6  

IF LIFE CAME WITH an instruction book, I had reached the chapter on taking stock of oneself without the help of a mirror. Looking at the larger picture, much seemed to have been lately set right in the world of me and mine. With the streets of Butte once again ringing with “Extra! Extra! Getcha Thunder here!” there was considerable to celebrate along with Robert Burns’s nativity, really. Jared’s bold newspaper venture was holding its own against almighty Anaconda, the manse had not fallen down on us, and I could see no lasting effects from my neck-saving impersonation of the Highliner. So let the grand day, or at least night, come, sang my heart.

A Scottish costume party might seem to be overdoing the obvious, merely a matter of showing up in customary garb ranging from those drafty kilts that so unnerved Griff and Hoop to the pulpit black of preachers thumping John Knox and the Covenanters back to life. But that overlooks the wardrobe potentialities in the pages of Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson and, for that matter, Burns himself. No sooner had I enlightened Grace as to the rural nature of much of his poetry than she chose to dress as a milkmaid, saucy bonnet and all. “If that doesn’t put me in the spirit, I don’t know what will.” She looked doubtfully at me in my usual suit and vest and watch chain. “Morrie, excuse me all to the dickens for saying so, but you don’t much resemble a Scotch version of a cowboy—”

“Cowherd.”

“—who’d be a milkmaid’s honey—”

“Swain.”

“—see there, we’re already running out of vocabulary. Why are you grinning like a hyena?”

I couldn’t help it, because Sandison, bless him and his strange ways, was granting me a boyhood dream. From the time I was old enough to take a book in my lap and make sense of sentences, I had loved Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson’s ruffianly crew aboard the Hispaniola as it hoisted sail for the isle where a chest of gold lay “not yet lifted” captured my imagination, and here was my chance, tucked in me somewhere ever since discovering young Jim Hawkins in his classic adventure, to sign on as a sea dog. “I shall be a none too ancient mariner, my dear, knee breeches and all. How does that sound?”

“Overboard.”

When the celebratory night arrived, however, she enthusiastically pitched in on my maritime getup, fussing over details as though she were a wardrobe mistress. “My, you do look piratical,” she ultimately circled me in inspection. “Isn’t the eye patch a nice touch?”

“If I could see better, I might think so.”

She powdered my beard to make me appear appropriately grizzled, and one last flourish, clipped a hoop earring onto my earlobe. “There now, you’re ready to sail the seven seas.”

“I’ll be content to navigate whatever Sandison’s notion of a party is,” I said in all honesty.

Having perfected me, Grace ducked to the dresser mirror for one last primp. I couldn’t see that she needed it, her flaxen hair peeking fetchingly from under her ribboned bonnet, her firm figure doing full justice to a maidenly blouse and ankle-long skirt. She caught my watching reflection. “Now what’s the grin about?”

“Merely thinking how well you fit the story of Robert Burns and the milkmaid.”

“A Morrie story, is it,” she turned to me quite coquettishly. “All right, I’m in for it, while you do something with this impossible bow, please.”

Going to her, I began, “Our man Burns is strolling along a country lane, no doubt writing poetry in his head by the ream, when who should he meet, a full pail in each hand, but a pretty milkmaid.” I tugged the bowstrings of Grace’s bonnet and her with it closer than absolutely necessary for tying, and continued. “Naturally he stops and bows and greets her, but she scarcely even replies and keeps on her way. Great one with the girls that he was,” I went on as my fingers flew with the bonnet strings and Grace listened with mock soberness, “this would not do, and he calls out after her, ‘Lass, d’ye not ken who I am?’”

“‘Nay, sir,’ she barely glances over her shoulder at him, ‘ought I?’”

“‘I’m Rabbie Burns,’” I finished the bow, and the story, with a flourish. “‘Ay, well,’ says she. ‘In that case, I’d better put my pails doon.’”

Grace whooped at the tale, poking my chest with a provocative finger. “I knew there must be some way around crying over spilled milk.”

•   •   •

Waiting for us at the bottom as we came giggling down the stairs were Griff and Hoop, attired as shepherds in rough clothes and sturdy boots. Not so different from their mining days, except for the tam-o’-shanters perched on their bald heads like tea cozies. Laughing like children playing dress-up, the four of us piled into a taxi where the driver barely glanced at us before setting out for the library.

