the coal-mining interests

I must have made him angry with my comment. He’s been giving me the cold shoulder ever since I said it.

The one farthest from the river was the largest and tallest; they decreased in size toward the river, until the fourth was little more than a tit of rock jutting up out of the prairie.

At the instant Mr. Smitty saw the woman, smoke ballooned out from the dual tailpipes of his hurtling car, and the engine's sound changed to an unsettling pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep.