10  

AND AS PLANNED, the next day’s Thunder featured, in the top-of-the-page spot where my editorial customarily held forth, an extended “Voices of the Hill.”

I worked in the mines for all of my life that amounted to anything, and on my first day in the Nevada Bonanza my three names, Maynard Emlyn Hooper, got barbered down to one, Hoop. Ten years old, I was. Starting out as putter boy, fetching tools and feeding the mules and so forth all the way down in the old Boney. I wasn’t so poorly off as Huck Finn with that no-good Pap of his, but my old man was what you might call seasonal, going off somewhere for months on end and leaving my mother and us six kids to get by as best we could. It’s funny about life—the only way I could see to go up in the world was down there in the hard rock where it was hotter than the hinges of Hell. I stuck with it, and by the time I was fourteen, I was as much a miner as anybody, following the ore from one place to the next.

Which is how I lit into Butte from the silver diggings in Alta, Utah, where the boss was Marcus Daly. Mark Daly could see into the ground deeper than any other man, and I figured he was worth tagging along with when he came here to the Hill to have a look. I was on the crew in the Anaconda, a good enough mine but nothing special as far as anybody knew, when he had us blast into some “new material,” as it was called, at the 300-foot level. I was standing right there when he picked up a chunk of ore with copper showing all through it and turned to the foreman and said, “Mike, we’ve got it!” That was the making of Butte, the largest deposit of copper in the world, and it set a lot of us up to stay and be miners here. It was not a bad life then. Marcus Daly always got along with the union, and things were pretty peaceful on the Hill. It was a sad day for Butte when he let the Anaconda get away from him and the ownership changed from day to night.

Later on, I was in the shape-up when the first shaft of the Neversweat was being opened, and this fellow came up to me and said, “You look like you know which end of an eight-pound sledge to hold. Want a partner?” And that was Griff. We got ourselves known as a flash team with the hammer and steel, before drilling changed over to the air pressure machines. We was never out of work in the mines together, in the Lucky Jim, the Shamrock, the Frisco, and a bunch of others. We seen a lot. Men hurt or killed, right near us. We’re only alive because we worked the earlier shift at the Speculator, before the big fire trapped all those men.

You get a little old, though, and the work gets to be too much for you. These days, Griff and me are new in the occupation of owning a boardinghouse—first thing we’ve ever owned besides our mining helmets and the clothes on our backs. But we’re in a spot. We don’t see how we can make a go of it, what with the taxes on the property. It just seems to us a strange situation, where working people have to be hit so heavy while we know perfectly well the biggest company in the state can afford to pay up but doesn’t. It makes a person wonder how things got so upside down.

There, I crowed to myself as soon as I felt the vibration of the press whirling those words into the world: If, reader of the Thunder, Hoop’s tale does not speak to your heart, it is made of harder ore than the Hill’s.

•   •   •

Grace served up the fondest of smiles that suppertime and Sandison gruffly congratulated Hoop—alongside, Griff beamed as if the credit were just as much his—who shyly maintained that the newspaper piece was nothing much, “just some gab Morrie took down on paper.”

Sandison glanced over at me with amusement. “The moving finger having writ, ay? And moves on to what, Morgan?”

“You shall see,” I said, like the magician withholding the rabbit in the hat. “In Jared we trust.”

If I thought that would satisfy Sam Sandison, I had another think coming. Grace and I were on our way up to bed when we heard him call from his library lair, “Step in here a minute, Pluvius. Excuse us, madam. I’ll return him to you in working order.” Rolling her eyes, Grace mouthed, “Don’t stay too late,” and headed on upstairs.

He had his back to me when I stepped in, shelving a scattering of the books that lived in piles around the room. “The Creation story of Butte in Hoop’s own words,” he said over his shoulder. “Very moving. Damn near biblical. Anaconda’s rag had better think twice before ripping into a poor old miner who has everyone’s sympathy, hadn’t it.” He turned half around, eyeing me over a ridge of shoulder. “Clever.”

“Why, thank you, Sandy. Even better, it’s true. Principally.”

“Wipe the feathers off your whiskers.” He gave me The Look. “What if they find out about the boardinghouse shenanigan?”

“I prefer to call it a ploy,” I protested, a bit for show. “Merely a necessary tactic. A mild subterfuge. Well, you see my point, I’m sure.” The Look did not bear that out. “Sandy, I assure you we are being very careful to stick to the letter of the law. Hoop and Griff are the owners of record ever since a down payment which, let me finish, took place at least on paper, and in time to come, they will simply fail to make their payments, and the property reverts to Grace, under her previous name.” I whisked my hands together as if that took care of that. “It was the one way I could think of to bring the battle down to the level of the reading public’s wallets. Was I wrong?”

He grunted neutrally. Clomping to his desk, he picked up a volume of Appleton’s Cyclopædia of American Biography, the famous edition with no fewer than forty-seven fraudulent entries, rather coincidentally, and glancing at the empty spot on the shelf and deciding it was too much trouble to cross the room again, added it to a pile. “All right, you have the snake by the tail, let us say. What now?”

“The next step is Jared’s,” I said with confidence. “It’s all in the plan.”

•   •   •

The Post temporized frantically after Hoop’s tale of tax distress, practically inventing new dance steps to get around the issue. Scriptoris, showing the strain, dodged off into the generality that property assessments were purely a local matter overseen by a duly elected assessor, ignoring the fact that Anaconda’s handpicked candidate for that office always strangely won and prospered in life thereafter.

Meanwhile, letters to the editor sympathetic to the plight of Hoop and Griff poured in to the Thunder. “Here’s another doozy, lords and ladies,” Armbrister trumpeted across the newsroom, plucking the prize from the overflowing mail basket. “‘Why must the rest of us be soaked while Anaconda floats above it all? Drown the reptile in fair taxation!’” Over the cheers and guffaws, he called over to me, “They’re doing your job for you, Morgie, bless their angry souls.”

Not to the extent I might have wished, as it turned out on what would go down in Thunder history as the red-letter day.

The elated editor and I were debating whether to pull an AOT piece out of overset and settle for that or fill the editorial hole with a fresh Pluvius offering on the plight of the Hoops of the world, when Jared Evans made his appearance, still in his senatorial suit and tie but also wearing a warrior’s conquering grin. At the jerk of his head, Armbrister and I stepped out into the editor’s sanctum with him.

“We’re ready,” Jared told us, tired but exultant. “It took so much arm-twisting that half the legislature look like pretzels, but the votes are lined up and the governor will sign it.” His eyes met mine, the message there before he spoke it. “Let’s tell the world, copper is going to start paying its way. Get out the big type, Jacob.”

Armbrister checked the clock and grimaced. “It’ll have to be damn fast, Morgie.”

“Duly noted.”

I raced to my typewriter, flexed my fingers, prayed to the gods of the alphabet, and began.

The time has come. For far too long, the Treasure State has been robbed of a source of its natural wealth—the jealously guarded profits of the mining industry. As this newspaper has chronicled, under the influence of the Anaconda Company and its Wall Street owners the tax burden has fallen almost entirely on the home owner—which is to say, the miner, the storekeeper, the rancher, the farmer, all of the citizenry shut out of the narrow corridors of power in Helena and unable to prevail in local elections where a certain key candidate proves to be bought and paid for by the company.

Does this mean there is nothing to be done, and Montana is forever doomed to have its mineral treasure extracted nearly tax-free while its citizenry must pay in full to support roads, schools, and other necessities of civil society? Absolutely not. To remedy this fiscal injustice, the Thunder is proud to propose a plan as simple as it is fair. Even as we go to press and these words reach your eyes, Senator Jared Evans is preparing to introduce a measure that will put to a statewide vote the creation of a tax commission to review the levels of revenue from all—all—segments of society. . . .

It was here that Jared’s twist came in—a lovely double snare, really—for Anaconda and its political puppets; the war may have cost him the bottom of an ear, but it certainly taught him the art of ambush. Precisely according to the plan he, Rab, Armbrister, and I worked out one night at the Purity, only legislators willing to openly wear the copper collar—even the dimmest of politicians had to choke at that—could oppose letting voters have their say on something that hit home in every pocketbook, and once approved, a tax commission was the ready route to a state levy on mining properties or, lo, even profits. And not coincidentally, a seat on that cocked-and-loaded commission to be appointed by the governor was quietly reserved, with a wink and a handshake, for Senator Evans of the city of Butte. It was almost enough to make an editorial writer swoon. At one swoop, Jared’s proposed legislation—and the philippic I was composing as fast as my fingers could fly—took the tax iniquity out of the hands of the company’s stooges in the legislature and assessor’s offices. Abracadabra, and one link of the copper collar was gone. I would have cheered myself hoarse if I hadn’t been so busy writing.

