The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 49

Part III

When I first came into this burg, I had a cold hunch, and I kept having it. Something was due to happen to me in this place.

—Wallace Stegner, Joe Hill

19

On the way from Seattle to Montana, they stopped in Spokane for a day. While Gurley checked in at the union hall, Rye and Early went to see Gig in jail, but the IWW leaders were on a hunger strike and weren’t allowed visitors.

“You could write him,” Gurley said on the train the next day, and she got a card and envelope from the purser. They were on the Northern Pacific, on their way to the Coeur d’Alene Mining District for a day of speeches.

Rye stared at the blank card. He had never written anyone a letter.

“Tell him to break out of jail and come find us and we’ll raise hell together,” Early suggested.

In the end, Rye decided simply to tell Gig what had happened since he got out—although he knew he couldn’t write all of it, about Ursula bringing him to Lem Brand’s house and the twenty dollars he’d taken for information, or the strange detective, Del Dalveaux, appearing in his Seattle hotel room. Instead, he wrote:

Dear Gig,

I’m sorry you are still in jail. I am traveling with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn raising money for your defense and for the others. She wants to hire a crack lawyer by the name of Darrow who I pretended to know of but I don’t. He must be even better than Fred Moore who is the lawyer who got me out. I never met a girl like Gurley Flynn. She is an excellent speaker tho you should of heard what she said to a priest. We had ice cream sodas one night. (Very good.) We have already been to Seattle and I talked in front of two hundred people and now we are taking the train to Wallace and then to Missoula. (Inside the train.) Early is with us too. He came to hear us in Seattle and we tried to see you in Spokane but they wouldn’t let us. Early made a joke that you should just break out of jail. I know you feel bad that I got knocked around and arrested that day and put in the sweatbox and mixed up in all this. But it’s the proudest I’ve ever been climbing on that crate next to you.

Yr brother Ryan

He sealed the letter in an envelope and wrote Gig’s name, care of the Spokane City Jail.

From the seat in front of him, Gurley turned back. “Listen, before we arrive, I need to tell you something about Al Bolin. To prepare you.”

She said that Al was an old union pick, blown up in an anarchist’s bombing in the ’99 labor wars. That in spite of his injuries, Al was a top organizer, and they should count themselves lucky he’d agreed to be their guide for two days of fund-raising in Wallace and the mountain mining towns of Idaho and Montana.

“Al can be a sight, and it takes a moment to get used to him,” Gurley said. “So try not to stare, though neither should you look away.”

Early sat up in the seat behind Rye. “How am I supposed to look and also not look?” Rye liked having Early along. It reminded him of traveling with his brother.

“I mean that you should behave normally,” said Gurley.

“Well, that’s what I’m saying,” Early said, “looking and not looking are fairly normal behavior for eyes.”

“You’ll see,” she said.

Al Bolin was waiting on the platform when they pulled into Wallace, and Rye saw right away that normal eye behavior was going to be impossible. The man lurching toward them was six feet tall on his right leg and six-four on his left; a four-inch peg had been nailed to his right cowboy boot to make up the difference. His arm and shoulder on the right side were diminished too, half gone, like his portraitist had lost interest.

But it was his face that Rye couldn’t keep from staring at: the cave-in that constituted the right side of Al Bolin’s burned, mottled mug, the eye patch and torn nostril, the gnarled mouth, and the hole where his right ear should be. A metal clip was punched through his cheek like a bull’s ring and held his jaw together on that side. When he offered Rye a hunk of stained bone with two scarred knuckles for a handshake, Rye hesitated.

Bolin said, “Best shake it, kid. The good one I use for fighting.”

Introductions over, they followed Al through the depot and out to a dirt street in front of the station. For a man half blown up, Bolin walked like he was in a footrace. He generated surprising speed on the block of wood, and Rye hurried to keep up with him as he strode into downtown Wallace, a picturesque valley town nestled between impossibly steep mountains. There weren’t three thousand people, and there were twenty horses for every automobile on the street, but Wallace was what passed for civilization here—schools, hotels, and restaurants, center of a spiral of two dozen smaller mining and logging towns that disappeared up in the mountains.

This area had been the site of a fierce labor war a decade earlier, culminating with a gang of angry, underpaid miners hijacking a train at gunpoint, loading up two hundred