Jacob waved his hand to dismiss the servants. “I don’t imagine you came here for dinner,” he said, calmly buttering a roll.
“How can you sit there when the people you’ve killed are on that mountain?” Kane managed to get out.
“There I beg to differ with you. I have not killed them. The truth is, I have done everything in my power to keep them alive, but they seem to have a suicidal bent. Could I offer you some wine? This is a very good year.”
Kane’s mind was full of the sights and sounds of the last few days. His ears seemed to ring with the sound of women’s crying, and he wasn’t aware of it, but he hadn’t eaten in nearly two days. Now, the smell of the food, the cleanliness of the room, the quiet, all went together to make him sway on his feet.
Jacob stood, poured a glass of wine and, as he pulled out a chair for Kane, he set the glass before him. Kane didn’t notice that Jacob’s hand was trembling as he held the wine.
“Is it very bad?” Jacob asked, as he walked to a sideboard and removed a plate, which he began filling.
Kane didn’t answer as he sat in the chair, looking at the wine. “Why?” he whispered after a moment. “How could you kill them? What is worth the death of those people? Why couldn’t you have been satisfied with taking all the money that was left to me? Why do you have to have more? There are other ways of making it.”
Jacob put a full plate of food in front of Kane, but the younger man didn’t touch it. “I was twenty-four when you were born, and all my life I had thought that I was the owner of what I’d grown up with. I loved the man I thought was my father . . . and I thought that he cared for me.”
Jacob straightened his shoulders. “At that age, one tends to be idealistic. The night Horace killed himself, I found out that I was nothing to him. His will stated that I could remain your guardian until you were twenty-one years old, and then I was to turn everything over to you. I was to walk out with the clothes on my back and nothing more. I don’t think you can imagine the depth of the hatred I felt that night for the squalling infant that had ruined my entire life. I don’t think I had a rational thought as I sent you away to a farm woman to wet-nurse and then bribed the lawyers. That hatred kept me going for years. It was all I could think of. If I signed a paper, I knew that somewhere there was a four-year-old child who actually owned what I was buying or selling. I sent for you once when you were young, so I could see for myself that you weren’t worthy of what my father had left you.”
Jacob sat down, across the table from Kane. “The doctor says that at most I have only a month or two to live. I haven’t told anyone, but somehow I wanted to tell you the truth before I died.”
He picked up his full glass of wine and sipped it. “Hatred hurts the one who hates more than it does the hated. All those years that you lived here, I’d see you and I was sure that you were trying to take everything that I owned. I lived in fear that you’d find out the truth and take what was mine and my children’s. And when you wanted Pam for your wife, it seemed that all my fears had come true. Later, I thought that I should have seen your marriage to my daughter as a solution, but at the time . . . I don’t think that I had any rational thoughts then.”
He drank deeply of the wine. “There you are, Taggert, a dying man’s last confession. It’s all yours; you can take it if you want. This morning, I told my son the truth about who owns my property because I don’t have the strength or the inclination to fight you any longer.”
Kane sat back in the chair and, as he looked at Fenton and saw the gray tinge under his skin, he realized that he no longer hated the man. Houston had said that his hatred of Jacob Fenton had spurred him on to achieve what he had, and perhaps she was right. In fact, she had pointed out the injustice of Horace cutting Jacob out of his will.
Kane took a drink of the wine that was in front of him and looked at the food. “Why did you have to starve the miners to make your money?”
“Starve the miners?” Jacob gasped, his eyes bulging. “Doesn’t anyone in the world understand that I barely break even with the miners? The only money I make is in Denver at the steel mills, but everyone looks at the poor mistreated miner and accuses me of being Satan.”
He stood and began to pace around the room. “I have to keep the coal mines under lock and key or the unionists will come in and incite the miners to demand more money, fewer hours. You know what they want? They want to elect a check weighman. Look, I know as well as anyone that the scales are fixed, and that the miners dig more coal than they’re credited for, but if I were honest and paid them what they earned, I’d have to charge more per ton for the coal, and then I’d not be competitive, and I’d never get more contracts and then they wouldn’t have any more jobs. So who gets hurt the most if I let them hire honest weighmen? I can hire coal miners by the hundreds, but I don’t think they can get jobs so easily.”
Kane looked at the older man for a moment. He understood about business, and he knew that sometimes compensations had to be made. “What about the mine safety? I hear you use rotten timbers and—.”
“Like hell I do. The miners have their own pride system. You can ask your uncle if I’m not right. They brag about how they can tell just how far they can go before the roof caves in. I have mine inspectors in there all the time, and they find that the men won’t take the time to shore up as they go.”
Kane picked up the fork by the plate of food in front of him and slowly began to eat, but then found that he was ravenous and began to shovel it in. “You don’t pay them for the time they spend shoring, do you? They’re paid by the tonnage they get out, aren’t they?”
Jacob took a chair across from Kane and put another thick slice of beef on his plate. “I hire them as subcontractors and it’s up to each man to fulfill his part of the contract. Did you know that I pay men to inspect the miners’ hats? The idiots open the cap to light cigarettes and send the whole place up. The inspector has to check that the caps are welded shut to prevent them from killing each other.”
Kane, his mouth full, was gesturing with his fork. “One minute, you treat ’em like children and lock ’em up and the next minute, they have to be subcontractors and take the responsibility for their own . . . what’s it called when you have to work and don’t get paid for the work?”
“Dead work,” Jaco
b supplied. “I do the best I can and still keep the miners working. I’d like to buy my coal from someone else and just make steel, but I can’t see putting so many people out of work. Every time something like this happens,” he motioned in the general direction of the Little Pamela, “I say that I’m going to close the mines. There’s a vast amount of competition to supply coal to the mills in Denver, and I could close all seventeen mines around Chandler and they wouldn’t even be missed. But you know what would happen to this town if I closed the mines? It’d be a ghost town in two years.”
“So, according to you, you’re just doin’ the whole town a favor.”
“I am, in a way,” Jacob said righteously.
“I imagine you’re payin’ your stockholders, ain’t you?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but I do the best I can.”
Kane was cleaning the bottom of the second plate of food with a piece of bread. “Then you’d damn well better start doin’ better. I happen to have a little money of my own and I just might decide to use it to bring a few lawsuits against the principals of Fenton Coal and Iron, and I think that all production—steel and coal—might be shut down while this thing was in court.”
“But that would ruin Chandler! You couldn’t—.”
“I somehow think that the owners of FC&I might have enough self-interest to keep that from happening.”