I pounded out the last of the editorial just as Armbrister shouted “Copyboy! Make it snappy, damn it!” As he and Jared gave my words one last careful look, he said aside to me, “Needs a grabber, Morgie, see what you can come up with.” Wheeling back to my typewriter, almost without thinking I produced:

What Is To Be Done?

That hurried headline seemed to fit the case, the copyboy went scrambling away to the typesetter with the finished result, and like mountaineers who had scaled a treacherous escarpment, the jubilant three of us—editor, publisher, and editorialist—slapped one another on the back in the rare alpine air of success.

•   •   •

Then the strangest thing. No word was heard from the Post in response, rebuttal, refutation, anything. A day passed, another, two more, then three, and it was as if Scriptoris had taken no notice of a proposal that would shake Anaconda in its giant boots, and all in the world the Post was concerned about were the old standbys, potholes, and patriotism.

“I don’t like it.” Armbrister tossed the latest namby-pamby example in the trash with the rest of the week’s worth. “They’re too quiet over there. The sunuvabitches.”

“I’ll take it,” Jared said with relief. “While they’ve got their heads stuck in Afghanistan or wherever you call it, we’re building support for the tax commission vote all the time. The Stockmen’s Association is lined up to pass a resolution—we can thank Williamson for that, the Farm Bureau will follow suit, and, get this, every lodge in Butte, from the Moose to the Knights of Columbus, is with us. Not to mention these.” He fondly patted the overflowing mail basket.

Even the saturnine editor had to admit things appeared to be going well, although not before snapping the question to me, “The boardinghouse boys—they making sure to do their part?”

I assured him Griff and Hoop were going through the motions of new property owners, and with them, motions were loudly noticeable. They enthusiastically spoke of having the boardinghouse open—with Grace’s consent, of course—for the summer turnover, when numbers of miners returned to families in the old country and newcomers drawn by the smoky beacon of the stacks of the Neversweat arrived to take their place. I saw no reason to add that Hoop and Griff, for company’s sake, still slept and ate at the manse.

Thus it was that I left work at the end of one of those heady days of editorial cloudwalking in the best of moods, humming the “America” reel from the Burns celebration as I started home. Spring was providing more definite indicators than Sandison’s sniff sorting the Hill smoke from pleasant airs to come; any tree that managed to survive in Butte was showing buds, nature’s assertion that hope springs eternal. Caught up in the season and my even sunnier mood, I did not pay particular mind when my usual route was interrupted by a broken water main, which had turned the street into a pond.

As a glum municipal crew tried to stem the flood, I detoured through an alley that brought me out on an unfamiliar backstreet. The prime business on the block, from the look of it an original bucket-of-blood saloon, now announced itself as the MILE-HIGH BILLIARDS AND PINOCHLE SOCIAL CLUB, making me chuckle at the resourcefulness of speakeasies. Although the enterprise evidently had not yet opened for the evening, out front a hawk-nosed man in a bowler hat was holding forth to a uniformed policeman, gesturing in frustration at the purported social club. He broke off at the sight of me.

“Well, well. Speak of the devil.” Swaggering up to me, he thrust his face practically into mine. “Couldn’t resist dropping by”—he jerked his head toward the speakeasy—“to see how business is, huh?”

“You are mistaken,” I sputtered, drawing back from his intrusion. “I’m a, a property owner and a taxpayer and a fully employed—”

“The mistake’s all yours, Highliner,” he sneered the word, “showing your face around here in broad daylight. Rub our noses in it, I suppose you think, strutting around collecting your bootlegging swag like a real businessman. We’ll see about that.” Hawknose flashed a badge and practically purred, “Let’s run him in, Murph.”

“No, wait, I’m not—” The uniformed policeman, the burly sort called a harness bull, clamped me by the biceps. “Shut your yap and come on along to the station house.”

•   •   •

There, the desk sergeant sat back in shock. “Jaysis, Davis, you’ll be arresting the pope next.”

