Треваньян - Incident at Twenty-Mile

Tillman cleared his throat. "I got this week's paper. " There was an embarrassed silence. "How… ah… how do I…?"

"You're wondering how you can give it to me without opening the door."

"Well… ah…" Tillman certainly didn't intend to take any chances.

Lieder stood up. "They roll the pages up and push 'em through the hole. And you know, I honestly believe that's the best way to do it. A man would be a downright fool to risk coming in here."

Tillman ineptly rolled up the first sheet of the four-page paper and slowly introduced it into the spyhole. It suddenly flew through his fingers as Lieder snatched it in.

"Good news," Tillman said as he started rolling up the second sheet. "Looks like the fighting in Cuba's all over. They've signed a… a something… with Spain."

Lieder stared fiercely at the paper. "A protocol… whatever the hell that is. Those pig-ignorant bastards in Washington have been tricked! Fine young American boys fight and die to teach foreigners who's who and what's what, and the politicians sign a protocol! Spain palms off Puerto Rico and the Philippines on us! And that stupid McKinley thinks he did good! Those sly Spaniards have slipped us the poison spoon, Mr. Tillman. Slipped us the poison spoon! They've palmed off a couple of million illiterate greasers on us, and first thing you know they'll come streaming over here to steal jobs from Americans! Give me that!" He snatched the second sheet in through the spy-hole and scanned it rapidly. "Stupid bastards!"

Tillman had been looking for the right moment to speak to Lieder about what his wife had suggested, but this sure wasn't it.

"I'm interested in your opinion about something, Mr. Tillman," Lieder said. "Who do you think blew up the Maine?"

"Ah… the Spanish, of course."

"The Spanish?" Lieder laughed. "It was those anarchists! One of those immigrant bastards put a time bomb on board when she was still in harbor in America!"

"But… why would they do that?"

"To lure us into war! To draw our soldiers out of this country and leave them free to take it over!"

"That's crazy! There ain't-"

Lieder spun and glared in rage at the spy-hole… then he smoothly masked his fury behind an eye-smile. "Well now, maybe you're right, Mr. Tillman." He showed his teeth in a broad grin. "Crazy men do sometimes say crazy things. That's how we know they're crazy, isn't it? Mr. Tillman, would you tell me something?"

"What's that?" Tillman's tone was stiff. No slick moonberry was going to talk him down from the trees.

"Are you a reader? Me, I believe a man ought to read. Keeps his mind sharp and his horizons broad."

"I don't read but the Bible. A man don't need nothing else, 'cause all the truth in this world is right there. Me and my wife read from the Good Book every morning and evening."

"Your wife? Oh… yes. Yes, a guard told me that the new man had just got married. It is a crying shame, ain't it, how some men feel they've got to say smutty things about newly married folks? Joking about what they get up to, and how many times they do it, and how sore the wife is afterward! Men think they're being funny, but all they're being is filthy-minded. So you don't read anything but the Bible, eh? You know what I was reading when you came calling at my door? I was reading the most important book ever written-other, of course, than your Bible. I was reading The Revelation of the Forbidden Truth, which was written by a man who signs himself simply The Warrior. You ever hear tell of The Revelation of the Forbidden Truth, Mr. Tillman?"

"Can't say I have," Tillman said, his curt tone showing he was no soft touch.

"I'm sorry to hear that. But then, I suppose it isn't given to everyone to receive and understand the Forbidden Truth. Only to those who have been chosen to smite the politicians in Washington who are despoiling this beautiful land of ours. And the immigrants! And the papists! And the stockbrokers! And the-" He smiled suddenly. "But just listen to me, will you? Babbling away like a crazy man. Sane people, they don't care if the foreigners and the Catholics and the Jews blow up American battleships and get off scot-free! No! And they don't care if America's turning into a garbage pit for Europe to dump their ignorant scum into." He dropped onto his bunk and threw his arm over his face.

"Ah…" Tillman began uncertainly. "Talking about reading and all, do you… ah… have a Bible in there?"

Lieder did not respond.