Would you believe, the heavens sent the old romantic scamp of a poet a present on his birthday, a resplendent full moon, the night on a silver platter. Butte looked its best in the snowy dark, the lofty downtown buildings washed by the moonlight. Grace nudged me in the ribs—“Oh, look!”—as the taxi drew into view of the library itself, lit like a filigreed lantern, every window to the topmost in its Gothic tower an aperture of glow. “Doesn’t it remind you of the Rhine? Those castles.”

Up the broad steps we grandly went, arm in arm, bandannaed and bonneted, trailed by Griff and Hoop, wordless for once. Striding into the handsomely lit foyer, I had the uncanny sensation of returning to an earlier life, when Sandison for some reason known only to himself hired me as his assistant and the Butte Public Library became my abode. It was as if nothing had changed, the palatial proportions, the Tuscan red wainscoting, the ceiling panels of white and gold interset among the dark oaken beams, the all-seeing portrait of Shakespeare above the Reading Room doorway. Most regal of all, arrayed in ranks as if holding court on the mezzanine were the reds and greens and gilts of those books of Sandison’s unmatched collection.

Knowing my helpless affection for this citadel of literature, Grace pinched my elbow and whispered, “Welcome back.” But there was too much traffic in the royally decorated hallway for me to dawdle like a tourist. “Looky there, the mayor,” Hoop was murmuring to Griff about a stout personage attired, if I was not mistaken, like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. “Righto,” Griff responded in kind, “and that pack of deacons or whatever coming through the door are them trustees Sandy’s always grousing about.” In short, all manner of costumed partygoers were pouring in, wigs and crinolines and buckle shoes and tasseled shawls back in fashion, the crowd parting like water around a stationary massive figure, kilted and outfitted with sporran and dirk and a claymore broadsword in a decorated scabbard, a veritable statue of Highland legend. Except it was Sandison.

He let out a “Heh, heh” at the sight of us, Griff and Hoop chorusing in greeting, “Swell outfit.” Pointing with his beard, he instructed us that the festivities were getting under way downstairs. “Enjoy yourselves,” he ordered.

The tingle at being back in such familiar surroundings increased in me as we descended to the basement of the library, which was as snug a venue as could be found in a mile-high city with the temperature hovering near zero. The thick stone walls did away with noise from outside, and the curtained stage at one end of the long room nicely turned the space into an impromptu auditorium. In that earlier time, among the countless tasks Sandison tossed to me was juggling the calendar of organizations that met here in evenings, and while bunches such as the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle and Dora Sandison’s Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group not infrequently had given me fits with their needs and foibles, I found myself thinking back on them with something like nostalgia. Parts of the past lend themselves to that while others—

“Isn’t this a picture!” Grace’s exclamation did justice to the thronged scene we stepped into. Onstage, above the bewigged and bonneted heads of the multitude, was the Miners Band, magnificently embossed and brass-buttoned in their emerald green uniforms as they played a Burns air, “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon.” People were clustered thick around the food table, where serving girls dished out oatcakes and scones. Griff and Hoop wisely migrated toward the punch bowl.

“Mr. Morgan, you only lack a peg leg and a parrot.” Rab swooped on us from behind, Jared self-consciously following in the uniform of a lighthouse keeper, medallioned cap and all. She herself wore a startling blood-red gown, yards of it, which had Grace and me guessing until we hit upon ill-fated Mary, Queen of Scots.

“That leaves only our youngest member unaccounted for,” I said, looking around for Russian Famine.

Rab pointed. “That’s him over there, hopping like a jackrabbit.”

Off to one side, a number of children were playing peever, an Edinburgh street game that was a cross between rosey toesy and hopscotch. Sure enough, when I squinted my seeing eye, the wraith in a soldier uniform complete with a soup plate helmet was adroitly hopping from one chalked square to the next while lightly kicking the flat-sided peever stone along. “It’s one of Jared’s old uniforms I cut down to fit him, he insisted so,” Rab confided as if it were a family secret. “He absolutely worships this man of mine.”

