“Good night, Miss Jessie. Doc.”

“Good night, boys.” She started toward the door. Her skirts rustled as she walked. They all stared after her.

“Doc,” MacGinty whispered, as Jessie went out. MacGinty’s thin, pocked face was raised to him; it did not look so feverish tonight, and he pressed the back of his hand to the dry forehead and nodded with satisfaction.

MacGinty said, “I guess you heard how Frank tried to get a contrib from MacDonald for—” He rolled his eyes toward Cassady. “But MacDonald said how if he gave anything we’d think the Medusa owed us something when we hurt ourself.”

“Frank was stupid to ask.”

“Lumber’s too high to run in enough laggings,” Dill said. “But it don’t cost them nothing when we get busted up.”

The doctor only nodded, curtly. It was difficult to meet their eyes. Sometimes that was even harder than trying to excuse MacDonald and the mine owners. “I’ll come in in the morning,” he said. “Good night.”

“Good night, Doc.”

He took up his bag, went out, and closed the door behind him. Halfway along the hall, Jessie was standing in conversation with Frank Brunk, a miner whom MacDonald had fired a month ago.

“He won’t last long,” Brunk was saying, in his heavy voice. “Not busted up the way he is. He can’t.”

“He can if he will,” Jessie said. She raised the lamp, and Brunk drew back a little, as though to avoid the light. He was a huge, almost square man, with a square, red, clean-shaven face. He wore a bowie knife slung from his broad belt.

“Hello, Doc,” he said. “Well, I went to MacDonald and I asked him straight out to—”

“You knew there was no use asking.”

“Maybe I did,” Brunk said. “Maybe I just wanted it clear what a son— Pardon me, Miss Jessie.”

“Asked him what, Frank?” Jessie said.

“Well, told him. How the Medusa ought to pay part of Tom Cassady’s keep.”

“Tom doesn’t have to worry about his keep, Frank.”

Brunk nodded a little; his eyes were pits of shadow. “No, I guess it won’t run to much, either,” he said. “But I worry about it, Miss Jessie. And it was the Medusa smashed him.”

“You are beginning to talk like Lathrop,” Jessie said.

“And maybe MacDonald will put Jack Cade to run me out of town, too?” Brunk said. “Well, I am just saying there is going to be trouble when Tom dies, is all.”

The doctor said, “Do you need him to die? So you can have your trouble?”

Brunk looked at him reproachfully. “That kind of hurts, Doc.” He leaned against the wall. “Do you think I want that? I only know what all of us want, and that’s help.”

“I have tried to talk to Charlie MacDonald about the laggings,” Jessie said. She put a hand on Brunk’s arm. “But he is no easier for me to talk to. He—”

“I think maybe he is, if you’ll pardon me, Miss Jessie,” Brunk said. “Doc, it is a fact. I am a miserable no-account miner. We all are. We are dirty, ignorant bullprod drillers and muckers, as everybody knows. No one will listen when the animals try to talk. We will have to have a union.”

“Have it, then,” the doctor said, with an irritation he did not understand. “If you break your heads fighting for a union or in the stope it is the same broken head.”

“It is not the same,” Brunk said.

Jessie said in her quiet voice, “Frank, my father used to say that men could do anything they wanted if they wanted it enough. Just to look at history to see what they have done, because they wanted it with all their hearts. He was going to write a book about it and he had collected pieces for the book — the impossible things that men have accomplished because it is in them to do anything if—”

“It’s not so,” Brunk broke in, roughly.

The doctor saw Jessie’s eyes widen. “You can be civil, Brunk,” he said.

Brunk rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Sorry. But it is not so, Miss Jessie. We can’t have a union because we are not strong enough to make it and never will be, and what we want’s nothing to do with it. That’s all,” he said bitterly. “Jim Lathrop was a good man and he did his best, and all he got was run out by a hired hardcase for his pains. Wanted enough!” he said, with scorn.

“Jim Lathrop did not have courage enough,” Jessie said.

“Jesus Christ!” Brunk cried. “I will not hear that from anybody, Miss Jessie!”

Jessie’s face was stiff as she gazed back at Brunk, the lamp steady in her hand, her breast rising and falling, and all the power of her will in her eyes.

And Brunk sighed and said in a humble voice, “I am sorry, Miss Jessie. I guess I have got the nerves tonight.”

“All right, Frank,” Jessie said. “I know Tom Cassady is your friend. And I know Jim Lathrop was.” Footsteps sounded in the entryway, and she excused herself and hurried away down the hall, carrying the light with her.

The doctor said to Brunk, “Don’t you know how to be civil? Don’t you ever consider what she has done for you?”

“Christ knows she helps us enough,” Brunk said, in his heavy, tired voice. “And Christ knows you do, Doc. But—” Brunk stopped.

“But what?” He put his bag down and stepped closer to the miner. He could not see Brunk’s features now in the darkness.

“But Christ knows we shouldn’t ought to be dirty charity cases,” Brunk groaned. “We are people like anybody else. When we are charity cases it just makes it worse what everybody thinks of us. We—”

“Just a moment,” the doctor said. “Let me tell you something. Who will you blame for the fact that you are charity cases? Jessie? Is it MacDonald’s fault that Cassady has saved no money and must become a charity case? You make more money by far than any other laboring men in Warlock. Have any of you ever thought of saving any of it? I will grant you that the saloons, gambling halls, and the Row are snares constructed to relieve you of your earnings. But must all of you fall into those snares payday after payday? Saving is good for the moral fiber — a quality extremely rare among you. Saving your pay might also keep you from becoming charity cases, since you resent that status so much.”

Brunk said, “If we had a union we could—”

“There is not moral fiber enough among you to make a union.”

Brunk was silent for a time. Then he said, “Doc, I’m not saying what you just said isn’t so. But it isn’t all there is to it. We have got to have help to have a union, Doc. And the help we have to have is from respectable people. Like you.”

He had told Brunk many times he would not engage himself in trying to form a miners’ union; he had told himself, as many times, that there was no reason why he should. He said with finality, “I am a doctor, Frank. That’s all I am.”

“That’s a funny way to be. For I am a miner, but I am a man too.”

He didn’t answer; he picked up his bag.

Brunk said bitterly, “Well, don’t worry — they won’t fight when a man dies, not having any of that moral fiber you said. But maybe they will try to cut wages one of these days. I have never seen a man yet that wouldn’t fight for money.”

Brunk moved away from him, down toward the hospital room. Carrying his bag, the doctor walked rapidly to the entryway, and the stairs that led to the rooms on the second story of the General Peach. Outside the open front door a group of boarders on the porch were talking together in the darkness.

As he started up the stairs he could see through Jessie’s door, which she always left open, when she had company, for the sake of propriety. She was sitting stiffly on the horsehair sofa, with her hands clasped in her lap and her face alight. Just past the edge of the door a black strip of Blaisedell’s coat sleeve was visible, on the arm of the red plush chair.

“They were reasonable enough,” Blaisedell was saying. “Most men are, when you can talk to them straight. I don’t know as McQuown is one I’d trust far, but then I don’t know him.”

Blaisedell’s voice ceased for a moment, and Jessie glanced toward the door. The doctor went on up the stairs. Below him they began talking again, but now he couldn’t hear the words. In his room, as he poured a glass of water, and, into the water, the carefully measured drops of laudanum, he could not hear them at all.