“Saving us for when we’re really needed, Jared says,” Griff reported. He wagged his head in general acknowledgment. “Caught Anaconda with its pants down today, he sure did. Put a Welshman in charge and you start to get somewhere. Look at Lloyd George.” He gestured as if the prime minister of Great Britain might materialize to set things straight in Butte.
“Yes, but-”
“Your turn,” Hoop called down.
I waited while the two of them traded places, like two aged sailors scrambling in the rigging. “But why this so-called work action instead of a genuine strike?”
“No strike, no strikebreakers.” Holding the ladder with both gnarled hands, Hoop looked around at me as if deciding how much more tutoring I was worth. “Besides catching that other gang-”
“-with its pants down,” Griff contributed, along with an emphatic swipe of his paintbrush.
I must have looked blank. Top and bottom of the ladder, both of them eyed me. The silence grew until at last Hoop spelled out:
“The Wobblies. They’d cut in on a strike, try to take it over if they knew it was coming.”
“Send in infiltrators.” To hear Griff echo Typhoon Tolliver was an unnerving experience. I drew myself up.
“As a mere bystander”-it was hard to tell if that registered on those walnut faces-“it appears to me the union council won the day, as you say. But what happens tomorrow?”
The last word was Hoop’s. “Things go back to their normal confusion.”
TRUDGING UPSTAIRS to my room to wash up before supper, I reflected again on that zigzag pattern of life. There I was, simply a hopeful empty-pocketed climber of the Richest Hill on the planet, and suspected of something more by nearly everyone except Rabrab, who usually saw connivance behind every mustache. At least, I told myself with a grim smile, tonight I could look forward to a meal not garnished with a goon.
But when I opened the door, my room looked as if it had been visited by a typhoon.
The bedding lay in a heap on the floor, the pillows flung onto the dresser top. The truly alarming thing, though, was the mattress, standing on its side and teetering toward me like a falling wall, while someone grunted in exertion behind it.
“You thugs!” I cried, wildly fishing in my pockets for the brass knuckles, expecting the pointy-faced Anaconda man to burst from the closet while the bigger one mashed me with the mattress. “Get out of here or I’ll-”
The mattress stopped its waggle. Around an edge, Grace’s face came into view. “Morrie!” She appeared as startled as I was. “Is it that time of day already?”
“Room devastation time, you mean?” The brass knuckles swiftly pocketed out of her sight, I stepped toward the disarranged bed.
“I’m glad you’re here, you can help me turn this mattress,” she said reasonably. “I do this every so often, so you don’t have to sleep on lumps.” I took an end and we flopped the mattress into place. As she unfolded fresh sheets she looked across at me curiously. “You came in sounding like you were declaring war. What were you so worked up about?”
“Oh, that. Everything upset as it was, I thought I’d caught Hoop and Griff playing a prank on me,” I alibied. “Tossing the room-all boys do it, and aren’t they that at heart?”
“They’re supposed to be painting the bad side of the house.”
“I must have come around the other way.”
Grace cocked an eyebrow. “‘Thugs’?”
“The word comes from thuggee, Hindu for someone who sneaks around and, ah, does mischief to you.”
She shook her head, making her braid dance. “I always learn something around you.”
I made no answer. A fresh apprehension was coursing through me. Over in the corner of the disheveled room, my satchel was missing.
Busily fluffing a pillow, Grace took a few moments to catch up to my alarmed gaze. “Oh. I had to move your bag out of the way. It’s in the closet.”
Undisturbed or gone through? I nearly asked. Suspicion was the contagion of Butte; now I was the one catching it. For once I was glad my trunk was not there, to disclose any of its secrets.
My landlady, dimpled with either innocence or guile, by now was done with the freshened bedding, the room miraculously back in order, and she announced she had better see to supper. “Grace?” I halted her before she could swish out the door. “You’ve been through the war of nerves between the men and the mining company before. What’s your sense of this one?”
She bundled her hands in her apron as she considered my question. “My Arthur,” she invoked somberly, “used to say taking on Anaconda is like wrestling a carnival bear. You have to hope its muzzle doesn’t come off.”
THE SPEED OF SOUND is slightly less than that of a shock wave, and so the tremor in the dark of that night shook my bed, and every other in the city, a few instants before the noise of the blast arrived.
Even foggy with sleep, I knew this was no usual detonation, no dynamiting at the depth of a glory hole. I stumbled to the hallway. Half-dressed, Hooper struggled from his room, yanking into the remainder of his clothes, while Griffith already was putting on coat and hat. At the head of the hall, Grace clutched her bedgown around her throat as she witnessed the exodus, then sent me an agonized look.
She did not even have to deliver my marching orders aloud. I dressed hastily and set off with the limping pair of old boarders to the Hill.
UP THERE, in the ghostly light of the headframes, a murmuring crowd was clustered around a mineshaft called the Flying Dutchman. When people gather from the nooks of a mining town to the surface of a disaster, they bring every degree of dread, and as the three of us edged through the throng I could feel the mood of apprehension, the air was sticky with it. Each arriving set of eyes, mine included, expected the sight of bodies laid out on the hard ground. But Griff and Hoop, pointing and muttering, saw at once this was no mineshaft accident, no explosion and flash of deadly flame deep in a tunnel. Instead, over near the machine house, beneath a now askew sign reading PROPERTY OF THE ANACONDA COPPER MINING COMPANY, the mine’s pay office stood open to the night, its front wall blown out.
Blue-uniformed policemen were chiding the crowd to stay back, while burly civilian types who could only have been plainclothesmen prowled the blast site. Reporters were clamoring out questions and receiving no answers. Flash powder kept going off, the hollowed-out pay office in rinses of light that would put it on front pages all across the state.
My companions were not impressed. “Mighty poor job of setting the dynamite,” either Hooper or Griffith appraised there in the deep shadows of the Hill.
“Could’ve done that much with firecrackers, couldn’t we?” said the other.
To me, the building looked devastated enough, the huge ragged hole in its front displaying broken bricks like snaggled teeth. I moved closer to the skeptical experts. “Do I hear that this blast wasn’t up to your standards?”
“The stupid pay office is still standing, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes.”
“That’s no kind of a result, if you’re gonna blow something up.”
“Waste of a good fuse and a match.”
“But,” I wasn’t able to budge from the evidence of my eyes, “the front of the building is by and large gone.”
“So what? They’ll get bricklayers in here in the morning and have it fixed back up before you can say boo.”
“Spell this out for me, then,” I gave in. “How would someone who was an old hand at blowing things up have done it?”
“All it would have taken,” Hoop explained patiently, “was to set the dynamite at the corner of the building.”
“It’d slump over like a dropped cake,” Griff mused, practically smacking his lips as he envisioned it.
By now the cloud of reporters and chain lightning of photography flashes were concentrated around one small circle of men next to the Flying Dutchman’s headframe. Even though I had expected something of the sort, my heart sank. As flash powder flared again, I saw in the glare the strong but strained features of Jared Evans in the midst of his beleaguered union officials. Although I had nothing to lend but moral support, I headed over.