The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 88
On such a black night, the two lamps in front of the car cast an unsettling cockeyed glow, lighting up a tree here, a basalt column there, like we were tunneling into the earth. The two-track road crossed a shallow creek bed, ice crackling under the tires, but the car handled the rough terrain. We shadowed the railroad tracks awhile, driving at an angle below the humped ties. We passed the lights of Ritzville and I thought of old Schulte and his wife and his son just up that creek north of town. I wondered if I could ever manage a life like that—or if it was another jail.
We skirted Sprague Lake and caught a lumber path that spilled us out on the state road. On good gravel, we could hear each other speak.
“You’re a natural driver, Gig.”
“Thank you.” I had to say, I did like piloting that Ford and thought I ought to learn the mechanical side of it. Maybe that would be the job for me—a way to be on the road but not jumping trains or sleeping in fields.
We rattled an hour on that state road, until the lights of Spokane began to show over the horizon. We stopped to refill the tank from a five-gallon can he kept on the floorboard of the backseat.
“You’re living in Spokane?” I asked as I poured the gas. “Why the hell did I go all the way to Lind looking for you?”
He said, “Why the hell did you go looking for me?” There was a real question in it, perhaps even some suspicion.
“Well,” I said, “I almost died in that jail, or thought I would. Singing and refusing to eat or work. We were doing nothing in there but irritating the cops and their rich bosses. Like flies at a picnic. And lying there, starving, I thought back to the last time I felt anything like a man. And it was that day on the river, when you knocked that cop back and I hit the other man with my shoulder. That was the last time. So I came looking for you.”
We climbed back in the Ford and kept on. I could feel him looking over at me. We rounded a corner and came onto the Sunset Hill, overlooking the valley that contained Spokane, all those electric lights and the brick and steel and wood and smoke and, through the center of it all, the deep river gorge.
“You want that feeling again,” Early said.
“Christ, Early.” I looked over. “You bet I do.”
The rest of the drive, he explained what he was doing. He’d put together a small crew, three men. They were making two bombs, to be planted the same day. Meeting up with me and hearing my story had given him a new idea for the targets, he said. He’d been thinking the police chief, Sullivan, “but we’d probably have better luck getting to your friend Sergeant Clegg.”
“And the other?”
“Lem Brand.”
I thought of what Ursula had told me—and maybe what she hadn’t told me—about getting a stake in Brand’s hotel. I got a tightness in my chest but said, “Well, I can’t think of two men who deserve it more.”
We skirted the north end and drove along the ridge below Beacon Hill east of town. There was an outcrop of boulders, an old Indian site where a natural spring burbled up. Early had a place just beyond that. An old spa had burned down there in the ’90s, in an area too rocky for grading or farming. That was where he’d been hiding out, in the spa’s old outbuildings, not five miles from Mrs. Ricci’s place.
He had me pull off the road onto a faint drive, trees on both sides, the car rattling over rocks and dry brush. We drove through a windrow of aspens toward what appeared to be a simple block bunkhouse next to a small shop, smoke curling from a tin chimney, the door propped partly open with a brick. Early had me park the Model T next to the shop, and I killed the motor. We were close to town but separated by a wisp of river and those clusters of boulders.
We climbed out and I could hear the gurgling water beyond the trees. Two men came out of the shop. One had been at the riot in November—a thin Negro who introduced himself as Everett, then shook my hand and said, “I remember you and your brother from the free speech day.”
“You get a month for disturbing?” I asked.
Everett nodded. “In the brig at Fort George Wright. Got fired from the hotel where I was working.”
The other man, white and thin-lipped with small pinpoint eyes, stuck out his hand and said simply, “Miller.” I got a cold chill off of that one.
“Miller I knew from Montana and Colorado,” Early said. “He’s a top powder man. Knows his way around a fulminating cap, too.” Before I could say anything, Early patted me on the back. “And this is Gig, our driver. And a good man to have in a row. Assuming you can get him to shut up.”
I followed the three of them inside the shop. There was a woodstove heating the place and a lantern lighting this front room. But no bombs. The whole room was covered in pelts—deer and moose and bear and raccoon and skunk and beaver and some smaller animals I couldn’t name. There must have been a hundred dead animals in various states, their fur and hide mounted, stacked, tacked to boards, hung on walls. The tables were covered with knives and pliers and fleshers and other tools for skinning and tanning and stretching. I stared into the black eyes of a lynx, stretched flat and mounted on a board.
Early pushed the wall at the end of the hide room, and a section opened