Heiress (24 page)

“
Dobray Ootra
, Miss Stewart.” Russian Oogie Popovich, bald-headed and the size of a buffalo, emerged from his barbershop. He had a nose broadened with too many fists, wide hands that betrayed the life of a mucker. A blast in the Neversweat Mine in Butte had taken his foot, sent him in search of a more gentle occupation.

“Morning, Oogie.”

“I hear there was a ruckus down at the rec center last night.” He stood, his apron tarnished with hair and old shave cream. “Sheriff’s got a couple BMUs down at the calaboose, cooling off.”

“What else is new?” Esme said as she passed by. The miners seemed to be always itching for a fight, and the agitators from the Butte Miners Union knew how to stir them. So far, they hadn’t accomplished their goal of banding together the Silverthread miners, but they never appeared to fatigue in their efforts.

This morning, the sun slid over the rim of foothills to the east, turning the ice-skimmed puddles to onyx. A western wind cleared the sooty skies over Butte, their smelters delivering sulfur and arsenic gasses into the blue-skied day, but over the mountains and away from Silver City.

It was a pretty town. She’d arrived just as the Silverthread Copper mine began to flourish, and chronicled the town’s growth from a mercantile, a saloon, and a very small Presbyterian church to a metropolis with three general stores, two saloons, a blacksmith, numerous grocers for every nationality, a butcher, a livery stable, a brewery, a cafeteria, two hotels, a trading company, a smattering of boardinghouses, the Cat’s Alley, a miners’ recreation hall, a courthouse, and a school, not to mention a boomtown of churches pledging to save them all from the dark habits cultivated by miners trapped too long under the crust of earth.

They even had a library, an opera house, and…a weekly newspaper.

From far off, she heard the piercing whine of the shift bell, and she could almost see the men ascending from the maw of the earth, black-faced, whitened eyes, smelling of sweat and grime, gulping in the sunshine as they trudged home, sandwich tins in their gnarled grips.

Another whistle signaled that this shift emerged without injury. No fires, no cave-ins, no faulty detonations, no falls.

She stood in the street and drank in the sound.

It died on the wind, stinging and brutal, as it delivered particles of the earth against her face. She pulled her hat down and trudged toward the post office.

The bell dinged over the door.

Neely Button stood at the counter, his hair gray and long, and grinned up at her. “Is that the latest issue of the
Times?”

She handed him the package and dug out the appropriate coinage. “What’s the news?”

Neely took the package, stamped it, moved it to the outgoing mail. She watched it just a second longer. Never an acknowledging note from her father, not once, in seven years.

“Sheriff has a slew of rabble-rousers in the pokey. Picked them up from the recreation hall last night.”

“Oogie told me. BMUs again.”

“They’re agitatin’ for a strike.”

“The Silverthread’s never going to strike. Hoyt’s a decent man. The Silverthread miners don’t need a union—they know if they strike, it’ll shut down the mine, put Hoyt out of business, and then they’ll have to work for the Anaconda.” Esme walked over to the wanted posters, scanned the faces. She knew most of the homesteaders in this area, but one never knew when she’d meet someone on the road. Besides, in her line of work, it behooved her to know the faces and names of the wanted.

“They might strike now that Hoyt’s passing on the mine to his son. Daughtry Hoyt might not be as agreeable as his old man.”

She froze, glanced over at Neely. “Archie Hoyt is passing the reins of the Silverthread?” She hadn’t seen Archie since the Christmas service, but the long Montana winter had driven nearly everyone inside to barred doors and boarded windows.

Neely shrugged. “Daughtry Hoyt got off the afternoon train a couple days ago.”

“He’s back?”

“You know him?”

“Just the legend, but yes.” So, maybe someone could return home again. Put things right.

“The scuttlebutt is that he’s here to sell off the mine.”

Esme froze. “He wouldn’t.”

“Why not? He’s been living back East for the last ten years. Running Hoyt’s stocks in New York after his Harvard education. Got a real way about him—come in to town yesterday wearing a top hat, tails, a real gent, like them you read about in the papers, you know?”

