17  

“I SEE THE BATS and owls haven’t moved in quite yet.”

Even Sandison’s growl about my less than inspired housekeeping was welcome, just to have him out of the hospital and back in the manse for companionship, such as it was. Whatever might be the fit description of a crabby wild-bearded shooting victim stalking through the place in cowboy boots, deafening silence was the farthest thing from it. His wound still nagged him, a fact he acknowledged only by grunting through set teeth whenever he sat down or stood up. The absence of Grace, and for that matter Hoop and Griff, told grievously on the pair of us as we went about domestic life only fractionally, the way bachelors do. I cooked as necessary, Sandison ate without comment. Nobody dusted, swept, or mopped on any regular basis; no offense to my dear wife, but never had I missed Rose and her housekeeping skills so much.

Say for Sandison, however, grumblesome and moody as he was, he was not unfair on larger matters. Try as he might, he could find no fault with my juggling of the public library’s ledger in his absence—“One thing about you, Morgan, you know the meaning of legerdemain, heh, heh”—or for the most part, my handling of scheduling and personnel matters. He nonetheless was chafing to get back to bossing the Butte Public Library from top to bottom himself, which I daily had to restrain him from. “Sister Magdalena”—she of the majestic wimple—“instructed me you are to take it easy until your side is completely healed, no exceptions.”

“Sister Magdalena holds the firm belief men can’t blow their noses without hurting themselves,” he could only mutter to that, listing to one side as he sulked off to his book-lined lair down the hall. Fortunately I’d had the foresight to simply stack on his desk the book parcels that arrived while he was hospitalized, and after heaving himself around in his chair until his side hurt least, he would settle in there like some Rip Van Winkle catching up on Christmases by opening the packages and turning the pages as carefully as a boy. Many a morning I left him engrossed in some fine edition of Turgenev or Blake or Balzac or Whitman, and would find him at the end of the day dozing in peace over the open book.

•   •   •

There was no such peacefulness in my working hours, as I grappled daily with what Cutthroat Cartwright threw at the Thunder and Jared and the tax commission plan, which the Post continued to imply—although not in so many words, since my desperate defusing of the “What Is To Be Done?” imbroglio—was a union-conceived plan to undermine capitalism and cause the crash of America into Russia-like rubble. I am happy to say he equally had to fend with what I flung in Anaconda’s direction. Thank heaven Theodore Roosevelt’s unrestrained enthusiasms had included smiting his foes with that Latinate billy club, “malefactors of great wealth”; my typing fingers continued to play every tune I could think of that hit the notes of the tax burden maleficently heaped on the honest citizens of the Treasure State while the copper colossus paid hardly pennies. Pluvius and Cutlass, we were hammer and tong, day after day as the newspaper war was shouted out in the streets of Butte by our newsboys and theirs.

Howsomever, as Griff would have said, the weak point, if there was one in Jared’s plan of attack, was the amount of time it was taking. The statewide vote could not be held until autumn, a special election set for the first Tuesday of September. Propitiously, the day after Labor Day, a conjunction that made Cutlass howl to high heaven in print, but Jared and his Ulcer Gulch allies had managed it somehow, perhaps by black magic. Pluvius didn’t ask. In any case, the showdown date was months off yet, an interval that made me uneasy. Caught up in the heat of competition, the Thunder staff gleefully produced news pages that shone with sharp writing and keen coverage and seemed exhilarated by the fight in which our typewriters and telephones served as artillery. But Armbrister and I, going over my editorials, which somehow had to keep up the barrage until election day, exchanged glances now and then that said, without ever daring to utter the word aloud, stalemate.

•   •   •

The one clear victory of this time was Russian Famine’s. I jumped up when I saw him slip into the office from the back shop with his newspaper bag jauntily slung at his side, grinning despite another split lip. “Done it,” he boasted, grabbing his daily allotment of gumdrops from the candy jar and popping one into his mouth. “A dumb Postie jumped me again. He got some licks in, but it ended up I cleaned his clock good.” Seasoned pugilist though he now was, he could not help giggling at the next. “He never seen the left hook coming.”

“Nicely done, Capper,” I said without thinking, my tongue slipping back more than a dozen years.

“Huh?”

“I merely meant, I wish I had been there to watch you at it.”

