“While you’re handing out favors,” Jared was quick on the heels of that, “I could use one, too. Rab tells me you’re a whiz with figures.”
With a modest gesture I admitted to something of the sort. “Good. Anaconda has us bamboozled on the production figures.” As if scouting a battlefield, he scanned the entirety of the restaurant to make sure we were not being observed. “Show him, Rab.”
Covertly she cracked open her sizable purse to give me a peek at a vivid sheaf of papers. “Those are the pink sheets the mine managers hand in at the end of each week,” Jared went on in a low voice. “The janitor at the Hennessy Building is supposed to burn them, but he has a nephew working in the Neversweat shafts, so he slips the batch to us.” Rapidly he explained that the famously fought-over wage was tied to the Hill’s production total and subsequent price of copper, but the union was suspicious of the company’s numbers in the negotiations. “They’re playing it cute on us, we’re pretty sure. It seems like the bulk tons that come out of the mine”-he indicated Rab’s trove of pink sheets-“ought to add up to more processed tons at the smelter than the company tells us. But the differential is the problem. No two mines assay out at the same percent of copper in the ore, and there are three dozen Anaconda mines on the Hill.” Jared tugged ruefully at his lopped ear. “It’s driving us batty trying to come up with a complete figure to argue against theirs.”
“I told you Mr. Morgan would have a solution,” Rab snuggled nearer him with the scheming expression I remembered so well, “just wait and see.”
With the situation delineated to their satisfaction, the two of them, ravens of collusion, waited me out.
This, I realized with a churning in my stomach that caused me to lose interest in my meal, was another of those moments when choice was forced upon me. What was being asked of me was exactly what Sandison inveighed against, taking sides in the dogfight, as he not inaccurately characterized the Butte feud of labor and capital. Here was where a headful of learning was a burden. Intuition, instinct, some mental gremlin, whispered to me that the library’s extensive mineralogy section, complete with the annual mining reports of the state industrial board, with a bit of calculation might yield the set of ore differentials the union needed. But why should it be up to me to coax out that magic arithmetic? Unfortunately the answer kept coming back: Who else? Resist it as I tried, a certain line of reasoning insisted that the Anaconda Company had an army of bookkeepers on its side and the union deserved at least one.
Besides, around Jared Evans you felt you were made of stronger stuff than you previously imagined, and Rab’s guile was as infectious as ever.
“All right,” I sighed as she glowed in triumph, “let me see what I can do.” Jared watched keenly as she slipped me the pink sheets and I tucked them well out of sight inside my vest. “I may live to regret this, but I’ll help out in the name of the holy cause of the lost dollar.”
“Oh, we have the wage back up to where it was,” he answered matter-of-factly. “Now we need to fight to hang on to it.”
“You have the-Since when?”
“Since some Anaconda bigwig with a lick of sense looked at a calendar and realized Miners Day is almost here.” He grinned fully for the first time. “Just after the next payday.”
“It’s Butte ’s biggest doings of the year,” Rab leapt in on that. “The whole town turns out for Miners Day. You’ll have to, too, Mr. Morgan.”
My brain felt weak. “Are you telling me the Anaconda Company gave in about the dollar because a holiday is coming?”
“Look at it from their side,” Jared instructed. “Every miner in Butte will be perfectly legally parading through town that day. If you were up there on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, would you rather have them happy or ready to tear things up?”
“Then this is a kind of truce,” I wanted to make sure of what I was hearing, “of the moment?”
“That’s not a bad way of putting it,” he commended in his best sergeant manner. “The one thing sure about dealing with Anaconda is that the war is never over.”
WHATEVER LUNAR POWER Miners Day possessed that the year’s other three hundred and sixty-four did not, things settled down ahead of it. Work actions ceased and the Hill pulsed day and night with the excavation of rich copper ore. The coveted dollar a day, as Jared had said, was added back in to the wages of ten thousand temporarily soothed union men. Without the morning tide of miners, library life quieted to its usual seashell tone of whispers. Miraculously, I nearly caught up with the chores Sandison pushed my way. He himself, of course, constituted a sizable task as often as not.
This day I came back into the office after some errand to find him pacing from his desk to the window and back, his bootsteps sharp as a march beat. Barely acknowledging me with a glance, he delivered: “That robber Gardiner in New York I deal with has a fine copy of The Bride of Lammermoor. What do you think?”
Quick as a fingersnap, I calculated what a transaction of that sort would do to the delicate balance I had achieved in the library’s ledger. “Sir Walter Scott himself regarded that as one of his lesser works,” I responded breezily. “Rather like Ivanhoe, but done with a trowel.”
He grunted. “All right, I’ll think it over.” The boots retraced their route as if following dance steps imprinted on the floor. I grew uneasy as he prowled the room, more often than not a signal that something was on his mind. I could only hope no one had blabbed to him that I was staying late after the Jabberwockians and other evening groups packed up and went home, and immersing myself suspiciously deep in the mineralogy section.
Just then Miss Mitchell from the cataloguing section, young and rather pretty and somewhat of a flirt, came in with a question. I dealt with it in no time and she pranced out.
Sandison watched the back of her until she shimmied out of sight, then turned to me with a frown. “Morgan, I don’t see you making eyes at young things like that even when they’re asking for it. What are you, some kind of buck nun?”
This turn of topic took me off guard. Good grief, did my social situation look that dusty to someone whose own idea of mating in life was the grandee and grandora sort? Trying not to show how much that smarted, I stiffly assured my white-bearded interrogator: “I enjoy female companionship when it presents itself, never fear.”
“THIS DAY GOT AWAY FROM ME.” Grace guiltily bustled past me, trying to tie her apron and control her braid at the same time, when I came in at the end of my own hectic day. “How do you feel about cold turkey for supper?”
“Rather tepid. Let me see what can be done.” Following her to the kitchen, I scrounged the cupboard, coming up with cheese that was mostly rind, some shelled walnuts, and macaroni. Yielding the culinary arena gracefully, so to speak, Grace stood aside while I whacked chunks of the turkey into smaller pieces and set those to simmering in cream and flour in a baking pan.
“Such talent.” She watched with folded arms as I did my imitation of Escoffier. “If all else fails, you can get on as a cook at the Purity,” she ventured.
Up until then, I had not offered any explanation of Rab mysteriously summoning me to the cafeteria, nor, for that matter, of Rab herself. “Yes, well, Miss Rellis you heard mentioned by our fleet young friend the other day,” I fussed with the meal makings some more while coming up with a judicious version of the past, “and to make a long story short,” by which time a pot of water was boiling merrily and I dumped in the macaroni for what was going to approximate turkey tetrazzini, “someone I knew when she was just a girl ends up as the fiancée of none other than Jared Evans. Isn’t it surprising how things turn out?”