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Holt shook hands with the doctor, and then the doctor climbed into his car and Holt motioned a man over to crank it. “Good luck, sonny!” the doctor shouted at me as the motor turned over and caught. He drove off, leaving me with Ben Holt, who said,
    â€œThe old man talks a lot, but he knows his business. This damn hand of mine was driving me out of my mind, and that’s why you got a poor welcome, Cutter. Now we can go inside and have a cup of coffee and talk.”

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    8
    If I sought to reconstruct that first meeting with Ben Holt out of memory alone, it would be full of the country smell of the old farmhouse, the late afternoon sunlight striking through the windows, and the motions of Laura McGrady as she brought coffee and bread and butter to us where we sat at the table. Laura was nineteen then, finished with almost two years at normal school, tall, full-fleshed, her hair long in two thick braids, and not beautiful the way a girl is on a magazine cover, but as beautiful, I think, as any strong, handsome girl can be in the flesh and blood and movement of youth. I don’t know that I fell in love with her when I saw her that first time, but I wanted her and the wanting continued, and a year later we were married.
    So my own memory of meeting Ben Holt and going into the farmhouse and interviewing him is hardly to be trusted today. What I wrote at the time is plain and to the point:
    Today I met Benjamin Renwell Holt, newly elected president of the International Miners Union. Our meeting took place at Mr. Holt’s organizational headquarters, a mountain hide-out, the name and location of which I am pledged not to reveal. There, in an old farmhouse, surrounded by mountaineer miners enlisted as armed guards, some of them carrying rifles of Civil War vintage, Benjamin R. Holt plans and directs the organization of an industry never before organized in the state of West Virginia. Backed by a few dozen union organizers from Pennsylvania and Illinois, he has declared war on the powerful and independent coal operators of Hogan and Mingo counties. And from the looks of Mr. Holt, a dynamic, alert ex-miner himself, they have found a worthy opponent.
    In the stilted newspaper language of the time, it records the moment of our meeting and something of my own impression. If it fulfills nothing of an obligation toward truth, that can be explained by the nature of what a newspaperman must write, not the subtleties of response and emotion that men exchange with each other and with their environment, but the bald declaration of a fact that can be filed and indexed into categories of facts.
    I sat facing a man who was alive, alert, and so filled with a sense of his own purpose and power that it spilled out of him. He never wholly listened and never wholly inquired; he was too much with himself; but even the part of himself that he lent to another made one feel him inescapably and respond to him. All his life, he used other people and they wanted to be used by him. This is not hindsight on my part. He used me then, immediately, because I had seen the bloody gunfight in Clinton. I had come to interview him, cynical about him, with no prepared respect whatsoever, yet I found myself flattered by his attention to what I knew and what I had seen. For the most part, during the course of his life, Holt did not make friends and enemies; he chose them for whatever his purposes were at the moment, and at this moment he wanted a newspaperman. Before we finished talking, he was calling me “Al.”
    He wanted to know about the fight, and I told him the whole story. He made no comment until I had finished, and then he said softly,
    â€œThat stupid bastard Flecker. I hate killers! The pleasure of killing is a disease.”
    I hadn’t thought of it that way, and I asked Holt, “Wouldn’t you say his sympathies were with the miners?”
    â€œHe doesn’t have any sympathies. He’s an