America 1929: John F. Kennedy, the Great Writer

Chapter 147 You bunch of idiots

Several rough hemp ropes, stained with engine oil, immediately bound Arthur's hands tightly behind his back.

Arthur was shoved and pushed into a weed-covered path.

We walked for more than an hour.

They traversed a labyrinthine abandoned mining area and entered a basin surrounded by towering cliffs on three sides.

This is a large settlement known as "Black Coal Valley".

Dozens of shacks, hastily constructed from abandoned mine sleepers, sheet metal, and tattered tarpaulins, lined up along a dried-up stream completely blackened by coal slag.

A group of children, barely clothed, stood blankly in the foul-smelling mud.

Their necks and arms were covered with red spots that looked like dried tree bark, their limbs were thin as sticks but their bellies were exaggeratedly swollen.

This is a fatal pellagra caused by a long-term diet consisting only of a single type of cornmeal porridge lacking vitamins.

In front of the shed, a dozen men under the age of forty were sitting on stones, coughing violently, their phlegm turning completely black.

This was because the company shut down the dust-free ventilation equipment in the mine in order to save costs, which led to all the miners contracting late-stage black lung disease.

They are suffocating to death little by little.

In this isolated and stagnant space, the living are like walking corpses.

Arthur was escorted to an open area in the center of the camp.

Hearing the commotion, hundreds of villagers came out of their houses and formed a wall around the area.

They stared intently at Arthur, their gazes filled with primal cruelty and extreme hatred.

An elderly man with a face full of tattoos and scars, who had lost his left leg and was using a homemade cane, was slowly walked out of the largest wooden house in the center, supported by several men.

He is the patriarch and absolute arbiter of this place, Old Seris.

Cletus stepped forward and handed the congressional badge to old Seris.

"Dad, we caught him at the roadblock on the bend. He was driving a brand new Ford, loaded with guns, and had a Washington Capitol badge on him. He insisted he was a writer."

Old Seris took the document and rubbed the gold-embossed eagle on it with his withered fingers.

Then, without even looking at the details of the document, he casually tossed it into the nearby trash can.

"A writer from Washington? Ha."

Old Seris let out a cold laugh.

"Are you going to write that we are inbreeding, uncivilized savages?"

Old Seris, leaning on his cane and with rotting legs, walked up to Arthur.

His cloudy eyes were fixed on Arthur's wool coat, then he suddenly grabbed Arthur's collar.

"I will never forget the scent of you, the fabric of your clothes."

Old Seris's voice began to tremble.

Old Seris turned around, pointing to the dilapidated shacks and sick miners around him, and launched into a scathing historical indictment of Arthur.

"Three years ago, we went on strike to demand an extra ten cents a day and for the company to install ventilation fans underground. The United Coal Mining Company hired the infamous Baldwin-Fields detective agency—one of the worst in America—to deal with us."

Old Seris angrily pounded the ground with his cane.

"Those private agents, dressed in the same black coats as you, came here with government authorization and expelled us."

"It was December, winter! It was snowing heavily outside! While the men were sitting quietly in the mine, they kicked open the door with dogs and iron bars, and brutally threw our wives, newborn babies, and all the furniture out of the company dormitory onto the icy ground!"

"When we pitched our tents outside the valley to protest, those agents drove up in an armored train. They called it the Death Express."

"They set up Gatling guns on the train. In the middle of the night, they turned off the lights and indiscriminately opened fire on our tent camp. That night, they killed three of my sons! They killed dozens of unarmed women!"

Old Seris's eyes turned blood red.

The entire camp of mountain people was ignited by this bloody memory, letting out a furious growl.

"Now that the coal mine is closed, they've squeezed every last drop of value out of us. And now they've sent you agents with badges and shotguns, trying to drive us out of this last dumping ground to die, is that it?"

Old Seris turned his head and delivered his verdict.

"Young man, whether your sign is real or fake, in Appalachia, no big company's lackey leaves alive. Hang him."

Before he could finish speaking, Arthur moved.

These illiterate mountain people, who had never left the mountains in their entire lives, made an irreparable tactical mistake.

They tied Arthur's hands with a dead pig knot, completely unaware that the man standing before them was not a weak and powerless scholar.

With his hands bound behind his back, Arthur exerted force, and the moment the ropes hit the ground, he took a half-step forward, precisely cutting into Jeb's blind spot on the right.

His left hand, shaped like a palm strike, chopped down on Jeb's thick carotid sinus.

Jeb collapsed to the ground with his eyes rolled back before he could even let out a scream.

At the same second, Arthur locked his sights on the most valuable person on the field, Old Seres, who was less than half a meter away from him.

Arthur's right leg swept swiftly toward the old Seris's only support, the prosthetic cane.

Old Seris lost his balance and fell forward violently.

Then, Arthur grabbed the old man by the throat with his left hand, forcibly lifted him up, pulled out the skinning hunting knife the old man always carried, and held it to his neck. The situation was reversed in less than two seconds when Cletus turned around in astonishment.

That "city dweller," who was originally like a lamb to the slaughter, could instantly kill the chieftain of Black Coal Valley with a mere touch of his fingertip.

The hundreds of villagers in the surrounding area were in an uproar.

They pulled the bolts of their rifles and double-barreled shotguns, and hundreds of dark muzzles instantly pointed at Arthur's head.

"Let go of Dad, you bastard!"

In despair and rage, Cletus drew the pistol from his waist.

"You can try shooting. Let's see if your bullet is faster or my blade is faster."

He fearlessly stared into the eyes of dozens of gun barrels across the crowd.

With a slight downward pressure of the blade, a glaringly bright red line of blood immediately seeped from old Seris's neck.

All the mountain people froze in place, hesitant to act for fear of harming the innocent, not daring to move a single finger.

The situation was completely out of control.

Arthur maintained a highly defensive posture and then began to criticize the mountain people's stupidity.

"If I were a cold-blooded agent of Baldwin Fields, I would never stand here patiently listening to you vent your ridiculous retelling of your wounds."

"I'll set up a machine gun on the high ground at the mountain pass and send you bunch of idiots and your dilapidated houses to your doom."

"What's so special about physical cleaning? Do you want me to explain corporate towns and corporate tokens to you? I know just as much as you do."

""

"Who—who are you?"

Old Seris managed to squeeze out a few words, his tone no longer carrying the arrogance of before.

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