“He’s at that age,” Jared said soberly. I still watched the boy, remembering the nimbleness of that time of life. While Grace and Rab chatted, Jared accepted attention from constituents dropping by to urge him to give ’em hell in the senate, “them” needing no translation. In an interval, he grinned at me and shook his head. “It’s a little different from when we had to hide out down here, wouldn’t you say, Professor?” One of my prouder moments had been smuggling him and other union men into this basement time after time to come up with the miners’ anthem that the labor movement had sorely needed at an earlier moment of suppression brought on by wartime hysteria. Music perhaps has no battalions, but it conquers worlds, too.

Just then the band struck up a dance tune—the schottische, of course—and Jared and I were practically swept off our feet by our eager wives. The evening galloped on that way for some time until a break in the music, and a chance to catch breath.

But as Grace and I adjourned from the dance floor, what wind I had left was nearly knocked out of me by a slap on the back. I turned around to the nearly coal-black face of Pat Quinlan. In old work clothes and a flat cap, he looked as though he had come straight from mucking out ore on the Hill, except the substance darkening him all the way to the eye sockets appeared really to be coal dust, not the usual grime that went with copper mining. “The Morgans!” he greeted us like the long lost. “Grace, you nabbed yourself a dilly with this one.” He winked at me as the worthy successor to her Arthur, one of his mates in the mines.

She recovered from the greeting, but not quite from the sight of him. “Quin, what ever are you supposed to be? A one-man minstrel show?”

“Let me guess,” I interposed. “A pitman.”

“Right the first try, Morgan my man. Solidarity with our brothers in the coal pits, over there in the thistle patch.”

“Very effective,” Grace said, still looking at him as if she would like to scrub him down. “A dancing man, are you? I didn’t know that.”

Quinlan laughed, more or less. “It’s Jared’s doing, my being here, I’ll warrant you. He’ll primp me into respectability if it kills us both.” He cast a look around at the crowd in its finery of make-believe. “Besides, I had to come to see how the other half lives, didn’t I?” All too casually, his gaze returned to me. “That reminds me. Might I have a word with you about when the Thunder is ever going to be accompanied by lightning?”

Grace cocked her head as if she had heard a rumble, all right. “You’ll find me at the punch bowl, Morrie.”

As she left, Quinlan moved in to speak confidentially, arms folded on his chest as he again took in the laughing, talking, dancing celebrants in the great room. “What I was saying to Grace I meant, you know. How many of them have ever been down a mineshaft? Or even up on the Hill, to see the way we live, see what it’s like on the hind tit of Anaconda?” He nudged me with his elbow. “You know Dublin Gulch.” I did. The sprawl of streets right in amid dump heaps of the mines, shanties with laden clotheslines bucking in the gritty wind. For moments longer Quinlan stared out of his coal dust mask of a face at the other Butte gathered there, then expelled a deep breath. “That’s just people, I suppose.” Lowering his voice, he came to the point. “I don’t mind telling you, the commotion about the copper collar you and Jared are kicking up in the newspaper is all well and good, but from where I sit, it’s also slower than the wrath of God.” Another wink from under the flat cap. “Tempus fidget, you know.” Joke that was not a joke, as he went on: “I don’t know how long I can bluff the company lackeys there in the Hennessy Building, in the bargaining. Oh, don’t think I mind ranting on a bit and giving them this.” He made that fist again. “It makes them squirm in those fine chairs of theirs polished by the seat of their tailored suits. I like that.

“Howsomever,” another of those gusty breaths practically up from his toes, “the buggers are starting to push back, more every session. They were on good behavior, for them, for a while there after shooting us down at the gate of the ’Sweat.” He laughed bitterly. “Even the so-called authorities, the sheriff and police and whatnot, thought that was a little much.” He tapped my arm as if in warning. “But now the company has something up its sleeve, or my mother didn’t name me Pat Quinlan. The snakes keep bringing up the dollar we won back in the last wage talks. So far, it’s still just dickering, but if they see the chance, they’ll take it away again, like that,” he snapped his fingers.

Pausing, he looked at me, eye patch and eye, to make sure I saw where this was heading. “We’ll have to take to the streets if that happens. Whatever Jared thinks, we’ll have to. This time, tear the town down, if it comes to that, soldiers be damned.” That came fiercely, then he settled back to merely darkly determined. “So, if you wonders at the Thunder are going to get any leverage on Anaconda, sooner is better.”

“I see, I think.”

“I figured you might. Well, don’t let me ruin the party for you. The good woman is waiting for you at the punch bowl.”