The giggles contending with his attempt at nonchalance, Famine imparted: “Jared says he’s real proud of me, sticking up for myself like that. Mrs. Evans scolded me, you know how they do,” now speaking man to man about the ways of women. “But I think she was kind of tickled, too.”

“As are we all,” I told him warmly, “when the side that deserves to wins.”

•   •   •

“It happened out of the blue” is one of those phrases worn smooth to cliché, I realize, but a wording of that sort endures because there is no better way to say it.

Consequently, I was enjoying myself on the steps of the public library, having ducked out for a breath of air that agreeable June forenoon—by the calendar, summer was not yet here, but it felt like it—while filling in for Sandison on some minor directorial matter, when I noticed something odd taking place on the Hill. More precisely, in the otherwise clear blue sky above the dominant rise of ground. One after another, the plumes of smoke from the seven stacks of the Neversweat were diminishing to nothing as each drifted off and vanished. Along with that, as though the disappearing smoke were taking the usual machinery noise with it, the Hill quieted steadily down as I stood watching until it fell silent.

In that ominous moment, I strained to hear the dreaded whistles signaling for medical aid, but there was not even that sound. Puzzled, I pulled out my watch and checked. Right on schedule it was time for the change of shifts, but ordinarily that did not stop the throb of mining operations at all.

By now people in the street had stopped to look questioningly up at the earthen height humped on Butte’s back and the silent headframes spearing the sky, and my feet had found their way down the library steps almost without my knowing it. As I hastened through the downtown streets, trolleys still clanged and automobiles yet honked, but there was a sense of the city slowing, like some great clock running down. Repeatedly asking storekeepers who had come out to stare or shoppers bolting for home what was happening, invariably such answer as I received was along the lines of “Something at the mines.” But what, what? The last few blocks to the Thunder office, I broke into a mad dash.

I found the newsroom going crazy, half the staff shouting into telephones, the others typing madly, Cavaretta trying to handle two phones at once. Plainly the Thunder was putting out an extra, hitting the streets with the news behind the sudden silence of the Hill. I panted into Armbrister’s office, where he and Jared stood together like men stricken.

“Another accident?” I asked, gasping for breath. “You called the men out?”

Ashen-faced, Jared shook his head. “Not a walkout. This is a lockout.”

•   •   •

The news was worse than I could have imagined. In a ploy of its own, the Anaconda Company had declared an impasse in the wage negotiations and informed Quinlan’s stunned successor at the bargaining table that from this day forward, mining operations were shut down until the union accepted a pay cut of more than twenty percent. At a stroke, the past two years’ gain in ten thousand paychecks was gone, the tenaciously won “lost” dollar per day lost again. Quin must have been howling curses in his grave.

The rest of us—Jared, myself, Armbrister when he wasn’t shouting to the news staff or the back room to hurry up with the extra; the Thunder had an entire city waiting for it—were flummoxed. “They can do that, without so much as a by-your-leave?” I struggled out of my daze. “Doesn’t the government care whether half of the world’s copper supply is choked off or not?”

“Professor,” Jared responded bleakly, “if the country was at war, Washington wouldn’t let the company bigwigs—”

“The plutocrat sunuvabitches,” Armbrister improved on one of my recent editorial epithets with his own.

“—get away with it for one minute. But production regulations and the like were thrown out the window right away after the Armistice.” Jared’s tone was more bitter than I had ever heard it. “Now ‘normalcy’ is back, haven’t you heard, and its high priest is Harding.”

“Here in our parish, it’s Cutlass, worse yet,” Armbrister bluntly spoke what I was thinking. “And pardon my French, Morgie, but we’re down the crapper and he’s on the hole.” That distressing analogy aside, the day’s development did make it all the more evident why the powers that be in the Hennessy Building imported Cutthroat Cartwright. They had been preparing to escalate the battle with us from the very first volley over the taxation issue. I felt sick. However, worse off by far was Jared, in his public role as the instigator in all this. He turned half away from Armbrister’s words as though physically struck by them. “A strike is one thing, hell, Butte’s been through those how many times and lived to tell the tale,” the relentless editor went on even as he checked around and shouted, “Roll it, Charlie!” to the pressman waiting in the back room doorway. “But this is the same stunt the company pulled in ’03, isn’t it, and we all know how that turned out. Three weeks of shutdown until the only sign of life anywhere in the state was grass growing in the streets, and the copper bastards got everything they wanted.”

