He looked from face to worried face, and no one answered him. “I think you will get neither of those things,” he said. “Lathrop made the Miners’ Union too much of a bugbear here for MacDonald even to tolerate the notion, and MacDonald has put himself into a position where to save his face he cannot put wages back to where they were. They were due to come down in any case, and I am sure he was ordered by the company to lower them, though possibly not so much as he did.

“My advice to you is to accept these two facts. Make no issue of the Miners’ Union as yet, and let MacDonald have his way about the wages. Then what can you hope for? I know you must save your own faces, and I think you must try to save your lives as well — by which I mean the timbering in the stopes.

“I think you should prepare a series of demands to present to MacDonald. He will refuse them, and then you should submit slightly different ones. If he goes on refusing them, he will come to look more and more unreasonable to everyone — including the Porphyrion and Western Mining Company. I think that is the way you can beat him.”

He saw that he had most of them with him. He took a deep breath. “Some of your demands should be these: Demand above all proper timbering, especially in that number two shaft. And demand that the number two lift be made safe. Demand ventilation at the lower levels. There are a great many more items that concern your personal safety which you know much more about than I. People are going to sympathize with demands of this nature, as they will not sympathize with the drop in your wages, or with the Miners’ Union as yet.

“You have every right to demand these things, but I would demand much more at first so that you can bargain downward. I would—” He paused a moment; what he was going to say seemed, in a way, a betrayal of Jessie, but he could see that they must, one day, have it. And, he though bitterly, Jessie had Blaisedell now. He said, “I would demand some kind of hospital for the injured, the cost to be shared between you and the mine owners.” He held up a hand for silence, and raised his voice above the muttering. “And there is to be a committee of miners established to supervise that, and to advise on what is to be done about safety in the Medusa. This is the most important thing. A committee,” he said, and paused again so as to catch their full attention, “that will be the basis for your Miners’ Union!”

They cheered in one voice, and he could not help smiling. He sat down quickly, amid the prolonged yelling and clapping. Fitzsimmons sprang to his feet.

“Listen!” he cried. “The Doc has told us the right way, I guess we all know; but there is something else to bring up. What we are waiting for is the day Peach gives this town a patent. Stop and think how the vote’ll run when we have got a vote. We—”

“Sit down! Young one — sit!”

“Listen! Why won’t you listen to me? I am telling you we can elect the mayor and council and all — and sheriff! We—”

“Sit down, boy!” Bull Johnson growled.

“Peach’s forgot us here. He thinks we are in Mexico.”

“Brunk was after MacDonald about that retimbering too, Doc. He never got anywhere but fired.”

“I say burn the Medusa for Frank’s sake!” Bull Johnson shouted. “Then they’ll have to retimber.”

“Hear! Hear!”

Old man Heck pounded on the table. Fitzsimmons sank into his chair again, and turned to grin bitterly at the doctor. “They won’t listen. Damn them, they just won’t.”

“Well, I guess Bull has got us back to what we come here to vote on,” old man Heck said. “All this other is interesting and maybe edifying, Doc, but we are here to vote on the first thing. All right, all for it!” Old man Heck got to his feet to count the hands.

The doctor did not turn to see how many had gone up, watching old Man Heck’s face. Fitzsimmons, who had looked around, grinned and winked at him.

“Seven for,” old man Heck said sourly. “Well, all right; against.”

“No fire tonight,” Frenchy Martin said.

“Yellow-belly bastards!” Bull Johnson said. All around the room men began to stir and rise. There would be no fire tonight.

The doctor sighed and got to his feet; he had better get back to Jessie. He excused himself and hurried from the dining room, waving a hand and nodding to the men who tried to talk to him.

He crossed the hall and entered Jessie’s room without knocking.

Blaisedell was there, sitting where he had sat, and Jessie’s head was against his chest. It did not appear that Blaisedell hated her, as she had feared. They both stared at him, Blaisedell with the color flushing to his cheeks, Jessie with her eyes round and bright. She smiled at him, and Blaisedell started to his feet.

“You had better keep your door locked, Jessie,” the doctor said, and backed out and pulled the door quickly closed behind him. The entry-way was full of miners, but he thought no one had seen.

Someone called to him, and he went to join Fitzsimmons, Daley, and Patch, and the two or three others who seemed to make up Fitzsimmons’ clique. Fitzsimmons asked if he would like to come to the Billiard Parlor for a game with them, and they all seemed surprised and pleased when he said that he would.

“You can hold my cue for me, Doc,” Fitzsimmons said, as they left the General Peach together. “But maybe you could let me call the shots.”

39. MORGAN LOOKS AT THE DEADWOOD

TOM MORGAN sat in the sun on the porch of the Western Star Hotel in his only suit of clothes, his only boots, his only hat. He rocked, smoked a good Havana cheroot, and watched the activity of Warlock in the afternoon — the bustle down the street of horsemen and wagons and men afoot, the loungers along the arcades, the groups of Medusa strikers standing along the far side of Main Street. There was a racket of whistling and catcalls as three whores in their finery promenaded down Southend Street and stopped to look into Goodpasture’s store window.

As he leaned forward in his chair to try to see down to the ruin of the Glass Slipper, his money belt pressed into his flesh. Quickly he leaned back. In it was his stake; his place was burned, and he had long been sick to death of Warlock. His mind began to poke pleasureably at place names, at things he had heard of this town or that one.

He spun his cigar out into the dust of the street, where it disappeared as into water. He rocked back and stared up at the sun past his hatbrim, and grinned — a painful stretch of flesh over his teeth. He could not go. Clay would not because of Miss Jessie Marlow, and he could not because Clay would not, and because of McQuown, and because he did not know what Kate was up to with the deputy

At that moment the deputy came into sight, mounted, from Southend Street. He came jogging down Main Street on a shabby buckskin horse, his hat pulled low on his forehead, his face turned aside against the wind. He nodded gravely as he passed, and Morgan turned to see that he took the Bright’s City road.

As he watched the deputy ride out of town he saw Kate coming toward him with her skirt blowing and one hand holding her feathered hat on her head. He rose as she came up the steps to the veranda.

“I want to talk to you,” she said.

“Fine. Sit and talk.”

“Not here.”

“Your deputy rides out of town and first thing you are out hunting a tomcat,” he said, as he took her arm. They started back toward Grant Street to her house. “You will get yourself a bad name walking with me,” he went on. “I am a devil, as everybody knows. What’s this about you and Buck Slavin going to build a dance hall?”

“We’ve talked about it,” Kate said shortly. “He’ll put up the money if I’ll run it.”

“Just Buck?” He grinned at her.

“No, I think there is somebody else in it, Tom,” she said, in an uninterested voice. He noticed that she was very pale. “I don’t know who.”