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miners’ union contending with the copper bosses of Butte. To my thinking, Jared Evans always looked freshly ironed, with a touch of starch. Not his clothing; Jared himself. On that score, though, I noticed he was better dressed than I remembered, which I credited to the influence of Rab, frisky clothes horse that she had been since school days. Properly named “Barbara” until in a classroom moment I never regretted I permitted her to flip that around to “Rabrab,” and now a teacher herself, she still exuded the zeal of a schoolgirl, albeit one who happened to have the chest and legs of a circus bareback rider. Jared had made a fortunate catch with her. And she him. Russian Famine luckiest of all, nearly a street orphan but for these two as his guardians. I could tell the boy thought the sun and moon rose and set in them, the pair in his parentless life to look up to.
    Gratified to be reunited with them so fast, I wondered, “How did you know I was back in town?” Rab only wrinkled her nose as though the whereabouts of Morris Morgan were common knowledge, while Jared winked and said, “Moccasin telegraph,” the old rubric for the soft-footed way news travels. Laughing as much as we talked in catching up, we shared quick stories, including mine of the mansion bequest from Sandison. The fidgety seventh-grader doing his best to follow the maunderings of adults brightened. “Ain’t he the one called the Earl of—”
    â€œCareful with your language, Famine,” Rab admonished.
    â€œI was gonna say ‘heck,’” he maintained guilelessly.
    I chuckled and asked the boy whether his current teacher was as strict as that stickler last year, meaning Rab.
    â€œGot her again, don’t I,” he reported with a fresh outbreak of fidgets. “Her and me are in the hoosegow.”
    I blinked. “He means the detention school, up on the Hill,” Rab hastened to explain. “It’s a dormitory school, for boys who are truant too much or delinquent in other ways that their families can’t handle. They learn some shop work, along with regular classes. They can be a handful—I know what you’re going to say, Mr. Morgan, remembering what I was like—”
    â€œJustice is served,” I said it anyway with a smile tucked in my beard.
    â€œâ€”but they tame down if treated right.” She left no doubt that was her calling, explaining that she was a day matron at the so-called hoosegow. “That way, Famine can come along and go to school under me.”
    â€œShe’s terrible hard, sir,” the boy testified.
    â€œSo are diamonds, my friend,” I said with a fond swipe at the hair perpetually clouding in on his eyes. Now Rab suggested the two of them tend to the matter of food, and Famine in a few bounds sprang ahead of her to the serving line.
    Silently proud, Jared watched them go, and then there were the two of us, and the topic always on the table in the shadow of the Hill, it seemed. I tried to put it diplomatically: “As those more statesmanlike than I might ask, how stands the union?”
    Jared tugged at his wounded ear, an answer in itself. A German bullet had clipped the lobe neatly off, lending him a swashbuckling look advantageous in leading an organization of hardened miners. He was every inch the combat veteran now, in more ways than one. “The war over here goes on and on,” he more than answered my question. “Anaconda just kills us more slowly than the Fritzies did.” By that, I assumed he meant the long-standing reputation of the Hill’s mines as the most dangerous anywhere, one mortal accident a week on the average, not counting conflagrations such as the Speculator fire, which claimed 164 lives, or the slow burn of silicosis in the lungs of hundreds of other doomed mineworkers. But no. Jared Evans practically blazed with fresh intensity as he leaned across the table toward me.