“You want us to cave, just like that?” Jared rounded on him with a steely look. “Give up the dollar in wages, and pull back on the tax vote, which is what is really behind this? I hired you for this because I thought you had guts, Jake.”

“Guts, hell,” Armbrister flared back, “brains are the shortage in this mess.”

“Boys,” I instinctively stepped between them as if breaking up a schoolyard fight, “if they could see this up in the Hennessy Building, they’d fall out of their chairs laughing.”

“Right, right. Sorry, sorry,” they muttered back and forth. The floor trembled under us as the press began to roll and the lockout Extra literally began to thunder into existence. Sheepishly, Armbrister took off his eyeshade and rubbed his forehead. “At least we got the damn paper out.”

“And it’s a good job well done,” Jared told him. “The same as you and the professor do every day.” He began pacing the narrow confines of the office, like a sentry on high alert at his post. “All right, my rod and my staff,” he rallied the pair of us. “Let’s put our thinking caps on, as Rab would say. We have to try to stick this out, and time is maybe on our side for once. Anaconda can’t let the Hill stay shut too long, or some outfit in Arizona or Chile or somewhere will start digging copper like mad to meet market demand. The powers that be, up in the Hennessy and higher, have got to be looking over their shoulders at that, however pigheaded they are toward us.”

“Sounds like their weak spot,” Armbrister agreed, as did I.

“It’s not going to be easy, keeping spirits up,” Jared calculated like the veteran of union battles he was, “since we couldn’t prepare for this. But we’ve got one advantage ahead.” Very much the publisher at this moment, he pointed to the calendar board, where potential stories ahead were marked in red.

I still didn’t follow, but Armbrister stirred as if about to be hit by a hunch.

“That’s right, Jake,” Jared encouraged that response, “it’s a while yet to Miners Day. That’ll help the town hold out.” A ghost of a smile visited him. “Show me any miner who isn’t going to want to march this year to demonstrate to Anaconda we can’t be pushed around.”

How right he was, if past experience was any guide at all. Miners Day was Butte’s version of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras, Venice’s Carnevale, Munich’s Oktoberfest, of all such gala holidays from the daily strains of life, a civic celebration giving mineworkers a chance to march in their thousands under peaceable conditions, the various lodges and brotherhoods and sisterhoods to show off their regalia, businesses to build floats to wow and woo customers, on and on through the ranks of all those with local pride or some cause to flaunt. It was a spectacle, a declaration, a civic rite, a coming together of the nationalities of the Constantinople of the Rockies, all that and more. I oh so vividly remembered watching—no, there was not time for that memory now as Jared in his authoritative way was going on, “The Hennessy Building jaybirds think they’re so clever, how’d they overlook that? We’re one up on them until the big day, anyway.”

“I shall remind them of it so incessantly they’ll hear it in their sleep,” I promised to do my editorial utmost.

“That’s the stuff.” What remained of the smile hovered another moment as he gave the mock instruction, “Give Cutlass a dose of bayonet.”

“It’s still going to be a damned hard slog from now till then, Jared,” Armbrister warned. “You know how things get when the mines aren’t running. Butte goes on its back like a beetle.”

Jared knew that only too well, his face told, but he remained grimly resolved. “Every family on the Hill has lived on short rations before.” Under the weight of command in such circumstances, his voice went low and reflective. “One thing about it, Dublin Gulch and Finntown and the rest”—he solemnly named off his vital constituencies, as union leader and senator—“are used to misery. We’ll see how Wall Street likes the taste of it.”

•   •   •

At least the newsboys prospered as the lockout took hold, with headlines raging back and forth over the dead quiet of the Hill. My editorials were variations on a theme, practically operatic in orchestration, back and forth from characterizing Anaconda as the cold-blooded money-grubbing untrustworthy reptilian corporate monster it behaved like—this was no time to spare the adjectives—and sounding every note of hope and defiance I could think of, for a citizenry under economic siege to hearken to. Or so we hoped. Jared and his union council were busy keeping the anger banked in the miners’ neighborhoods, helped by the newspaper running pleas and pledges in various tongues that echoed those of “Voices of the Hill,” only with much graver accents. And while the Thunder lived up to its name, Cutlass dueled with my offerings by employing every dirty trick known to journalism, from quotes out of context to implications that Pluvius was, of all things, a hired gun of the writing sort, bought and paid for so richly he lived in a mansion while posing as a tribune of the people. “He ought to have to live in this overgrown bunkhouse,” Sandison said to that.