She did, and the image conjured memories she’d banished long ago.

Daughtry Hoyt couldn’t sell the mine.

But if he were planning on it, then that was news she aimed to find out first.

She pushed outside, bracing herself against the crisp spring breeze. Already, men fresh off their shift lined up at the recreation center, probably looking for hot coffee and eggs from the cafeteria. The saloons wouldn’t open until noon.

Someone had set up a soapbox, climbed on top of it, and a crowd jockeyed close as his oration rose over them.

“If we are to be a force against the Capitalists, we must join together. There can be no peace between the working class and the employing class so long as they have all the benefits of life. We must organize and wage war, take ownership of production, eliminate the system of wages, and live as one class.”

Union agitators. But, a newspaper woman could recognize a notable moment. She estimated the crowd, pushed forward to the front as the man, a rakish charm about him with his dark hair that fell over his blue eyes—she guessed him to be Cornish, maybe, and the English twist of the vowels confirmed it—raised his earnest tenor vibrato.

“When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run, There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;”

With the passion of his voice, he reminded her crazily of Oliver.

“Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, But the union makes us strong.”

Around her, men—some she recognized from a few of the wakes, Irish and Cornish, and one Italian—began to hum to the contagious melody of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Her stomach knotted as they joined in the chorus. She’d heard rumor of this song belonging to the International Workers of the World, a much larger movement than the BMUs.

“Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.”

“Stop!” The voice cracked the air as the leader began the second verse. He searched for the dissident as he sang.

“Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?”

“Don’t listen to him!”

A murmur of discontent started, like a locomotive. The voices in the crowd lost steam even as the union man bellowed out his response.

“Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.”

“The union will only destroy you!”

The owner of the voice pushed through the crowd, tall, with an aristocratic look in his high cheekbones, his dark eyes, and an expression that could part crowds. He turned, a derby clutched in his hand, a shadow of dark whiskers layered upon his dimpled chin. Esme placed him about her age, and something about him—his diction, perhaps, or even his calm, commanded attention.

It niggled something inside her.

“We don’t need a union,” he said. “They’re out to destroy the Silverthread! They don’t care what it costs. They don’t care about your children or your homes or your jobs! They’ll starve you all when they force you to strike, and it’ll be your bodies rotting from the pit heads!”

He’d ignited a dangerous murmur, and she heard others, the whisper of stories about the strikebreakers fighting the Pinkertons, and labor leaders found murdered.

“What about the six men who died two weeks ago when their cage crashed?” the union man shouted, his eyes sparking. “Who paid for their funerals? Who will feed their families?”

“The Silverthread looks after its own.”

Murmuring began, someplace low and behind her, and she heard the name in the well of her mind even before it emerged on the tongue of the union man. “Daughtry Hoyt. Come back to finish the job?”

His tone, perhaps, stunned the crowd to silence. Or maybe the way the two men stared at each other.

Daughtry Hoyt, blue blood from the East. Indeed—she should have recognized his confidence, the kind wrought from a vast supply of resources, unaffected by life’s lower-class tragedies.

As if in confirmation, he stared, unruffled at the union man, his voice steady. “No, Abel. I’ve come back to fix—”

It seemed she alone heard him because even as he said it, the crowd erupted into a surge of fury.

Men pushed and kicked, fists finding flesh, shouts and cries. Esme had seen plenty of fights—mostly the flavor of inebriated men spilling out of the Nickel. But this felt different—as if the union man’s song had plucked a string already too taut.

Someone knocked her to her knees and she scrambled back to her feet, ran toward the direction of her office.

She caught a fist in her back and cried out, pushed against another man, then ducked when he turned on her, his fist swishing past her cheek.

“Miss Stewart!”

She heard the voice but couldn’t find it in the mass of bodies, the sense of panic that roused inside her, turning her body to liquid.

Blood splattered on her jacket, across her face.

She wiped her hands down her face, stared at them. Stumbled and fell into another man.

He whirled, grabbed her up by the collar of her jacket.

She screamed, covered her face, and braced herself for the blow.