“Aren’t you partaking?”

Not unexpectedly, he slapped a side pocket of his pitman’s jacket. “When I want a nip, I carry my own. Tallyho, Morgan.” He moved off toward the end of the room, where Griff and Hoop and other old-timers were carrying on. “I’ll join the stag line. One thing about Butte, it has enough widows to keep life interesting.”

•   •   •

“What’s put the wind up him?” Grace wanted to know when I joined her.

“Quin’s a man in a hurry. Perhaps for good reason.”

“What did he want?”

“For me to hurry Jared along, against Anaconda.”

She pursed her lips in concern. “It doesn’t have to be tonight, I hope.”

“Lass, for you I’d postpone the end of the world,” I gave her my best Burns imitation, and she smiled, dimple deep. Fortified with punch, we moved along to the victuals end of the table, where Sandison had stationed himself in tartan lordliness, knees as big as hams showing beneath his kilt.

“Samuel, you certainly know how to throw a party,” Grace told him gaily, fanning herself. “I haven’t danced so much in years.”

“Scotch parties require a lot of footwork, Dora always said,” he responded mirthlessly.

I cocked a look, or at least half of one, at him. “I’m interested, Sandy, that you do not use the prescribed term ‘Scottish.’”

“Don’t be a jackass. The Dutch don’t call themselves the Duttish.”

Suddenly Rab swirled in on us, anxiously looking in every direction. “Have you seen Famine? I told him to stay here in the room with us, but he’s disappeared, the pup.”

Sometimes you just know. “I believe I can find him.” Grace granted me leave with the assurance that she wouldn’t turn into a wallflower with Hoop and Griff available to dance the light fantastic with her, and I went off in search of a junior wisp.

•   •   •

Fortunately I knew every nook and cranny of the building, from being dispatched by Sandison on every conceivable kind of librarianly chore. And if I were a boy—no, if the daredevil boy haunting my memory were Russian Famine—there would be one place above all others sure to lure him.

I took the shortcut of the back stairs and in a minute was in the rear of the darkened Reading Room. Guided by feel and instinct, I worked my way to the central desk, pausing there to listen. Somewhere overhead there was the hop hop hop sound of the peever game, although more lightly done.

Quietly as I could, I climbed the stairs to the mezzanine. Sure enough, there were the boots and puttees and helmet he had shed. I peered down the aisles between the lofty shelves of books, but could not make him out in the dimness. Careful to keep my voice down and not startle him, I softly called: “Famine? Your absence has been noticed by headquarters.”

Silence for a long moment, then another of the subdued hopping sounds.

“Mrs. Evans is awful nice, but she don’t trust me out of her sight.”

“I wonder why.”

“Beats me. I never busted my neck yet.”

“That may be, but she and Jared are naturally concerned when you vanish like that.” Still searching from aisle to aisle, I saw nothing but shadows. “All right, poltergeist, I give. Where are you?”

“Up top. What’s a poltergeese?”

Startled by the response literally over my head, I shot a look upward past the highest shelf of books. Belatedly remembering, I pushed up my eye patch to make sure of what I was seeing. Squatting on his haunches, gazing down at me for all the world like a stone carving in a cathedral eave, the light-haired boy roosted on the narrow top framing of the nearest set of bookshelves. Directly above the works of Tolstoy, if I was not mistaken. I realized he had been leaping from bookcase to bookcase, traversing the room without ever touching the floor.

“It’s a fancy word for ‘ghost,’” I answered his question, “which you will find out all too much about if you fall off there.”

“Nah. That’s why I’m in socken feet. Makes climbing around easier and such.”

“I’ll take your word on that. But you’re being missed at the party.”

“Nothing much going on there. I can do that dumb peever game with my eyes shut.”

“No doubt. There’s the matter of manners, though. Being nice to those who are nice to you.”

“I try, but it’s a pretty small bunch.” Suddenly grinning at me from his perch like a mischievous gargoyle, he asked, hushed, “Sir? Got ’em on you, in that rig?”

I clinked the brass knuckles in the swag pocket of my breeches. “I’m never without.”

“Attaway. A guy has to look out for hisself, don’t he.”

