Read "The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason" by Melville Davisson Post online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
About one o'clock on Thursday afternoon, William Walson, manager of the great Oceanic Coal Company, stepped out of the Fairmont Banking House in the Monongahela mining regions of West Virginia. It was pay-day at his mine, and he carried a black leather satchel in his hand containing twenty thousand dollars in bills. At this time the gigantic plant of this company was doing an enormous business. The labor unions of the vast Pennsylvania coal regions were out on the bitterest and most protracted strike of all history. The West Virginia operators were moving the heavens in order to supply the market; every man who could hold a pick was at work under the earth day and night.
The excitement was something undreamed of. The region was overrun with straggling workmen, tramps, "hobos," and the scum criminals of the cities, and was transformed as if by magic into a hunting-ground where the keen human ferret stalked the crook and the killer with that high degree of care and patience which obtains only with the man-hunter.