Free Hardcastle by John Yount

was about to head over this way and try my hand at farmin.” Regus turned his head and spat out the window again and raised his eyebrows. “Turned out a mine guard had just been killed down to Elkin, and Royce got me the promise of his job. Royce was a-workin himself as a mine foreman for Consolidated Coal Company in Jenkins, last I heard. Lost all his holdings. You see how it is then,” he said, tucking the lump of the cigar into his cheek and looking at Music; “I’m about as new to Switch County as you be. Hell, what with me and Momma,” he said and laughed, “you may have more friends here than I do.”
    Just at that moment they passed Regus’s homestead. Clothes fluttered from the clothesline which ran from the corner of the house to an old, blasted walnut tree, and Ella Bone straightened from a galvanized tub beneath the line to shake out a dress. When Regus saw her, he beeped the horn and he and Music waved. She turned and shaded her eyes with her hand to look after them, but didn’t wave back. “Momma did take to you,” Regus said, “but there’s one thing that tends to worry me about all this here, and that’s how we figure to arm ye.” He looked at Music and raised his brows and grinned. “I don’t reckon you got a pistol on ye I don’t know about?” he said.
    “Never carried one,” Music said, and blushing, he added, “I never even fired one.”
    “Hmm,” Regus said and rolled the lump of the cigar from one cheek to the other and back again, “well, we’ll have to sort something out.”
    “I always hunted a lot,” Music said, “but it was with my daddy’s old hog rifle, a muzzleloader, don’t you know?” Suddenly he wondered what he was doing hiring on as a mine guard, a deputy sheriff, for Christ’s sake? He knew nothing about Switch County and coal mining, about guarding property against unionizers and Reds. How the hell was he supposed to recognize a unionizer if he saw one? What did he want with a job that would make everybody his enemy? He was suddenly homesick. He felt a longing simply to be on his way home, or anywhere, to have only the problems of finding shelter, a little something to eat, a freight to jump.
    “You ever bark a squirrel with it?”
    “No,” Music said, “never did.” Hell, Music thought, hold on a minute and let me think.
    “Ever shoot any deer with it?” Regus asked.
    “Four,” Music said.
    “Any wild turkey?”
    “A few,” Music said.
    “Ain’t much game around here no more,” Regus said. “Most of it’s been killed off and put in the pot.”
    The valley opened out a little to Elkin: the strings of shacks on the right; the commissary, movie house, depot, and school on the left; and across the river, the tipple, powerhouse, gobpile, the empty coal cars parked on the siding.
    “We’ll see can we catch Bert Maloney without us having to get in that damned rathole mine,” Regus said. “Yonder’s his coupe down to the powerhouse.”
    Regus turned left just before the commissary and crossed the plank bridge over the river. Under the Model T the planks clattered against the strippers like a volley of pistol shots. Music could get no space to think, and there was a giddy feeling in his stomach, as though he were on a swing in the middle of its downward arc.
    Just as they pulled up beside the green Chevrolet coupe, the mine foreman stepped out of the powerhouse door. He was about Music’s height, but heavier-set. He wore broad green suspenders over a relatively clean khaki shirt, and upon his head was a miner’s cap with a carbide lamp clipped to it. Regus got out and walked around the front of the truck. “Bert, I’d like ye to meet the new mine guard,” he said. “This here’s Mr. Bill Music.”
    Music stepped down from the cab of the truck and stuck out his hand.
    “Hydee,” the mine foreman said and gripped it briefly. “I’ll hafta let Regus show you about and fill you in,” he said in a high, almost feminine voice. “We’re