As Armbrister bleakly forecast, Butte did slow to a crawl without the rhythm of the mines in its daily life. Men whose hands knew nothing but work had to find time-killing pursuits. The public library was jammed daylong, I reported to Sandison, and I would have bet good money that Smitty and crew were telling the Highliner the same about speakeasies. Nor did it escape me that with everything shut down, a certain Neversweat powderman with a Roman profile now had nothing to do but idle around under the same boardinghouse roof as the attractive woman who was very much my wife, still. The animal.

Even in those first days, a widespread unease, something like the brink of fever before some terrible illness, could be sensed in the conversations in the streets and the way people glanced up at the stock-still equipment of the mines and quickly down again. The pinch of lost wages had been endured before by the families of the Hill during strikes, but, according to the oldest hands on the Thunder, Armbrister profanely included, there was a feeling in the air that this time was nothing like anything before. A strike was one thing, workers withholding their labor, the only real weapon they possessed. A lockout was chillingly different. The contrast, say, between a queue waiting at the doorstep for the right invitation to come in, and a slammed and barred door. Between negotiation and coercion; between callused hand and merciless fist.

The one bright spot on the horizon remained Miners Day, and as vowed, in my editorials I drummed away at reminding our readership that, more than ever, Butte’s own holiday must serve as the occasion to celebrate the unity of the house of labor and show the copper bosses that the spirit of ten thousand mineworkers was not broken. Take that, Cutlass. I did my best to have my typewriter keys echo the sound of a mile of men on the march, Jared’s confident goal for turnout on the great day.

This was the hard going for my fingers, every mention of that midsummer high point of life in the proud mining community bringing such a surge of emotions in me. Two years before, watching the parade together from a private aerie and then a trolley ride to the attractions of the amusement park called Columbia Gardens had been Grace’s and my first “date,” to use that modern term for the onset of courtship, those first breathless hours of shy glances and modestly exchanged confidences.

What a picture we made, I in my best suit and checked vest the least of it, Grace resplendently filling out an aquamarine dress with a sea shimmer to it, her hair done up in a circlet braid with a swooping ribbon-sprigged summer hat topping even the gold of that crown upon a crown—an enchanting vision time could not dim. Although it flickered the following day, when my newfound darling suffered an outbreak of second thoughts and hives. I tossed and turned all night trying to figure out who am I with when I’m with you, she’d wailed through her mask of calamine lotion while trying not to scratch. Take yesterday. One minute I’m on the arm of someone I enjoy thoroughly, and the next, you’re gambling away money like you’re feeding the chickens. Actually only a bet on Russian Famine in a footrace, which I pointed out in vain was a sure thing. Thank heavens, hives and much else had been overcome in the subsequent course of our romance, leading to matrimony and our year of wonder, of traveling the world on a cloud.

Descending from a cloud brings an awful jolt, however, and I already was not at my best while trying to compose yet another Miners Day piece, several days into the lockout, when Armbrister came by my typewriter stand and dropped a freshly inked Post with a plop. “Take a look at this, and then slit my wrists for me.”

I stared down at the headline shrieking across the top of the front page.

Anaconda Takes Steps Against Miners Day Threats

And below was worse.

The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, citing grave threats against life and property, today announced the hiring of extra guards to be deployed around company headquarters and other properties during the forthcoming Miners Day observance. “We have reason to believe radical elements may use the parade as an occasion to incite violence,” a company spokesman declared, “making necessary certain protective steps.”

Questioned whether the guards would be armed, the company spokesman said: “All necessary measures will be taken.”

It went on in the same sickening way. The mayor was quoted as calling on the miners to forgo the traditional parade in this time of tension. The chief of police was quoted as warning the public at large that he did not have enough men on the force to quell major trouble if it erupted. Anaconda and its Post lackeys had not missed a trick.

Topping it off was a front-page editorial—front-page!—by Cutlass piously expressing the hope that cooler heads would prevail on the union side, but if not, the consequences clearly would fall on those who instigated trouble. “Those who mistake the temple of prosperity for the Bastille,” the fiend wrote.