“If I catch him running booze right under our noses, you better bet I will.” The hawk-nosed detective cut off my attempt to protest that I had been doing no such thing. “Book him on something or other—‘spitting on the sidewalk’ will do until I can come up with better charges—and toss him in the drunk tank. We’ll see how he likes his customers for company.”

•   •   •

The view from behind bars was a disturbing one. The world abruptly striped with iron, smelling bad, and rife with company of dubious character. My cell mates were a pale, bony man still wearing a full-length apron that marked him as a dishwasher, traditional occupation of drunks, and a stouter individual with the characteristic stoop of a miner. The aproned one had the shakes. In a cracked voice he asked me, “Got a flask on you, buddy?”

“Sorry, I’m not equipped.”

“Dressed like that and you don’t carry a drink of no kind? What are you, some kind of camel?”

The other inmate, marginally less unsteady, ogled me with a slowly dawning expression. “Say. You ain’t—?”

“You’re right, I’m not.”

“We unnerstand, don’t worry. A guy starts owning up, it can get to be a bad habit, can’t it.” Shielding his mouth with his hand, he whispered something to his jail mate. The shaky one said, “Ooh.” The other continued, low enough not be heard outside the cell, “He gives the cops fits.” They both took a wobbly step back in tribute. “You can have the lower bunk.”

I lay down and put my hat over my eyes, to try to let this nightmare pass. Of all the people on the planet I could resemble, why did it have to be the kingpin of a gang of bootleggers? True, the Highliner seemed to run a masterfully efficient operation, judging by that tempting cache of cash I had glimpsed at the warehouse, but he still was a lawbreaker, even if the law was a supremely stupid one. If I had to have a twin, why not Charlie Chaplin or George Bernard Shaw or some other personality the world would heap with riches and esteem instead of perilous misapprehensions? Finally worn out by the traffic of such thoughts and aided by the considerate shhs of my cell mates to each other, I drifted off to the only escape at hand, slumber.

•   •   •

I awoke on the jail bed to Sandison frowning through the bars at me. “Turn him loose,” he wearily told the hawk-nosed detective at his side. “I know him like a bad habit.”

“If he’s not the Highliner,” the detective protested, “then who is he?”

“My butler, you fool.” Sandison scowled at me. “The next time I send you downtown for cigars, do you think you can stay out of trouble?”

“I’ll make every effort.”

•   •   •

We left the jail, the clangor of the nearest mines on the Hill following us as we headed home in the dusk. After the first wordless block or so, Sandison glanced at me. “What’s the matter? Your jailbird phase make you forget how to talk?”

“‘Butler,’ Sandy?” I gave him a look. “You could just as easily have said I’m your landlord.”

“Tch tch, hurt feelings? Maybe I should have left you in there with the bedbugs and barflies.”

“How did you know I was incarcerated?”

“The boy. Snickelfritz or whatever you call him.”

“Russian Famine, in reality. Thank heaven he watches out for me.”

“Someone needs to, Morgan. You seem to be a walking lightning rod.” An observation of the sort from the Earl of Hell did not lift my spirits any. “The whippersnapper came tearing into the library to find me, saying he’d been delivering newspapers to the jail as usual when he spotted you back there in the drunk tank. ‘Must’ve got into that libation stuff,’ he told me.” Sandison’s upper half shook with amusement. “Sharp lad.”

•   •   •

“Jail, Morrie. That’s not good.”

“Grace, it could have happened to anyone of my general appearance under the circumstances.”

“I thought you just said it was a million-to-one chance that you happen to be the spitting image of this Highliner person.”

“Paradoxical, but true.”

She softened the next with a bit of a smile, but concern was behind it. “I don’t remember that part in the wedding vows.”

“Only because ‘for better and for worse’ sounds less dire,” I muttered, undressing for bed. Already in her nightie, Grace undid her braid and shook her hair for brushing. She watched me in the dresser mirror while silently counting her strokes. Much too disturbed to settle in for the night, I paced the floor in my slippers and pajamas, trying to reach some conclusion. If my stint in jail was upsetting to Grace, the shotgun blast from the other side of the law in my first encounter with the Highliner’s shadow world of bootlegging would be decidedly more so, were I to tell her the whole thing. Yet it would hardly be right to leave her wondering what manner of mannequin she was married to. The remedy was drastic, but had to be swallowed. Going to Grace, I nuzzled her cheek as the hairbrush paused in mid-stroke. “I have something to tell you, darling.”

