But for all that a number have been indicted for offenses ranging from common assault to murder. In every case, however, bail has been ready and it is rare that charges against them have been brought to trial. Some of the assault cases in which they have figured have been of great brutality, yet rarely has any serious trouble resulted for the guards. They go about their work in a purely impersonal way. If a worker becomes too inquisitive, if he shows too much independence, or complains too much about his condition, he is beaten up some night as he passes under a coal tipple, but the man who does the beating has no feeling against him personally; it is simply a matter of business to him.
Just what the services of the guards cost the coal companies is difficult to learn. The companies contract with the Baldwin-Felts agency for them and the sum they pay is kept a secret. It is generally understood that the guards get about $5 a day, or between $100 and $125 a month. A man in the mines who knows one of them intimately told me he "picked up his gun" for $105 a month. When a man joins the Baldwins he "picks up his gun," and that stamps him forevermore with his former associates if they were of the laboring class as an enemy and a man who has turned his back on his class and his kind.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of the United Mine Workers' Journal_
Unless the miners are beaten in this fight, and utterly and completely beaten, there will never be a settlement of the difficulty here until the mine guards are driven from the region. "The mine guards must go," is the slogan of the striking miner everywhere. His going is of more importance than an increase in pay. There will be no lasting peace in the region until they are gone. All over the state when the situation in the Kanawha valley comes up for discussion you are told that the mine guards are at the bottom of the trouble. They are the Ishmaelites of the coal regions for their hands are supposed to be against every miner, and every miner's hand is raised against them. They go about in constant peril--they are paid to face danger and they face it all the time. But they are afraid, for they never know when they may get a charge of buckshot or a bullet from an old Springfield army rifle that will make a hole in a man's body big enough for you to put your fist in. A number of guards have been killed since the trouble began, and it is generally understood that some of these were buried by their fellows and nothing said about it, there being a disposition down in the mines not to let the other side know when either side scores and gets a man.