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Pete would make room for me on the premises of the Modern Mortuary and Funeral Home, however. Somebody had to put on a fixed smile and sell those caskets. Accordingly, I was not in my best mood as I headed for the kitchen to tell Grace she was about to have an undertaker’s assistant for a husband.
    â€œBy the way, Morrie,” Griff called between slams of his hammer. “You’re wanted.”
    That stopped me as if impaled. The vision of oneself portrayed in every post office in the land with that incriminating word beneath would halt any thinking person. Confusion asked the sizable question: for what?
    Griff sized me up as if putting a price on me himself. “Got the note on you, Hoop?”
    â€œSomewhere.” The other oldster patted his pockets to finally retrieve it. With no small measure of trepidation, I unfolded the message.
    Mr. Morgan—
    Welcome back to Butte—we’ve missed you something awful. Jared needs to talk to you, and you know I always want to. Meet us at the usual place, the usual time, tonight.
    Yours until the fountain pen runs dry,
    Rab
    I checked to make sure. “This was brought by—?”
    â€œThat kid,” said Hoop. “Thin as a whisker.”
    Relieved, I went directly to the kitchen to inform Grace. Slicing onions, she was in tears, but greeted me with a world-beating smile all the same. As Hoop and Griff and I knew and Sandison was about to find out, her years of balancing a boardinghouse budget had made her a canny if unconventional grocery shopper, and today’s triumph was a bargain on rabbit. “Those French. Remember that meal, lapin à la something or other?”
    Touching her cheek to wipe away a trickle, I managed to look regretful as I told her to set one less plate for supper. “Jared Evans wishes to see me about something.”
    â€œOf course you need to go, then,” she said at once. The leader of the mineworkers’ union inspired almost royal loyalty, and I had been proud to stand with him in a certain episode in 1919. “Still,” she sniffled from the effect of the onions, “it’s a shame you’ll miss the stewed rabbit.”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The spacious eatery with the big red welcoming sign NO WAITING! YOUR FOOD AWAITS YOU! was called the Purity Cafeteria. Butte never undernamed anything. I scanned the ballroom-size dining area but could not spot Rab and Jared yet, and so went to the serving counter at the back and, with a mental apology to Grace, got myself a pasty. Fortunately pronounced like
past
, not
paste
, this was a meat-and-vegetables dish encased in pastry crust, introduced to Butte by Cornish miners, and in my experience, that rare thing, a hearty delicacy. It proved to be so, again this evening, as I ate, watching the traffic of customers waiting on themselves, until a wraithlike presence at my side caught me by surprise.
    â€œHiya, sir.”
    â€œThe same to you, Famine!” The boy had grown in height the past year, but not at all in girth, still skinny as an undernourished greyhound. Straw hair flopping over his pale brow as he stood on one stilt leg and then the other, he retained the personification put on him by schoolmates, Russian Famine, which he greatly preferred to Wladislaw. Close behind the lad, natural authority resting on him as ever, Jared Evans provided me a serious smile along with a handshake and the greeting, “Professor, how you doing?” Then came the whirlwind, Rab, exclaiming, “Mr. Morgan!” and flinging herself into hugging me while I was only half onto my feet.
    What a family tableau they made as they settled at the table with me. The boy restless in every bone but his mind at ease, I could tell, in the company of these trusted grown-ups. Jared, lean and chiseled, his dark eyes reflective of battles he had been through, from the trenches of death in France to the sometimes deadly front lines of the