A minute later, Mullins, a 41-year-old striker with a bushy reddish beard, has a change of heart. When Buford Mullins sees that, he flips the trucker the bird. As one truck roars past the picket shack, the driver slows to a crawl so he can smirk and wave sarcastically at the strikers. The trucks are escorted by State Police cars, a fact that irks the strikers, who think the state has joined the other side. Every few minutes, a truck carrying a load of coal dug by the replacement workers rumbles into the plant. Three of the strikers pass the time whittling cedar sticks, while a fourth, the only woman in the group, reads a fat romance novel called Twilight Temptress. At other places during the six months of this bitter strike against the Pittston Co., there had been more than 3,700 arrests, most for sitting down in front of coal trucks, but some for throwing rocks and slashing tires. A few weeks earlier, in mid-September, a group of 98 strikers and a minister had suddenly surged past the guards and seized the plant, shutting down coal production for four days, until a judge ordered them to clear out. At the picket shack outside the Moss 3 coal processing plant in southwestern Virginia, the striking miners are sitting around an old oil drum stove in their camouflage outfits, staring out at the company's security guards, who stand stiff as soldiers in their dark blue jumpsuits and stare back through mirrored sunglasses.