“Do you think it’s broken? It looks broken.” Ruby peered over Doc Samson’s shoulder at Esme’s swollen ankle as if she’d like to push the frontiersman-turned-physician aside and doctor the swelling herself.

Esme gripped the stool and gulped back a cry, seizing her breath between her teeth as the doctor examined her foot, moved it ever so slightly in a circle. “Can you walk on it?”

“Absolutely. Just give me back my boot. Sorry to have bothered you—”

“She can’t walk on it, and ten minutes before you got here, she was in tears, so don’ya listen to her, Doc.”

The doctor glanced at the man standing behind Esme, his arms folded. “I suppose we should all thank Abel here for picking her up out of the mud.”

“I can take care of myself.” Esme shot a glare at Hud. He leaned against the bar, arms folded, not in the least intimidated. In fact, he even rolled his eyes.

Well, she could. Except, she had to admit to a moment of relief that when the blow came, it didn’t hurt as much as she feared, more glancing as it spun her around. She’d slipped in the mud then crawled until she saw daylight, dragging behind her an ankle the size of a grapefruit.

She didn’t have so much pride, however, that she couldn’t take the hand offered to her at the edge of the angry mass.

A hand that belonged to the rabble-rouser himself.

“Does this hurt?” The doctor pressed his thumb against the bones in her ankle. Pain shot up her leg, nearly to her eyeballs.

“Nope.” Her gaze ran to the union man, now straddling an office chair backwards, scrutinizing Esme’s expression. He wore the makings of a smirk on his unshaven face, his brown eyes alight with humor.

“Okay, maybe a little. But I’ll be fine.”

Doc Samson stood up, grabbed his hat. “I don’t think it’s broken.” He glanced at Ruby, who looked dubious. “But you’d better stay off it a couple days.”

“Hardly. I’m heading out to the Hoyt ranch to talk to Archie, find out what he thinks about all this rabble-rousing.”

She glanced at the union man, who pursed his lips. Well, she had a bruise on her cheek, thanks to his agitating.

“The story will keep for a few days,” Hud said to her, then turned to the doctor. “We’ll make sure she behaves.”

Doc Samson let out a laugh. “I don’t expect that much, but I’ll come by in a couple days to check on you. Try to stay out of the miners’ street brawls, will you, Miss Stewart?”

She waved him away and reached for the snow-filled cloth the doctor had used to take down the swelling. Ruby dropped to her knees to help her fit it on. For a second, a memory skidded through her mind—her ladies maid, Bette, fixing her hair, helping her into her dress, tying her slippers. She brushed Ruby’s hands away. “I can do this. Thanks, Ruby.”

Ruby stood, rounded on the man in the chair. “And I want to know, Abel White, just what you were doing leading that union meeting? Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Abel seemed well acquainted with Ruby’s demeanor. He grinned up at her. “Don’t go getting your knickers in a knot. I was just drumming up support for the Butte Miners Union. We’re going to need one with Daughtry back in town.”

His voice slid into a dark tone at the name of the owner’s son.

Ruby shook her head, grabbed up her hat. “Ten years seems too long to hold a grudge.”

“Too long to forget my brother?”

Ruby shook her head. “No one is forgetting anyone. Including your brother.” She glanced at Esme. “You want me to go see who else got hurt?”

“Yes. Please go talk to the sheriff while I interview the troublemaker here.”

A ghost of that smirk returned, one that Esme might have found fetching if not for his cryptic, acerbic words ringing in her mind. Forget his brother?

Hud must have sensed a confrontation, because he walked over to the stove, added another log, and stirred the coals to life. “If you need me, you know where to find me.”

Normally, on a Friday morning after the paper was out on the streets, he’d be tapping a keg at the Nickel. But today, with her reminding him of her mortality, she knew he’d be sitting in the back room, with his ear pressed to the door, listening for trouble.

Just as she thought, he headed to the back room.

“Is he your father or something?” Abel said, watching him go.

“An uncle of sorts.” She hopped over to a chair, held up her hand when Abel stood to help her. “He came with the place.” She lifted her leg onto another chair and managed not to let the pain show on her face.