“It’s a long story,” I said, as if that explained everything.
The upstairs room she showed me was neat and clean, with subdued wallpaper. On the bed was a coverlet of an old style with an embroidered dragon rampant; it would be like sleeping under a flag of Camelot. I can be picky, but I liked everything I had met up with under this roof so far.
As I toggled the switch to make sure the overhead electric bulb worked-another innovation-my landlady-to-be similarly checked me over. “Drummer, are you?”
It took me a moment to recall that the term meant a traveling salesman, one who drums up business. “No, life has given me other rhythms to march to, Mrs. Faraday. My family originally was in the glove trade, until circumstances did that in. I now do books.”
“Poetry?” she asked narrowly.
“Ledgers.”
“Then you’ll appreciate my own bookkeeping, which starts with a week’s rent in advance.”
“Very wise,” I said with composure, although coming up with the sum took nearly every bit I had. Now I really had to hope opportunity of some sort presented itself without delay.
“Welcome to Butte, Mr. Morgan,” my new landlady said with a winning smile, complete with dimple, as she pocketed my cash. “Supper’s at dark this time of year.”
THE DINING TABLE WAS LAID for four when I came down a few minutes early to scout the premises. There was no wax fruit nor fussy display of doilies on the sideboard, a good sign. Instead, under the blaze of the modest but efficient electrical chandelier, a wedding photograph was propped in the spot of honor. Grace Faraday, even more fresh-faced than now, smiled out as capriciously as if the white of her bridal gown were a field of ermine, while beside her in a suit of approximate fit stood a foursquare fellow I took to be the prominently mentioned Griff. He at least had good taste in women and mustaches, as he wore a full-lipped Rudyard Kipling version not unlike my own.
Just then my hostess popped out of the kitchen with a bowl of boiled potatoes and nodded to where I was to sit, saying, “Make yourself to home, the other pair will be right along. Griff had to stoke the furnace and I told him to go wash up or eat in the street-ah, here’s the thundering herd.”
Through the doorway limped two scrawny half-bald figures that made me think I was seeing double. Both wore work overalls that showed no evidence of work, both held out knobby hands for a shake, and both were grinning at me like leprechauns, or whatever the Welsh equivalent might be.
The nearer one croaked out: “I’m Griff. Welcome to the best diggings in Butte.”
“Same here,” echoed the other. “I’m Hoop.”
Was it humanly possible? I wondered, doing my best not to glance in the direction of the wedding photo during the handshake exchange with the wizened Griff. What manner of marriage could deplete a man from that to this?
With a twinkle, the lady of the house rescued me from my confusion. “These specimens are Wynford Griffith and Maynard Hooper, when no one is looking. They’ve been part of the furniture here since my husband passed on and I’ve had to take in boarders.” As the duo took their places like old Vikings at a feast, she delivered the sufficient benediction: “We all three could be worse, I suppose.”
“I’ll try to fit in, Mrs. Faraday.”
“Start by saving words and call me Grace, even though this pair of old Galahads refuses to.”
“Wouldn’t be right, Mrs. Faraday,” Griff or Hoop said.
“Manners is manners,” said Hoop or Griff.
“I go by Morrie.” I dealt myself in, and formalities fell away in favor of knives and forks.
“Didn’t I tell you, Hoop?” Griff said as he sawed at his meat.
“That new sign works like a charm. What part of Wales do your people hail from, Morrie?”
“Chicago.”
“Before they crossed the pond,” he persisted.
“Griff, I am sorry to say, the exact family origins are lost in the mists of ”-I searched the gazeteer of my mind-“Aberystwyth and Llangollen.”
“The grand old names,” he proclaimed, adding a spatter of unintelligible syllables that could only have been Welsh. “ ’Tis the language of heaven.”
“Why nobody talks it on earth,” Hoop explained.
By then I was on about my third bite of the meat and ready to ask. “Venison?”
“Close,” Grace allowed guardedly. “Antelope.”
“Ah.” I looked down at the delicate portion. “What a treat to be served cutlets.” I emphasized the plural. “Are there seconds?”
She mulled that. “Tonight there are.” Off she went to the kitchen stove.
While we awaited replenishment, the history of my tablemates came out. Now retired-“at least the tired part”-the pair had been miners, to hear them tell it, practically since the dawn of Butte. Which was to say, since copper became a gleam in the world’s eye. The Hill, as they called it, held the earth’s largest known deposit of the ore that wired everything electrical. Much of this I knew, but there was a tang to hearing them recite it with the names of mines such as Orphan Girl and Moonlight and Badger. The crisscross of their conversation about life deep underground was such that I sometimes had to remind myself which was Griffith and which was Hooper. Although they looked enough alike to be brothers, I figured out that they had simply worked together so long in the mineshafts that the stoop of their bodies and other inclinations had made them grow together in resemblance as some old married couples do.
“So, Morrie, you’ve latched on in life as a bookkeeper, Mrs. Faraday says,” Griff was holding forth as Grace appeared with the replenished meat platter, rosettes from the cookstove heat in her attractive cheeks. It was surprising how much more eye-catching she was as the Widow Faraday.
“Except when the books keep me.” Both men bobbed quizzically and Grace sent me a glance. Offhand as my comment was, it admitted to more than I probably should have. With rare exceptions, my stints of employment had been eaten away by the acid of boredom, the drip-by-drip sameness of a job causing my mind to yawn and sneak off elsewhere. One boss said I spent more time in the clouds than the Wright brothers ever dreamt of. I had found, though, that I could work with sums while the remainder of my brain went and did what it wanted. “But, yes,” I came around to Griff’s remark about bookkeeping, “I have a way with numbers, and Butte by all accounts produces plentiful ones. First thing in the morning, I’ll offer my services at the office of the mining company, what is its name-Anaconda?”
Forks dropped to plates.
“You’re one of those,” Grace flamed. Yanking my rent money from her apron pocket, she hurled it to the table, very nearly into the gravy boat. “Leave this house at once, Whoever-You-Are Morgan. I’ll not have under my roof a man who wears the copper collar.”
“The-? ”
Hooper and Griffith glowered at me. “Anaconda is the right name for company men,” Griff growled. “They’re snakes.”
“But believe me, I-”
“Lowest form of life,” Hoop averred.
Enough was enough. Teetering back in my chair as far as I dared, I reached to the switch on the wall and shut off the chandelier, plunging the room into blackness and silence. After a few blank moments, I spoke into the void:
“We are all now in the dark. As I was, about this matter of the Anaconda Company. May we now talk in a manner which will shed some light on the situation?”
I put the chandelier back on, to the other three blinking like wakened owls.
Grace’s braid swung as she turned sharply to me. “How on earth, you, can you land into Butte as innocent as a newborn?”
“I have been elsewhere for a number of years,” I said patiently. “I knew nothing of this ogre you call Anaconda. To the contrary, I have only seen ‘The Richest Hill on Earth’ described in the kind of glowing terms the argonauts lavished on the California goldfields in 1849.”