“Cute, isn’t it,” Armbrister said dolefully over my shoulder. “Just nicely letting everybody know there’ll be goons with guns if the union doesn’t scrap the Miners Day parade.”

The threat sent a chill cold as ice through me. “Has Jared seen—?”

“I called him at union headquarters. He’ll be here as soon as he picks himself up off the floor.”

It wasn’t long before we were joined by our Sisyphus of a publisher, who indeed looked as if the rock had rolled down the hill on him. Alert to trouble, the newsroom watched the three of us huddle over the flagrant Post front page spread on the desk in Armbrister’s goldfish bowl of an office.

His voice tight, Jared began, “I’m afraid”—the first time I had ever heard that word from him, even in such a context—“they’ve got us. I can’t put our people in a fix like that, where a hothead on either side can set off a shooting war.” He looked ready to spit out something bitter, and did. “Anaconda doesn’t mind that, it would just as soon live on blood as copper.”

“What about troops,” I reluctantly came up with, “to keep the peace?”

Jared shook his head. “This governor won’t want to do that. He’s too new in office, and while he’s mostly with us against Anaconda, he won’t stick his neck out farther than he already has on the tax vote.” The other two of us followed his dispirited gaze back down to the threatening headline. “This raises absolute hell with us in trying to hold on against the lockout, but we’ve got to scrap the parade, I don’t see any way around it.”

“Conniving bastards,” said Armbrister. “Bastard,” he corrected himself, for this had Cutlass written all over it in more ways than one. Dread in his every feature, he shook his head at the retreat the Thunder now had to lead. “Better get started putting the best face on it you can, Morgie, so—”

The editor broke off, scowling as he always did at unfamiliar faces in his newsroom. “Who the hell are these, the oldest living candidates for the Lonely Hearts Club?”

No, they were not lovelorn ancients come to place matrimonial ads, they were Hoop and Griff. Each wearing a suit and tie, like themselves a bit threadbare but serviceable, and clutching in both hands nice hats, homburgs I never would have suspected they possessed. Behaving as though they were in church, they gazed around the newsroom meekly as they padded past surprised reporters.

Coming up to us in the editor’s office, they nodded a little greeting as if we were all in the same pew, and paused to consider, one to another.

“You better tell them. It’s pretty much your idea.”

“It’s just as much yours. You go ahead.”

“No, no, be my guest.”

“Righto. What this is”—Griff addressing the blinking trio of us—“we couldn’t help but hear the Post newsboys yelling their tonsils out about what the snakes are up to now.” He shook his head at Anaconda’s latest injustice, Hoop following suit. “We’d miss the Miners Day parade, something awful. Marching in that is the last thing we’ve got of our life on the Hill, if you know what I mean.” The seamed old face, duplicated by the work-worn one next to it, spoke memorably to that. “So Hoop and me got to thinking, how about the Fourth of July?”

While I was a moment behind on that, Jared looked like he’d been hit by the Book of Revelation. “The American Legion parade? Pull a fast one on Anaconda and the mayor?”

Armbrister’s face lit up all the way to the green of his eyeshade. “Hell yes, that’s it! The Legion is always scrambling for bunches to march with them besides the DAR and the GAR and kiddies with sparklers.”

He had scarcely finished before Jared let out a whoop that brought up heads all around the newsroom. “Not even Anaconda can let itself be known for a Fourth of July massacre,” our tactician said with a smack of his fist in his palm. “I’ll bet my bottom dollar they have to rein in any bloodthirsty goons if we’re out there strutting our stuff like true Americans.”

By then I could see it as plainly as reveille in some grand dream, the men of the Hill stepping forth as if from some monumental shift change to form the tighter ranks of comrades in arms. Montana always rallied to the colors, famously so, contributing more than its share of manpower in time of war—there was no doubt about it, every mining neighborhood of every nationality would have veterans who were in the Great War or served in the Philippines insurrection or in Mexico against Villa. What a sight it would be, the army of the Hill stretching behind the Legionnaires in their service caps and the Grand Army of the Republic aged remnant in their Union blue and the Daughters of the American Revolution costumed as Betsy Ross in multiple. Carried away, I whapped Jared on the back hard enough to startle him. “And you, Sergeant Evans, must wear your uniform and be out front, like a good soldier.”

