I looked, and a candlestick was through my hand, pinning it to the timber.
A candlestick is like a clay pipe made out of iron, with the stem part a sharp point that they stick in wood or in dirt wherever they want a light, the bowl a cup that holds the butt of the candle, and the nub a curlicue that comes around and under, so they can hook a finger in it and yank it out as easy as they stuck it in. I reached for the curlicue with my good hand, but I didn’t catch it. Because a six-pound striking hammer swung past my head, and the breeze put out the candle in my hat, and the jolt put out the candle on the stick. And then there I was in the dark, with that candlestick driven so deep in the wood I couldn’t get it out no matter how I pulled with my free hand, and the hot wax spilling down and mixing with the blood, and still I couldn’t get loose. “Get his gun!”
“His gun, hell, get his guts!”
They kicked me and beat me and did their best to get my gun, but I used my teeth and it stayed under my arm, even if I couldn’t get it out to use it. Maybe I hollered. Anyway there was plenty of noise, and pretty soon there were lights up the entry, where other miners were on their way, running. But before they got there Gator jumped on the cage, pulled Oleson aboard, and gave the signal. He and the boy were up to the top by the time they prized me loose.
They got me to the top at last, and took me to a doctor on Taylor Street. It wasn’t bleeding much, but it was all mashed and raw, and hurt like holy hell. The doctor was named Rausch, and if he was a regular doctor or a horse doctor I don’t know, but the way he treated me it felt like he thought I was a horse. He poured a liniment over it that he made from mixing whisky and witch hazel in a bottle, like it was a salad dressing, and then he bandaged it up with rags he tore up from women’s petticoats he had in one drawer of his desk. When he got done I was so weak I could hardly stagger, and he got sore when I asked him to call a cab, but I hadn’t taken the gun off and when I begun fingering it with my left hand he went outside, and pretty soon a cab was there.
Next day I went to work, but by noon I felt so queer I had to come up and sit down in the office. Hale kept watching me, and pretty soon said I ought to go home. He didn’t send me, he took me, in his own carriage, and didn’t leave until I was in bed, and another doctor had come, a young fellow that at least acted like I was human. It wasn’t like Hale at all, but I figured out why he was so kind. I was out of my head a little, and he was afraid I’d talk.
How long I lay there I don’t know, but Mrs. Finn would come, and the doctor, and every time he washed my hand and bandaged it, it made me sicker to look at it, because it was swelled up the size of a ham and about the same color. And then one afternoon they were all in there, Hale and Mrs. Finn and the doctor, and the Chinese cook bringing hot water, and a look on their faces that said they were up to something. The doctor opened his case and got out a bottle of whisky and some tools. He poured me a tumbler full and told me to drink it. I put down a swallow or two, and gagged on it. “What the hell is it for? Ain’t I sick enough already with out a bellyful of this stuff?”
“You’ll need it.”
“What for?”
“For what I’ve got to do to you.”
“And what’s that?”
“...Take off your arm.”
“Oh no you’re not.”
“Duval, you’ve got blood-poisoning. I’ve done everything I know to prevent it, and nothing I’ve done has helped. There’s only one thing left, and that’s an amputation. The alternative is, if we don’t resort to that, and resort to it now, while there’s still time, or we hope there’s still time, in three more days you’ll be dead. Now let’s not deceive ourselves. Removal of an arm is a major operation, and one hell of a painful one. You’ve got one little thing in your favor, on that score. You’ve had practically nothing in your stomach since day before yesterday, and I think this liquor is going to put you out pretty completely. I’m not going to start till you’ve had a lot, but it’s going to be bad. You may as well be prepared.”
“I won’t let you.”
“I tell you, you’re going to die.”
“Then all right.”
But next thing I knew he was washing my arm, and Hale was shoving the whisky bottle against my teeth, and Mrs. Finn was standing by, with a basin. I knocked the bottle away with my chest and kicked the basin out of Mrs. Finn’s hands. The doctor began to cuss at me. “Goddam it, we’re trying to save your life, and the least you can do is act like you had sense.”
“Nobody asked you to save it.”
“Well, we’re going to.”
He motioned with his hand, and two miners stepped up, that I hadn’t seen before, and began tying me down, with rope. I fought and they fought back. I screamed at Hale, told him he’d be better off if I was dead, on account of what I knew, and why didn’t he make them let me alone? He screamed back, and I got the point a little bit then. Paddy and Williams had been paying him a few visits at night and he had just prayed them out of there when now I’d be teaming up with them, and the three of us, he figured, would really be tough. So he helped tie. And then all of a sudden they let go, and she was standing there, and my heart gave the same jump it had given in Sacramento, because she had that same look on her face, and I knew neither they nor fifty more like them could do anything to me now, because she wouldn’t let them. How she got there I didn’t at that time know, but it was easy to figure, later on. The house entrance was on B Street, but you climbed stairs in a long tunnel of a staircase to the rooms, which backed up on A. The boardwalk ran right past the window of my room, and she had just stepped off it to the sill, and then to the floor.
She looked things over, and said: “Thanks ever so much, doctor, for what you’re doing to Roger, but I’ll take charge of him from now on, if you don’t mind.”
“And who are you?”
“Just a friend.”
“Do you know what this man has the matter with him?”
“I see it’s his hand. I’m curing him up.”
“Not in my house you’re not.”
That was Mrs. Finn, who had been looking Morina over. One of the miners or somebody must have whispered something, because she cut loose with a spiel that sounded like something she had learned up for church, all about the respectable house she ran, and how nobody like Morina could come in it, even over her dead body. She was one of those dumb, worked-out women that naturally has it hard no matter where she goes. She had run a lunchroom for rivermen in St. Louis before she married Finn and came with him to the minefields. He put down so much booze she got religion, and after he died in Grass Valley she came on to Nevada and opened up the same old rivermen’s joint, except here it was miners.
She was hooking it up good when Morina stepped over to her, her hips swinging and her eyes showing that same cold glitter I’d seen there before. Right in the middle of a holler Mrs. Finn broke off, and when the doctor wigwagged her she went out in the hall with him and for a whole minute they were whispering to each other, while Morina looked from one to the other in the room, trying to figure out what was being said. When they came back Mrs. Finn nodded to the doctor, and he did the talking. “You’re willing to assume responsibility for this man, knowing as I now warn you that his injury will probably prove fatal unless he submits to the surgery I have recommended?”