Springing to his feet as if taking off to fly, he toed back and forth along the precipitous top of the shelving like a tightrope walker; it was all I could do not to hold out my arms in the vain hope of catching him. Abruptly he crouched again, flipping the hair out of his eyes to peer down at me. “I figured I had the place all to myself. How’d you know I’d be here?”

“By divination.”

“Huh?”

“It simply occurred to me, is all.” True, as far as it went. Memory returned me to a first time, one of those markers in life. I had been filling in at the reference desk, answering questions about everything under the sun, when Rab appeared with her restive troop of sixth-graders, consigned to the basement for story hour. Trailing the others was this boy, awkward as if made out of sticks yet quick in every way, gazing hungrily around the holy Reading Room as if desperate to take in the world of grown-ups with their riches of books open before them. Nameless as he then was, I knew him in a flash, the teacher in me recognizing the restless soul, the burning wish to rise beyond his circumstances. Now the roles were reversed, something in my face giving me away as he scrutinized me from his perch. Hesitating, he spoke, more hushed yet. “Can I ask you a thing?”

“Anytime.”

“You ever get like me? Itchy to do something but you don’t know what?”

“On occasion,” I admitted to more than I wanted to.

“That’s good. I was afraid I was the only one with those kind of skitters.”

I braced for a slew of unanswerable questions, of how to contain wild urges and blind desires, the riptides in the blood. But Russian Famine only gave me that gremlin grin again, a gleam coming into his eyes. “Know what’s most fun for climbing around on?” He couldn’t wait for any guess from me. “The Hill.”

Seeing my puzzlement—the copper-rich rise of land was one of the most dangerous places on earth underground, but hardly any physical challenge above that—he confided further: “Those whatchums that stick up. Gallus frames.”

“Good heavens, those?” I should have known. Gallows frames, as the headframes were called that towered over the mineshafts to raise and lower elevator cages by cable and pulley. “Famine, that’s too dangerous, with the cable hoist running and all the other machinery that could catch your clothing or—”

“Huh-uh.” The expert’s scorn for my objection. “I only do it on the dead mines.” He looked at me shrewdly. “They shut the Muck a while back. That’s a good one. You can see plenty from up there.”

The demise of the Muckaroo, the one mine I had ever descended into, or ever intended to, came as startling news to me, an epitaph of a kind, and Famine shifted himself a little as if catching my discomfiture. Suddenly a spine-chilling note echoed through the building, making him freeze like a hunted quarry. “What’s that? Somebody getting killed?”

“If my ears don’t mislead me, it’s a bagpiper warming up. You’d better come on down—you wouldn’t want to miss the ceremony of piping in the haggis, now, would you?”

“Depends. What’s a haggis?”

“Food. Of a sort.”

“Huh. That sounds halfway interesting.”

“Now, how do you get down?”

“Easy. Same’s I got up.” Like a tightrope walker he tiptoed the length of the bookcase to the poetry section, where slim volumes left a few inches of exposed shelves, which he descended as handily as a ladder. Alighted and scooping up his soldier gear and already in motion toward the source of the not yet melodious wails, he glanced over his shoulder at me. “You coming?”

“At my own speed. Don’t inquire too closely about what’s in the haggis, all right?”

Off he went, scooting down the back stairs, but by impulse I chose to go out through the Reading Room. A pale cast of light from the foyer lent just enough outline to the massive oaken tables and softly conjured the Romanesque clock above the reference desk as I gripped the banister in my descent. If I had been able to levitate like a certain wraith of boy, right then is when I would have, for these old loved surroundings cast me into a spell of my own. My introduction to the Butte Public Library, and to Samuel Sandison and so much else, had taken place in this very room when I requested the Latin edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars—my own copy a victim of the luggage-devouring railroad—and realized from the tanned leather cover and exquisitely sewn binding that I was in a literary treasure house. What a wealth we are granted, in the books that carry the best in us through time. Now, as if in that daydream state between waking and sleeping, I wound through the maze of darkened chamber with my smile lighting the way.

Only to go cold as I stepped into the illuminated foyer. A pair of overcoated figures, hats low on their brows, lurked in the nearby corner of the otherwise empty lobby. They were ogling me with an astonishment equal to mine with them.

“Boss!”

Before I could draw back, the broad face of Smitty loomed into mine. “What a disguise! If we didn’t know it was you, we wouldn’t know it was you, huh, Ralphie?”

