carries across the office, blunt and acerbic. 
Adams bolts up.

"*Reactivate the Rangers*" shouts Adams. "The state militia? 
Mister Welborn, that is beyond the pale!"

Welborn steps away from the window. "Governor, the time for the 
Rangers has come again. If they cannot be used in a time of 
crisis, then when?"

Adams paces the room. "Welborn, these state militias, they never 
work out. Never. They are glorified gunmen, from Sand Creek to 
Ludlow. It's like trying to cook food with dynamite shavings, you 
just can't contain it!" Adams had heard stories from his ranching 
days of cowboys who had tried cooking with dynamite on long cattle 
drives. At least, he had heard about what was left of them. It 
astounds Adams how some men thought a lot of guns and TNT was the 
quick fix to any and all problems. How rarely that was the case.

Welborn smiles and opens his arms. "Governor, just last year, this 
state was run by a bunch of white-hooded lunatics, the Ku Klux 
Klan." He points at Adams. "You put an end to that. Where is that 
decisiveness now, when these Wobbly savages are banging at the 
gates like the Visigoths marching on Rome?"

Adams nods. "Yes, I ended the Klan's rule over our public offices. 
Good riddance. In doing so, I won the labor vote. When the Klan 
burned their crosses on someone's lawn for being foreign or 
Catholic, or both, a good many of those foreigners and Catholics 
were coal miners. The Klan may have seen them as inferior, or 
unworthy, and I have no doubt there are some bad fellas among 
them. Still, those who dig our coal, and mill our steel, should 
have just as much chance to be part of this nation as anybody 
else."

Welborn states back at the Governor in deep concentration. Out on 
the street below, they can hear the sound of a trolley releasing 
its air brake and begin its slow lumbering forward. They have time 
to hear it gather speed on Lincoln Avenue, clang its bell, and 
make its slow turn onto Colfax.

The steel tycoon looks square at the Governor. "Well, Governor, 
since you're such a fan of the 'labor vote', I will assume you are 
familiar with their hero, Leon Trotsky."

"Now you listen here..." says Adams.

"No," says Welborn, "*you* listen. I would then assume you have 
read the essay where Trotsky says 'If you cannot acquaint a man 
with reason, acquaint his head with the pavement.' I can see the 
window for reason is behind us now, Governor, so I will be as 
clear as I can:

"If I don't see some momentum on this strike matter, I will 
personally inform Mister Rockefeller in New York that the state of 
Colorado is in need of new management. When this strike goes into 
the winter, and the coal reserves are exhausted, and the unions in 
those other states are blockading the relief shipments, who do you 
think voters will hold responsible for letting them freeze to 
death? Make no mistake: Rockefeller's pockets are so deep, he 
could endorse an orangutan for Governor, and it would win in a 
landslide!"

Welborn heads for the door, opens it, and looks to Adams one more 
time. "Think about it." The door closes.

Adams slumps back into his chair and loosens his bolo tie. So that 
was the situation: let the strike continue, tempting anarchy, or 
reactivate the Rangers, which amounted to an endorsement of 
martial law. 

A harsh wind blows through Capitol Hill in Denver. The colder it 
gets, the more pressure they will be for a decision from the 
Governor's office. He remembers a line from a childhood history 
book: "These are the times that try men's souls."

*Paine*, thinks Adams, *it was Thomas Paine who said that. And 
look what the French did to* him, *when he stood up for his 
beliefs.*

Adams picks up the telephone receiver on his desk, and tells the 
Capitol's operator to ring the cabinet for an emergency meeting. 
He'd campaigned on the promise to tun the Governor's office like a 
business, with a tight budget and controlled expenses. When you 
run a business, Adams thinks to himself, they don't pay you to do 
nothing.