"I'm asking because my wife…" Tillman shrugged.

"Because your wife what, Mr. Tillman?" Lieder asked from beneath his arm.

"Well, I told her about you, and she said I should… I mean, she thought maybe you'd like to…"

"Maybe I'd like to do what, Mr. Tillman?"

The guard cleared his throat. "Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?"

Lieder smiled into his arm. But his voice was gentle and receptive when he answered, "Well now, I can't honestly say as I have, Mr. Tillman."

"You haven't been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?"

"N-no. But I confess that something in those words attracts me mightily." He lowered his arm and looked toward the spy-hole, his eyes vulnerable and sincere. "Your wife, she wouldn't have something I could read, would she? Something to guide my feet along the right path?"

"I'll bring you some tracts tomorrow."

"Will you, Mr. Tillman? I'd be so thankful."

"You can count on it." Tillman closed the spy-hole and drew a deep breath. Mary will be pleased as punch when I tell her. Pleased as punch!

Alone, Lieder's lips compressed into an astringent smile. "Well, now! I guess there's something to what Paul said in Friesians: 7, 13. Praise the word of the Lord, for it is Truth, and the truth will set you free."

DUTCHMAN'S FINGER, YANKEE PROMISE, Sally's Drawers, Why Bother? Easy Squaw, Eureka Ditty… the Wyoming silver rush left so many short-lived and whimsically named towns in its wake that "Twenty-Mile" seems mundane by comparison, until you discover that the town wasn't twenty miles from anything. It sprang up overnight beside a narrow-gauge railway that connected the boomtown of Destiny to a high mountain silver mine called the Surprise Lode. The distance between these terminals was only seventeen miles as the crow flies, but if that crow had been obliged to take the train, it would have had to endure a tortuous forty-three mile crawl up the vertiginous switchbacks of the Medicine Bow Range, with solid rock walls almost brushing one side of the train and, on the other side, a series of stomach-fluttering drops into deep ravines.

Some claim that Twenty-Mile got its name when the railroad surveyors, having chosen a point at random from which to measure distances, discovered a two-acre shelf of flatland about twenty miles up the line that would serve as a way station for supplies while they were blasting out the roadbed and laying track. The little cluster of unpainted, false-fronted buildings that sprouted up overnight came to be known as Twenty-Mile. Admittedly, it is not very gratifying to learn that Twenty-Mile was so called because it was twenty miles from a spot twenty miles away, but we are unlikely ever to get a better explanation because Twenty-Mile now exists only in small print on the survey quads, where its symbol indicates uninhabited agglomeration, map-maker language for a ghost town.

This ghost town attracts occasional memento-hunters who, after working their way up the now-derelict and dangerous railroad cut in search of souvenirs from America's Vanished Past, report feeling a disquieting "chill" upon reaching Twenty-Mile's little scattering of abandoned, sun-bleached buildings. Old-timers say that the town's "bad totem" comes from what happened there in 1898 when, already slipping toward decay after its brief flurry of growth, it was inhabited by only a handful of hangers-on. But every Saturday evening a rattling five-car train used to carry the week's output of silver from the Surprise Lode down to Destiny to be smelted and shipped back East. The snorting narrow-gauge engine made a brief stop at Twenty-Mile to drop off sixty-or-so miners for their weekly bender. It would pick them up again on its return Sunday morning, as it brought coal, equipment, and supplies up to the Lode and to the residents of Twenty-Mile. This arrangement had been worked out by the mine managers to prevent their work force of misfits and drifters from getting down to Destiny, where they might find work that was less back-breaking, dangerous, and poorly paid, or even desert to the new gold fields up in the Klondike. But the Surprise Lode miners were a feckless, burnt-out bunch, content to stay where they were so long as they had all Saturday night to raise hell and squander their wages; and it was this hell-raising and wage-squandering that constituted Twenty-Mile's only excuse for existing, after its role as the mine's principal supply station had been superseded by Destiny, and the flood of independent prospectors that used to comb these mountains had dwindled to a trickle of half-crazed diehards.