“Ain’t that the truth.” The other bootlegger goggled at my knee breeches.

Smitty meanwhile was squinting hard at my pirate patch. “I bet I get it. Keeping an eye on the jerks who run the town, right?”

I managed to coarsen what there was of my voice. “You said it.”

“Smart.” Smitty clucked in admiration. “They got to get up early to beat you, boss. Wait till we get back to the warehouse and tell the boys how slick the Highliner is, it don’t matter where or when.” He turned to his sidekick and tenderly took something in soft wrapping from him. “Since you’re here, how about you deliver the baby?”

I nearly dropped what he deposited in my arms before I realized the gurgle it made was the liquid sort, not the infantile kind. Peeking inside the wrapping, I read the label on the bottle. OLD BALLYCLEUCH, 90 PROOF. “We had to send all the way to Calgary for it,” Smitty said proudly, his fellow bootlegger nodding in reverent affirmation.

“I’ll mind the bundle of joy,” I borrowed some of Sandison’s gruffness without apology.

“Swell, boss, we’ll leave you to it.” Smitty gave one last admiring wag of the head at my pirate costume. “C’mon, Ralphie, back to the egg truck.”

“Wait.”

They stopped in their tracks. I glanced the length of the corridor to make sure it was deserted, both of them doing the same. “Tell the boys—”

They hung on my words.

“Keep the hens setting.”

“Right, boss!”

“You bet, boss!”

•   •   •

Downstairs, the dancing was breaking up in anticipation of the haggis ceremony. Grace, looking flushed from twirls around the floor with Griff and Hoop, met me with a whoosh of relief. “I’d nearly given you up for lost, you.” She touched a curious finger to the parcel I was so carefully cradling. “So, Captain Kidd, what do you have there? Buried treasure?”

A closer guess than she might have thought, actually. Telling her it was a delivery for our host and I would explain later, I sidled off through the crowd, trying to look unobtrusive, toward the punch bowl table where Sandison still presided like a Highland chieftain. His frosty eyebrows cocked slyly when he saw the bundle in my arms. “You look like you’re carrying nitroglycerin,” he chortled as I edged in close enough for us to talk without being overheard.

“It maybe amounts to the same. Old Ballycleuch, Sandy?”

“Heh.” He poked into the wrapping enough to verify the bottle of scotch. “That’s the stuff. Strong enough, it probably walked from Scotland by itself.”

Glancing nervously toward where the mayor and the police chief stood swapping jokes, I hissed to him: “Need I remind you it is a prohibited substance? As in Prohibition, remember?”

“I must have missed that page in the book of fools. Hand me that lemonade pitcher.” Shielding the action with the bulk of his body, he emptied it into the punch bowl, then barked, “Make yourself useful, can’t you? Get around here and pour the needful into the pitcher, hurry up.”

We got the job done just as a wild skirl of tune announced the bagpiper entering the auditorium, followed by two other kilted figures bearing the haggis platter between them. The contingent advanced in a slow march as the bagpipe brayed and huffed, until reaching the victuals table, where a spot had been cleared for the prize of the night. As was his due, Sandison posted himself there to preside as the wail of the pipes wound down and the red-faced piper awaited his traditional reward.

Grandly Sandison hoisted the pitcher in one hand and a tumbler in the other, then with a generous hand poured what looked for all the world like lemonade, meanwhile booming the customary question, “Piper, wha’ll ye ha’ in your libation?”

“More libation, mon.”

Pouring further, Sandison included a glassful for himself to toast the deserving bagpiper and then the poet of the land of thistle and heather and lastly the crowd—“Here’s to honest men and bonnie lasses!”—with a healthy swig each time. “And now for the food of the gods!” So saying, he advanced to the victuals table, flourished the ceremonial dirk, and grandly cut into the haggis for serving.

Glimpsing the mushy gray contents, Hoop and Griff along with a good number of others faded back, but Grace, ever the provider of meals, and I, incurably curious, tried the haggis. “It’s not as bad as you might think,” she judged, maybe the best that could be said for a recipe that begins, Take one sheep’s stomach . . .

Once the Scotch version of feasting was done, the only thing left on the evening’s program was a parting message from our host. Sandison, however, showed no sign of mounting the stage and in fact had withdrawn behind the punch bowl again. Something in his manner told me to visit the situation, and I excused myself to the others.

