So I did one day, while everyone else stayed out of sight. Well first I had to talk Zar out of killing Bert. And then out of firing him — that I did by convincing him Isaac Maple would hire the boy in his place. When I had him calmed down I said: “Look here Zar, what’s some little old Chinagirl matter when in just a few months you’ll have the finest saloon in these parts. A businessman like you can’t bother with such things.”
“Not a saloon, frand. An hotel. Two stories. Glass windows. A mirror. A polished wood bar.”
“Well there you are, that’s big time Zar, and big times are coming.”
“You are right.”
“Sure I’m right — hell you’ll be able to import a dozen Chinese if you want, this town grows up and you’ll have more girls than you can choose.”
“We will be a city!”
“Sure!”
“Alright Blue: you tell the boy I will not kill him.”
“That’s the decent thing, Zar.”
“He loffs her, he can have her.”
“Fine.”
“For three hundred dollars he can have her.”
Zar was a match for me, no question. When I took the news out to Bert and the others I looked at some long faces. But Molly came up with an idea: she said: “If Bert takes the girl, and brings in someone in her stead, maybe the Russian would make a trade.”
So I tried that and I guess Zar didn’t think there was a chance in Hell, he agreed readily. We sat there and it was like talking to some foreign king making a royal marriage for his daughter. If Bert got him another woman he wanted only one hundred dollars — which is what he’d paid for the Chinagirl — and he’d let the young fellow pay him in labor. That was all I could get out of him. He stuck to those terms for the best part of a week. Till finally Bert borrowed our mule and rig and rode off and was gone two days, and Lord! if he didn’t come back with a sad grey-haired woman, full of sags, and deliver her up with a flourish. That was Mrs. Clement and I never found out where Bert got her. You just didn’t look to find such enterprise in a boy like that, and part of it was the way he never told anyone how he did it.
The Russian hadn’t expected Bert to come up with anyone but it was to his credit he stuck to the terms. He might even have delighted in the boy’s wherewithal. But then the trouble was Mae and Jessie. They didn’t take to the new woman at all, they sniffed at her and found her wanting. When Zar offered her the same arrangement he had with them they went into a rage. It was an insult to them, there was a big fuss and they made up their minds then and there to quit Zar and leave the town.
That was a noisy morning in my cabin, Jessie and Mae coming in and tearfully ordering me to write out tickets for the next stage. Miss Adah was with them, wringing her hands, and Zar shouting and ranting; and things were all inside out now as the girls were put out with Bert for disrupting things and Zar was standing up for him. But when Mae and Jessie demanded their share of the profits which Zar had been holding in trust for them, the Russian stopped the game: their money, along with his own, he had invested in the wood for the new “hotel.” It was all gone, receipted by Alf, he told the furious women, and smiling he invited them to carry off their share of the lumber when it came on the freight wagons.
That took the heart out of them; and nothing more was said or done once the whole problem had reached its natural limits. By the time the lumber came, and Zar was hiring a few miners who knew how to carpenter, the women were actually looking forward to the luxury of those second-story rooms — although they never did warm up to old Mrs. Clement.
And by autumn, when the wedding was made, everyone — Zar, Mae, Jessie as well as the rest of us in the town — were happy for the two young people. And the only shadows were on the faces of Bert and his Chinagirl, both combed and clean but awful scared, and looking sorry about the whole thing.
I was the one did the marrying. I don’t regret it, I think it was proper enough, it sort of fell on me to finish the business I had become party to. We stood out in front of Zar’s old place. There was a scatter of people looking on including a few folks I barely knew. Over the heads, across the street, was Zar’s new saloon, two stories as it was planned, with three rooms with glass windows on the second floor and a false front another story high; next to it, with an alley in between, was Isaac Maple’s wood store which Swede had raised almost by himself. From where I stood the scar of the old street was blocked from my sight. None of the newcomers knew that I was no real Mayor, or that the words I spoke to wed the boy and girl were those few true phrases told to me by Miss Adah — who seemed ashamed even to recall them — plus what I could summon up in my mind from the ordained minister who married me more than twenty years before. Miss Adah had a Bible too, and had offered it to me until Mae pointed out the Chinagirl wasn’t hardly a Christian and so it would not be fitting.
Afterwards Zar gave out drinks on the house. His bar and his mirror weren’t arrived yet and he passed the liquor out from behind his plank, we all drank up, one of the new men showed a violin, and although it was afternoon we danced around on that new pine floor till it was tolerably sanctified. Swede brought his Helga in to dance, I danced with Molly, I did alright for an old man, that rigid back was soft in my hands and there was a flush of pleasure on Molly’s face as we stomped around, arms around, till we could dance no more.
Sometime between that heady evening she relented and that day we danced — there must have been a moment when we reached what perfection was left to our lives. “We’ve both suffered,” she said, but words don’t turn as the earth turns, they only have their season. When was the moment, I don’t know when, with all my remembrances I can’t find it; maybe it was during our dance, or it was some morning as a breeze of air shook the sun’s light; maybe it was one of those nights of hugging when we reached our ripeness and the earth turned past it; maybe we were asleep. Really how life gets on is a secret, you only know your memory, and it makes its own time. The real time leads you along and you never know when it happens, the best that can be is come and gone.
What my mind sees now is the winter, November. The cabin is double-boarded, snug against the wind. Just inside, by the front door, is my desk, Swede’s table which I’ve bought from him. There are shelves on the walls filled with provisions, pegs hung with extra boughten clothes for all of us, a commode with an ironstone jug and washbowl. Mr. Hayden Gillis sits at my desk looking a long time at my books, a man all the way from the office of the Governor of the Territory.
“What have you charged for your lots Mr. Mayor,” he says shortly, turning around to face me.
“Well nothing to speak of. I put down witness stakes whenever someone claims a section he intends to build on. And he signs the ledger and I sign, that’s all.”
“You are not the promoter of this townsite?”
“No …”