The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 100
The snow that year just kept coming, and on the first of March, a lightning storm caused an avalanche that swept down the Cascades, picked up a Great Northern passenger train, and tossed it like a toy, tumbling cars down a thousand-foot embankment and burying ninety-six people under forty feet of snow. I had been on that run once, carrying Gurley’s story to Seattle. Ghostly people on the platforms.
In April, a boy went missing near the river, and when they couldn’t find his body, the city decided to dynamite below the falls in Peaceful Valley. They did this every few years to dislodge the tons of construction debris and garbage that collected there, to move it all downstream, and they usually got to clear a few missing persons cases while they were at it.
So, the first Sunday in May, I went downtown to see if my brother was coming up from the riverbed. There was a big crowd, people with picnic baskets and camera tripods, hundreds gathered on the same cliffs where I had watched Gig’s car burn. At noon, the explosives went off, a plume of water blasted into the sky, the boom came a half-second later, and a great cheer rose as bricks and logs and boards and random bits were vomited to the river surface and flushed downstream.
Later, police identified three bodies in the risen tumult, none of them small enough to be the missing boy and none of them Gig or Early. There was a woman who had apparently committed suicide. And an old drifter who might’ve just fallen in the river drunk. And finally, there was the bloated, washed-out body of a private detective from Denver named Del Dalveaux, who had gone missing three months earlier, and who the coroner said had died of knife wounds to the chest and throat.
That spring was bone dry, and summer was the hottest on record, and I read in the newspaper about a traveling preacher who portended that the Great Drought of 1910 was the beginning of the end of the world.
It felt like it. Lakes dried up, cattle died, farms went bust, and all summer, trains sparked small brush fires. In August, when the great forests were tinder, a dry typhoon blew down through Canada and fanned a small fire into a conflagration that swept over three states, four mountain ranges, and nine national forests, burning three million acres in two days.
They called it the Devil’s Broom, and it killed eighty-seven people and destroyed half of Wallace and parts of forty other towns. Seventy-eight firefighters died, crews giving up fire lines to run for their lives, only to be swallowed by flames. Tens of thousands were evacuated, fleeing in train cars that ran just ahead of the smoke, or waited out the fire in seething railroad tunnels that heated up like woodstoves. Seven towns were burned completely to the ground and lost forever.
On the second day of the blaze, a desperate fire crew retreated into the ragged old work camp of Taft, Montana, where they tried to rally the men in the dark wooden barracks to dig a break and set backfires to save the town. But the men were more interested in draining Taft’s booze stores, and as firefighters dug trenches, the residents trudged from saloon to saloon. By the time the last drunk staggered onto the evacuation train, hot embers were raining down on the faded wood buildings. The train wasn’t a half mile down the track when the inferno devoured Taft and wiped it from the earth forever.
Not a lot of things that I wish I’d gotten to see in my life, but I’d have paid to see that one.
I don’t know when I became convinced that Early Reston was still alive, but over the next year, I began to have nightmares about him. He’d be sitting on Gig’s cot or standing outside the house. And every time I read something terrible in the newspapers, I imagined he was out there, setting fires, causing avalanches.
The way his car door had flapped open, I wondered, had I seen a body roll out just before the car went off the cliff? Then, that winter, someone shot big John Sullivan. The old police chief was sitting in his living room, and was shot right through the front window. “This world,” Gemma Tursi said at dinner that Sunday. I could do nothing but nod in agreement.
His assassination dominated the news for weeks. The cops rounded up foreign tramps for questioning, and they arrested two labor men, but they let them go. They found a threatening letter from the Black Hand, so they arrested Italians, then they recalled the chief cracking down on the Tongs, so they arrested Chinese. Then a murderer in Seattle confessed, but that same man confessed to shooting President McKinley and being Jack the Ripper. A lawyer was quoted in the Press anonymously saying that Sullivan had been killed by a hired assassin because “certain forces” hadn’t wanted him testifying before the grand jury investigating police corruption.
Through it all, I couldn’t help wondering if it wasn’t Early Reston.
One day in 1911, I was working at the machine shop when Willard came in. He wasn’t dressed in his usual suit but in a sweater and light jacket. He said he couldn’t believe how much older I looked. “Like your brother,” he said.
I stepped outside to talk to him. He said he was no longer working for Mr. Brand.
“Why not?” I asked.
“He is—” Willard cleared his throat. “Unwell. He’s been under some pressure from the city and divested his holdings here, sold out to various partners. He’s going to move east, spend his retirement with his family.”
“What will you do?”
“I’m going to British Columbia,” he said. “I have a sister up there.” He looked around and then leaned in. “Ryan, I was wondering. The money. From that day. I hate to ask, but, well,