Треваньян - Incident at Twenty-Mile

Even before the train came to a full stop, the fun-hungry miners would scramble down from the boxcars, whooping and shooting their slack-hammered old dogleg pistols into the air as they descended upon Bjorkvist's Boardinghouse, where they would devour huge quantities of pretty bad food. Then most of them would go to Kane's Mercantile Emporium to buy overalls or work gloves or muscle liniment or flannel shirts or chewing tobacco or patent medicines, and sometimes frilly little gifts for someone's birthday back home. Mr. Kane would keep their purchases for them until just before they scrambled back onto the train Sunday morning.

From Kane's Mercantile, some went to Professor Murphy's Tonsorial Palace, where a coal-stoked boiler wheezed dangerously as it struggled to heat water for the four wooden tubs. You could get a bath for 35Вў, and a 15Вў shave came with enough bay rum slapped onto your cheeks to make your pals hoot and whistle when they smelled you coming into the Traveller's Welcome Hotel (which was not really a hotel, just a whorehouse with a bar). The reason some men got all bathed and shaved and bay-rum'd was because they believed they might get special treatment from the hotel's whores if they looked their best. No one ever specified what this "special treatment" might consist of, but the words were usually accompanied by winks and nudges and knowing snickers.

Three "girls" worked the Traveller's Welcome: Frenchy, a tall, lean, yellow-eyed black woman from New Orleans; Chinky, a shy Chinese girl who spoke little English and never looked a man in the eyes; and Queeny, a loud, laughing, sloshy-breasted old Irishwoman who was said to be able to drink anything that didn't eat the bottom out of the glass before she got to it. The older miners preferred Queeny, saying she was a "barrel of laughs" and a "good ol' gal at heart"; the younger boys went for Chinky because more experienced girls might poke fun at them; and those who passed for connoisseurs went for Frenchy because everyone knew that black gals were just naturally better at it, and if she was also French…! Well, hey there! Stand aside!

The miners greatly outnumbered Twenty-Mile's permanent population, which had shrunk from more than two hundred at the high tide of the town's fortunes to just fifteen souls, so few that they occupied only a handful of the unpainted wooden buildings that had been slapped up during the heady years of boom and hope, when the town's motto had been: Watch Us Grow! Now those empty buildings creaked and groaned softly as they surrendered themselves to the patient and deadly embrace of gravity.

Twenty-Mile's fifteen residents included Mr. Kane, owner of the Mercantile Emporium ("Everything a Person Really Needs"). Mr. Kane's independent-minded seventeen-year-old daughter, Ruth Lillian, was accounted the town's beauty. Professor Murphy, as we have seen, sold hot baths, shaves, and generous splashes of bay rum at his Tonsorial Palace. Mrs. Bjorkvist ran the boarding-house, which was really just a big dining room that served "steaks" (the quotation marks are meant to suggest the same level of dubiousness as those around "girls" when describing the hotel's whores). These steaks came with cabbage, baking-powder biscuits, and canned peaches at every meal. There was a long room at the back with wooden bunks and skimpy straw mattresses on which miners stumbling back from the Traveller's Welcome could sleep. Bed, supper, and breakfast cost an all-in price of one dollar-robbery, the miners always grumbled, but they paid up. Although Mrs. Bjorkvist spoke with an accent that could blunt a hacksaw, she managed to make it known that she never wanted to see any of the Traveller's Welcome's "girls" around her establishment. There was a Mr. Bjorkvist skulking in the background, a hefty, scowling man with whose assistance she had borne two children. (One wag said he must have struck pay dirt each time he put in his spade.) Kersti Bjorkvist was a heavy-shouldered, thick-featured girl of twenty-two who worked in the kitchen and waited on tables, and her brother, Oskar, was a slow-witted boy a year older than Ruth Lillian Kane, whom he ogled in a moist, slack-jawed way that made Mr. Kane frown irritably. The Traveller's Welcome and its three girls were run by Mr. Delanny, who coughed a lot, wore sparkling white shirts with frills down the front, and was thin as a rail. Mr. Delanny was understood to have been a "big-time gambler" in his day, a reputation burnished by Jeff Calder, the one-legged Civil War veteran who served behind the hotel's bar and often complained that although he'd done more than his share in the defense of the Union, this no-account government refused to treat its wounded heroes like it ought to.

As for the remaining three citizens of Twenty-Mile: B. J. Stone dealt with the donkeys they used up in the mine shafts. He was accounted "odd" because he read a lot and had a way of looking at you as though he knew something he wasn't telling. B. J. Stone's helper-of-all-work was called Coots, a gruff old mixed-blood, part Black, part Cherokee, who kept to himself and was rumored to be a dangerous man to fool with because he had been a gunfighter. Finally there was "Reverend" (see "steak" and "girls") Leroy Hibbard, who received a stipend from the mining company for accompanying the men back up to the Lode every Sunday morning and laying a soul-scourging sermon on the entire work force, which the Puritan Boston mine owners obliged to assemble and receive this bludgeoning enlightenment. Hibbard always stayed overnight at the mine after his exhausting witness and returned Monday afternoon, walking the fifteen miles back down the railroad track. The Reverend was locked in constant battle against the Depravity and Evil that lurk within all descendants of Adam, but every couple of weeks his moral fiber would begin to fray, and he would sneak in at the back door of the Traveller's Welcome late at night to drink with Jeff Calder, then he'd go sin with Frenchy, after which submersion in the sloughs of iniquity, he would stagger down the street in that blackest hour just before dawn, sobbing and crying out that he was a disgusting creature! a loathsome sinner! a fornicator! an unworthy vessel undeserving of God's forgiveness! Mrs. Bjorkvist made no secret of the fact that this was pretty much her own evaluation of the Reverend, who eagerly lapped up her loathing as a deliciously appropriate punishment for his wickedness. B. J. Stone (the Livery man who reads a lot?) found the Reverend ludicrous and openly laughed at him. And for this reason the man of God detested Stone with that marrow-deep hatred that the righteous claim to reserve for the sin but always visit upon the sinner.

Every Sunday morning, after the train dropped off supplies and picked up the miners to carry them and their furry-mouthed hangovers back up to the Surprise Lode, Twenty-Mile was left feeling stiff and leaden, as though it were suffering its own kind of hangover, dazed by all the shouting and laughter, soured by drink, drained by loveless sexual excess. Most people slept late on Sundays, but Kersti Bjorkvist could usually be found sitting at her kitchen table, slump-shouldered and staring, and over at the hotel Jeff Calder would be stumping one-leggedly around the barroom behind his push broom, while upstairs the public girls sprawled in tangled, sweat-damp sheets.

The spring bell over the door of Kane's Mercantile jangled as Mr. Delanny came in to pick up the bottles of Mother Grey's Patented Suppressant he used to keep his cough in check. Departing, he met Mrs. Bjorkvist at the door, and he lifted his hat in a sarcastically theatrical gesture that made her sniff and turn her head away. She wanted no truck with the man who owned The Traveller's Welcome, with its… its… its Whores of Babylon! Mrs. Bjorkvist's moral abhorrence of the hotel did not, however, extend to denying herself the profit she made by supplying that iniquitous den's residents with their daily dinners and suppers. Unable to lower herself to having such people in her establishment, she sent her daughter over with covered pots containing the meals, but she watched the clock to be sure the girl was gone no longer than was necessary to put the food under the warming hood of the hotel's kitchen stove, because… well, because you never know, do you?