What a picture we made as a couple, caught there in the mirror’s reflection, she as violet-eyed and pleasant-faced as a maiden in a Dutch painting and I in my set expression of determination, my beard practically bristling with resolve as I announced my decision. “I am going down to the barbershop tomorrow and have it shaved off.”

Grace took in my mirrored image before finally saying, “Let me be sure I’m following this development. You intend to make the earthshaking change to clean-shaven in order to not look . . . paradoxical?”

“Exactly. More or less.”

She pursed her lips coquettishly. “Naturally I’ll miss the whiskers. But of course, you must do what you think is right.”

•   •   •

Sacrificing a beard may sound easy, but believe me, it is more than a matter of lather and razor. There is an attachment that goes beyond the follicles. My crop of whiskers had been carefully grown during our honeymoon year, and thus was a kind of keepsake of that romantic time. And a cultivated beard had proved to be a successful disguise on our travels, permitting me to pass with impunity even through the Chicago train station, in proximity to the gambling mob and its window men. No, shaving it off would be like losing an old friend, one who had served well. My reflection in the downtown store windows was more than a little guilty, the upper part of my face apologizing to the lower half. Why couldn’t the damnable Highliner shave his? A mute question, as Hoop and Griff would have called it, and I trudged on toward the barbershop.

I was passing the Thunder building when Armbrister thrust his head out the office window. “Morgie! Damn it, man, we’ve been looking high and low for you.”

“I’ll be in later,” I called back, “I’m on my way to a tonsorial appointment.”

“Never mind that, get yourself up here right this minute. We’ve got big trouble.”

When I entered the newsroom, the entire staff was clustered around Armbrister’s desk. He was scowling down into what I could tell was our contraband early copy of the day’s Post, the ink practically dripping from it. “All right, everybody. Hold on to your hats and listen to this.”

The Truth Comes Out. In Red.

What is black and white and red all over?

The usual punch line, cue the guffaw, is a newspaper, read to the fullest extent of the pun and readerly endurance. But there is a wholly unfunny answer when the gazette in question is the daily issuance of ominous noise that calls itself the Thunder. For it has revealed its true colors, and those are, in the anthem of revolutionaries awaiting their chance, deepest red.

“Whaaat? Have they gone loony?” Hoots and groans and profanities chorused until Armbrister held up a hand. “It gets worse.”

Consider this: The Thunder’s latest jeremiad against the existing order in the mining industry—which is to say the capitalistic system—was brazenly headlined What Is To Be Done? Which was, let’s don’t mince words, the exact question of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, with which he titled his published blueprint for undermining the existing order in Russia and seizing power for his ruthless socialistic coterie. It is all there, the plan for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it surfaces now on American soil with the coaxing of a supposedly legitimate newspaper. The telltale phrase is a code for Bolshevism, nothing less and nothing more.

That was met with stunned silence. My head felt as if it were going to burst.

Armbrister read on.

The Red menace takes various forms—anarchist bombs and bullets, on-the-job sabotage by the Industrial Workers of the World (the so-called Wobblies; may they wobble back to their holes) that this industrial community only lately has rid itself of through apt governmental prosecutions and direct action—but here is a new and insidious manifestation, striking at the profits that pay the wages that provide prosperity. As the mouthpiece for the radical element in the miners’ union, the Thunder is slickly setting the tune for nothing less than the soviet of Butte.

It’s enough to make an honest patriot see red and hurl those bespoiled batches of newsprint being peddled on the street into the nearest trash can, isn’t it.

There was more, much more. All of it invective, expertly done. The blood seemed to have drained out of the Thunder staff; I am sure I had turned pale as a ghost.

When Armbrister finally recited the last iota of innuendo, he removed his eyeshade and mopped his brow. The younger staff members glanced around nervously. Mary Margaret Houlihan moved her lips in prayer.

As for me, I had an awful feeling in my gut. From lede to end, Scriptoris never saw the day when he could deploy language in so deadly a fashion. In the stunned silence of my colleagues, I asked, “How . . . how is it signed?”

With extreme distaste, Armbrister read off the editorial signature beneath the diatribe: “‘Cutlass.’”

Of course. It would be.