There’s plenty of food for them here to last out the winter, and they probably haven’t saved any money (granted they ever got square with the commissary even when they were being paid enough wages to save) and as Buckner said, you can live pretty happy a long time on illusion. Maybe you aren’t happy any other time. I mean, if you are a hunky that never learned anything else but how to time a dynamite fuse five hundred feet underground. And another thing. We’ve still got three-quarters of the hundred dollars in grub ourselves, and if everybody left here, somebody would hear about it and he might even send a man in here to pick up the other three cans of beans.”
“And something else too,” Charlotte said. “They cant go now. They cant walk out in this snow. Hadn’t you noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“That little toy train hasn’t been back since it took the Buckners out. That’s two weeks ago.”
He hadn’t noticed this, he did not know if it would come back again, so they agreed that the next time it appeared they would wait no longer, they would tell (or try to tell) the men in the mine. Then two weeks later the train did return. They crossed the canyon to where the wild filthy jabbering men were already beginning to load the cars. “Now what?” Wilbourne said. “I cant talk to them.”
“Yes, you can. Some way. They believe you are the boss now and nobody yet ever failed to understand the man he believes is his boss. Try to get them over to the commissary.”
Wilbourne moved forward, over to the loading chute in which the first tram of ore was already rattling, and raised his hand. “Wait,” he said loudly. The men paused, looking at him out of the gaunt pale-eyed faces. “Commissary,” he shouted. “Store!” jerking his arm toward the opposite canyon wall; now he recalled the word which the first one, the one who drew up Charlotte’s coat for her that first day, had used. “Ron,” he said. “Ron.” They looked at him a moment longer, silently, the eyes round beneath the brute-like and terrific arching of pale brows, the expressions eager, puzzled, and wild.
Then they looked at one another, they huddled, jabbering in that harsh incomprehensible tongue. Then they moved toward him in a body. “No, no,” he said. “All.” He gestured toward the mine shaft. “All of you.” Someone comprehended quickly this time, almost at once the short one whom Wilbourne had seen behind the galloping ore tram on his first visit to the mine dashed out of the group and up the snowy slope on his short strong thick piston-like legs and vanished into the orifice and reappeared, followed by the rest of the endless shift. These mingled with the first group, jabbering and gesticulating. Then they all ceased and looked at Wilbourne, obedient and subdued. “Look at their faces,” he said. “God, I hate to be the one to have to do this. Damn Buckner anyway.”
“Come on,” Charlotte said. “Let’s get it over.” They crossed the valley, the miners following, incredibly dirty against the snow—the faces of a poorly made-up and starving black-face minstrel troupe—to the commissary. Wilbourne unlocked the door. Then he saw at the rear of the group five women. He and Charlotte had never seen them before; they seemed to have sprung from the snow itself, shawled; two of them carried infants, one of which could not have been a month old.
“My God,” Wilbourne said. “They dont even know I’m a doctor. They dont even know they are supposed to have a doctor, that the law requires that they have one.” He and Charlotte entered. In the gloom after the snow-glare the faces vanished and only the eyes watched him out of nothing, subdued, patient, obedient, trusting and wild. “Now what?” he said again. Then he began to watch Charlotte and now they all watched her, the five women pushing forward also to see, as she fastened with four tacks produced from somewhere a sheet of wrapping paper to the end of a section of shelves where the light from the single window fell on it and began to draw swiftly with one of the scraps of charcoal she had brought from Chicago—the elevation of a wall in cross section with a grilled window in it unmistakably a pay window and as unmistakably shut, on one side of the window a number of people unmistakably miners (she had even included the woman with the baby); on the other side of the window an enormous man (she had never seen Callaghan, he had merely described him to her, yet the man was Callaghan) sitting behind a table heaped with glittering coins which the man was shovelling into a sack with a huge hand on which glittered a diamond the size of a ping-pong ball.
The she stepped aside. For a moment longer there was no sound. Then an indescribable cry rose, fierce but not loud, only the shrill voices of the women much more than a whisper, wailing, and they turned as one upon Wilbourne, the wild pale frenzied eyes glaring at him with at once incredulous ferocity and profound reproach.
“Wait!” Charlotte cried. “Wait!” They paused; they watched her once more as the crayon moved, and now, at the rear of the throng waiting outside the closed window Wilbourne saw his own face emerge from beneath the flying chalk; anyone would have recognised him: they did at once. The sound ceased, they looked at Wilbourne then at one another in bewilderment. Then they looked at Charlotte again as she ripped the paper from the wall and began to attach a fresh sheet; this time one of them stepped forward and helped her, Wilbourne too watching the flying crayon again.
This time it was himself, indubitably himself and indubitably a doctor, anyone would have known it—the horn glasses, the hospital tunic every charity patient, every hunky gutted by flying rock or steel or premature dynamite and coming to in company emergency stations, has seen, a bottle which was indubitably medicine in one hand, a spoonful of which he was offering to a man who was compositely all of them, every man who ever labored in the bowels of earth—the same wild unshaven look, even the sheepskin collar, and behind the doctor the same huge hand with its huge diamond in the act of extracting from the doctor’s pocket a wallet thin as paper. Again the eyes turned toward Wilbourne, the reproach gone now and only the ferocity remaining and that not at him. He gestured toward the remaining laden shelves. Presently he was able to reach Charlotte in the pandemonium and take her arm.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” Later (he had returned to the ore train, where Hogben, its entire crew, sat over the red hot stove in the caboose not much larger than a broom closet. “You’ll be back in thirty days then,” Wilbourne said. “I have to make a trip every thirty days for us to hold the franchise,” Hogben said.
“You better bring your wife on out now.”—“We’ll wait,” Wilbourne said. Then he returned to the cabin and he and Charlotte stood in the door and watched the crowd emerge from the commissary with its pitiful loot and later cross the canyon and board the ore train, filling the three open cars. The temperature was not forty-one now, neither was it back up to fourteen. The train moved; they could see the tiny faces looking back at the mine entrance, the refuse dump, with incredulous bewilderment, a kind of shocked and unbelieving sorrow; as the train moved a burst of voices reached across the canyon to them, faint with distance, forlorn, grieving, and wild) he said to Charlotte, “Thank God we got our grub out first.”
“Maybe it wasn’t ours,” she said soberly.
“Buckner’s then. They hadn’t paid him either.”
“But he ran away. They didn’t.”
It was still nearer spring then; by the time the ore train made its next ritualistic and empty visitation perhaps they would see the beginning of the mountain spring which neither of them had seen and did not know would not appear until that time which in their experience was the beginning of summer. They talked of this at night now, with the thermometer again sometimes at forty-one. But they could at least talk in bed now, in the dark where beneath the blankets Charlotte would, after an amount of savage heaving and twisting (this too ritualistic) emerge from the woollen undergarment to sleep in the old fashion. She would not fling it out from beneath the blankets but would keep it inside, a massy wad upon and beneath and around which they slept, so it would be warm for the morning. One night she said, “You haven’t heard from Buckner yet. But of course you haven’t; how could you have.”
“No,” he said, suddenly sober. “And I wish I would. I told him to take her to a doctor soon as they got out. But he probably— He promised to write me.”
“I wish you would too.”
“We may have a letter when the ore train