Laughing, he said Rab might have to let it out a little for him, but by God, he would wear it to the fullest. Exuberance then got the best of him. “You old devils,” he seized Griff and Hoop each by a shoulder, “are going to be right there in the front rank of the honor guard.” Modest as church mice, they shuffled their feet and declared in duet that would sure take care of their wanting to march, all right.

As publisher and editor feverishly began trading further ideas about how to turn the Fourth of July into Miners Day come early—Armbrister already was envisioning a Thunder special section headlined Butte Marches for Loyalty and Country; “Let the readers catch on, loyalty to what,” he chortled—Griff and Hoop edged toward the door, turning their hats in their hands. Before they could make their exit, I caught up with them to rid myself of the question tickling at the back of my mind. “Why are you dressed to the teeth?”

“Oh, this.” Hoop looked down as if just noticing his suit and tie. “You explain, Griff.”

“Sure thing. Giorgio is taking us to the matinee of the Eyetalian opera company that’s in town.”

I had an awful premonition. “Grace—Mrs. Morgan as well?”

“Well, yeah, sure. He’s got to invite one and all, don’t he, that’s only manners.”

“Polly-atchy, they’re doing,” Hoop chimed in. “Something about a clown who bawls a lot. Should be better than it sounds.”

The despicable creature Mazzini, copying me culturally as the way to the heart of my wife? What next? With an effort I got hold of myself. “Please tell her for me I love—” Sudden emotion choked me. “Just say I miss her.”

“We’ll pass that along,” they chorused heartily. Their expressions adding, for all the good it would do.

•   •   •

At the end of that day when so much was happening, perhaps it was ordained that I would coincide at the front steps of the manse with O’Malley the postman, who’d had an abjectly apologetic air ever since the intrusion of his gun-wielding impostor. “I hope himself is on the mend,” he said anxiously while handing over a package somewhat larger and lighter than the usual book box, and I assured him Sandison’s recuperation was taking its course as well as its time.

When I duly took the parcel in to Sandison, he lifted it with a frown. “What the blazes is this, cotton batting? I was expecting the collected Burns with Rowlandson engravings.”

After dubiously hoisting the package a few more times and giving it another grumble or two, he got around to slitting it open. Inside was a slouch hat, the kind with the brim rakishly turned all the way up on one side. I recognized the style at once, which was not the same as grasping its significance.

“Sandy,” I exclaimed, “you mean to tell me you were a Rough Rider?”

“Don’t I wish,” he intoned distantly, turning the hat over in his hands. “Dora wouldn’t let me. ‘Who’s going to run the ranch if you trot off like a patriotic fool?’ she said. Good enough question. But I gave some horses, and three of my top hands signed on with Roosevelt after he begged me for some good men to take to Cuba. That damned Teddy. Hard to say no to.” Wincing, he managed to lift an arm enough to try the hat on. “Well? How’s it look?”

“Dashing enough to conquer Cuba by itself,” I replied, not terribly far off the truth. Indeed, with it on, Montana’s Earl of Hell looked like the very manifestation of wild and woolly triumph in the Spanish-American War, the grizzled rider of the range who might have led the famous charge up San Juan Hill if Teddy Roosevelt had gotten out of the way.

“Hah.” Trying to hide his pleasure, Sandison shucked open the envelope that had come with the apparent gift. Reading the accompanying letter, he began to laugh and gasp with pain at the same time. “Get an eyeful of this, Morgan. You never know what’ll come around the corner in this life, ay?”

With various loops and flourishes of phrase, the missive invited none other than Samuel S. Sandison, valued patron and old pard when mounted patriots were called to the colors, to join their presence on the occasion of the twenty-second annual gathering of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry—better known as the Rough Riders—this year to be held in Butte on the Fourth of July, to serve as an honorary member of their honor guard—a bit redundant, that—and thereby ride at the head of their mounted contingent in the parade.

“Now I do feel guilty,” I lamented after reading over his shoulder.

“Why? You been up to something?”

“Well, I mean, if it had not been for that shooting intended for me, you could ride with them.”

“Where do you get your logic from, the bughouse?” he said peevishly. “I’m not an invalid, I’m merely laid up.” With a sharp grunt, he took the hat off, admired it, and clapped it back on. “Of course I’m going to ride with them. Heh. Watch and see.”

