The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 34
Ursula was studying the heated floor. Rye couldn’t imagine the thing of value he could supply in return for helping Gig. “Like what?”
“I understand you met a young woman yesterday?” Lem Brand said. “A Mrs. Jack Jones?”
Rye said nothing.
“Listen, Ryan,” Brand said, “I am not a political person. This business with the Wobblies and the police, I don’t like it. Were it up to me, I’d put every English-speaking man in Spokane to work. I am a businessman, and this is bad for business. But I also have responsibilities, and partners. And to satisfy those responsibilities, I need information. That’s all I’m asking from you. Information.”
“What kind?”
He shrugged as if it were nothing. “Plans, meetings, developments. Say a union organizer like Mrs. Jones comes to town. Basic news of the street.”
Rye looked down at the glass in his hands.
Brand leaned forward. “I wouldn’t ask you to put anyone in danger or do anything that goes against your ethics.”
Ethics? Did Rye have those? He’d slept and shat in people’s yards and stolen their food, he had been drunk and sacrilegious and disparaging. Was the peak of tramp ethics seeing a dead girl on a train car and not going through her pockets?
“I only ask two things,” Brand said, “that we keep this in complete confidence, which is to your benefit as well as mine. And that you answer my questions honestly. That’s it. For that, I will do my best to intervene in your brother’s case.” He looked over at Ursula. “And as long as your information is correct, I will pay you twenty dollars a month.”
Rye took a drink to keep himself from making a noise. He didn’t imagine he’d had twenty dollars’ worth of information in his whole life.
“For instance”—Brand pulled a twenty-dollar note from his pocket as if it were nothing—“tell me about the man who beat up the police sergeant on the river that day.”
“Early?” Rye asked before he thought better of it. “What about him?”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” Rye chewed his lip. How did Brand know about Early? “He said he was going to Seattle.”
Brand leaned forward and handed him the twenty. “See how easy that was?” The bill was crisp and flat, like it had been pressed. Brand leaned back in the chair and watched him. “Your father worked the Golden Sunlight strike in Montana.”
Again, Rye wondered how he could know. He nodded.
“I owned that mine,” Brand said. “I worked it myself after my father died. Started on the muck line and worked my way into the sluice and the mill. These agitators—your Gurley Flynn, she doesn’t care about men like your father or me. Or you. All they want is revolution. You’re a pawn in that.
“Look, I’m not saying you always get a fair deal in mines and timber camps. But you’ll get worse from them. They come from Berlin, from drawing rooms in New York City. Do you think they care about you? About this job-shark business? They want to upend everything. Blow up the world. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Gurley Flynn. Ask her where this all ends. Ask, if you get rid of the job agencies, get a higher wage for workers—will that ever be enough?”
Rye looked down at the floor.
“People like her, they only want to get you killed and then go on to the next battlefield, because that’s what they really want. A war. I’ve seen it for twenty years. They call themselves WFM or IWW or socialists or syndicalists, they rile up the locals, get you arrested and killed, then go back to New York and tell their friends how they fought in the revolution out west.”
He was getting himself riled up, Ursula shifting uncomfortably like she’d heard this all before. “Do I use workers?” he asked. “Yes. I use them to extract silver and to fell trees and to pull beer in my saloons. But I pay them for it. And that’s all I want to do, pay good men for good work, the way I was once paid to dig silver. Do you know the difference between me and them, Ryan?”
He shook his head.
“This?” Brand waved around the room, the house, the grounds, the mines and hotels and saloons, the world that he owned. “I want you to have it, too. I want you to have every opportunity I had. With them, nobody gets a chance at anything.”
This was when Ursula finally spoke. “Ryan?”
He looked over at her and could see she must be tired of Brand’s ranting.
“Do it for Gregory,” she said.
If Ursula thought she had to remind Rye of his brother during Brand’s speech, she was wrong. He wondered just what sort of ethics a person needed to survive so long in cages with cougars. Rye looked down at the twenty-dollar note in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other. He took a deep breath.
Ursula the Great
A WOMAN owns nothing in this world but her memories—a shabby return on so steep an investment. The First Ursula taught me this. The other thing she taught me was how to climb in a cage and sing to a mountain lion.
I was the Second Ursula. I met the First in the spring of 1909. She’d been