Standing there as pensive as it is possible for a bare-kneed white-maned colossus to look, Sandison was gazing off somewhere in a world of his own. Well, the lord and master of the Butte Public Library and its birthday gala had every right, didn’t he. But there was still the matter of an auditorium full of guests starting to mill uncertainly.

“The shade of Rabbie Burns awaits an appropriate good-night, Sandy,” I exuded encouragement as I came up to him, “as do the rest of us.”

“I can’t do it, Morgan.” He was clutching the pitcher of scotch to his breast with both arms and I realized a significant amount of its contents must have gone into him. “Dora always did this part,” he blubbered, with tears leaking into his beard. “You’ll have to.”

“Me? Oh, no. I haven’t a clue how to end a Scotch soiree.”

“Don’t quibble.” He snuffled. “Just get up there, slowpoke.”

Pressed into service, I nearly tripped on the steps leading to the stage—the confounded eye patch—as I tried to think what to do or say. The trouble with Burns is that he is like Shakespeare; everyone’s head already was full of language on loan from him. The best laid schemes o’ mice and men. Let us do or die! Nae man can tether time or tide. My love is like a red, red rose. Should auld acquaintance . . . Why could the Scotch bard not have been less prolific?

Gulping, I took my position at center stage as the audience quieted in anticipation or apprehension, it was impossible to tell which. The faces of Grace and Rab and Jared, at first surprised, were gamely supportive, and behind their backs Russian Famine grinned conspiratorially at the sight of me at that unexpected elevation. The Miners Band onstage in back of me, though, were gathering their music sheets and starting to put away their instruments. Down front, the dignitary brigade, as I thought of them, the whiskery trustees and city fathers, were glancing back and forth in perplexity at Sandison’s absence and my presence. Depend on it, in the back of the crowd Quinlan cupped his hands and called out, “Show us your tonsils, man!”

Think, Morgan! I enjoined myself, think how to end this labyrinthine evening. And not for the first time, the library itself came to my aid. One of Famine’s toeholds had been that shelf of Tolstoy, the immortal holdings of War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Kreutzer Sonata and most pertinently Anna Karenina. The splendid ball that Anna attends at the Shcherbatskys’ palace floated in my mind like a vision, and while Butte was not nearly Moscow except for snowfall, a dance floor bridges many differences. I had only to pluck the right opening note, whatever that was.

“As the strains of the bagpipe have reminded us,” I put that as generously as I could, “Robert Burns’s native land was a commonwealth of music as well as of rhyme. Therefore, it may be fitting to conclude this evening of festivity with a musical excursion that takes in his Scotland, the old country, and our own land, the new.” There is a trick to speaking swiftly and firmly enough that a crowd has to listen to catch up. “This particular promenade dates from 1773, when James Boswell accompanied the learned Dr. Johnson on their tour of the Hebrides,” I sped on. “Hosted on the Isle of Skye, the two of them joined in, Boswell tells us, a reel of ‘involutions and evolutions,’ suggesting the partings and arrivals of emigration. It was, in the wonderfully simple words of Boswell, ‘a dance called America.’”

Quickly I hummed a snatch of what passed for a reel to the suddenly alert Miners Band. The bandmaster allowed as how they could probably do something with that. Turning to the crowd, I quickly described the sequence, the first couple addressing the pair behind them before whirling away, the next couple addressing the third, until the entire line of dancers was awhirl in a great circle. “First in procession, fittingly,” I extended a gesture as if I were the master of the ball, Shcherbatsky-style, directly at the suddenly sobering Sandison, “shall be our incomparable host, the Butte city librarian!”

While the band worked up the tune and I clapped a rhythm, Grace alertly slipped over to Sandison and separated him from the scotch pitcher, seized him by a reluctant arm, and steered him to the head of the line with her. Rab and Jared stepped lively into place behind them. Hoop and Griff, no slouches, each picked a willing widow, and with some hesitation even Quinlan did the same. The mayor, proving himself a good sport, joined arms with his wife next. On down the procession the couples multiplied, downtowners and those from the Hill, old-timers and newcomers dancing as one in a Rocky Mountain outpost where copper and blood mingled, all in the dance called America.