•   •   •

No amount of argument could budge him from that, and so I did the next best thing. Which was to turn it into news for the Thunder.

Jared was back in the office the next day plotting out the paper’s parade coverage with Armbrister, Rab along probably because she could not be kept away. When I joined them and reported that, thanks to Sandison, we knew the Rough Riders were coming to town, Armbrister swore mightily before catching himself and asking Rab to excuse him all to hell. “That’s just what Cutlass needs, an excuse to ramble on about his famous dispatch from San Juan Hill and his dear old friend, Teddy Roosevelt. Front-page feature, up top of the parade coverage. That’s where I’d play it, you can damn well bet.”

Thrown by his reaction, I lamely said, “If it helps any, Sandy was on a first-name basis with him, too. Theodore, that is.”

Jared’s eyebrows shot up at that, while Rab looked intrigued. “You know that for a fact? How’s he ever chums with Roosevelt?” Armbrister asked doubtfully. “The Earl of Hell has never seemed to me the political type.”

“They were, ah, lynchers together, back in their cattleman days.”

“Oh, swell. What a perfect story peg—dishonoring a dead president on the Fourth of July. Got any more bright ideas, Morgie?”

“Actually, I do. Sandison is going to ride at the head of the Rough Riders color guard, at their invitation—what’s wrong with a story about that?

“String ’em Up Sam is going to lead the Rough Riders? That’s more like it.” Armbrister had that look of reading print in the air. “‘Vigilante Rides Again with the Rough Bunch.’ Sensational!”

I coughed. “That is a word that does not sit well with him. Were that headline to appear, he would promptly be in here chastising you, perhaps physically.”

“Touchy about the old days of the Montana necktie, is he. All right, then—‘Pioneer Figure Saddles Up with the Rough Riders.’ We’ll run it as a parade sidebar.” The energized editor stopped suddenly. “I’ve got a better idea. Cross your fingers, everybody.” His already were, in that hex sign that signaled a hunch, and the other three of us guardedly waited for this latest brainstorm to strike.

“Here’s what we’ll do. Stick a reporter right in there with the Rough Riders. Horseback interviews, that’s the ticket.” Again, print in the air that only an editor could see: “‘By Our Mounted Correspondent.’ Can you beat that for a byline? We’ll scoop the sonofabitching Post, right out in plain sight, and Cartwright and his crew won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jared immediately signed off on the idea, Rab clapping in approval.

“Very enterprising,” I approved heartily. I swept a look around the newsroom for anyone who looked fit for horsemanship. “One of the young ones, I suppose. Sibley, perhaps? Or Cavaretta? He’s the daring type—”

“Nope. You.”

My skin prickled. I suppose I was not allergic to horses in the strictly medical sense, but the thought of parading through the city on the back of one had much the same ill effect. I tried to laugh. “Jacob, sorry, but I am not an equestrian.”

“Oh, but Mr. Morgan, you’re much too modest!” Rab stuck her pretty nose in. “At Marias Coulee, you had to ride horseback to go anywhere, remember? We schoolgirls thought you had a very nice seat.” She giggled, all too innocently. “Of the horsemanship kind.”

“Necessity is not the same as aptitude, Rab,” I tried to evade that ambush.

Armbrister was not hearing anything but the gallop of story in his head. “It’ll be a peach of a feature. I’ll have Sammy set up his camera across from the Hennessy Building, so he gets a terrific shot of you riding right past Anaconda’s doorstep. Let Cutlass try to top that.”

“Jake, no, really, I—” My protest was drowned out by his shout for the photographer.

“Jared?” I was running out of names to plead to.

“I’m infantry, remember?” Poker-faced, he tugged at his short ear. “I leave the cavalry up to you, Professor.” Wasn’t that just like a politician, my aggrieved look told him, and words to that effect would have followed had not Armbrister got me by the arm and dragged me off to hatch his plan with the photographer. The two of them plotted his assignment out on the wall map of downtown Butte while I tried to blink out of my daze.

“Easy one. See you at the Hennessy corner, Morgie,” the cameraman said, and went back to his poker game, as Armbrister impatiently overrode my last-ditch protests against becoming the Thunder’s mounted correspondent. “You’re buddy-buddy with Sandison, he’ll be right in the thick of the mounted bunch, that makes you the natural one to tag along with him and do the story. What the hell, all you have to do is get up on a horse—”