I had fought so hard, schooling myself to think of Jesse as of the dead, with reverent tenderness. Little by little I had filled a bleak and empty widowhood with mother duties, womanly service, my holy art of song, and harmless fairies, making the best of it while age and plainness were my destiny. But now of a sudden my poor peace was shattered, and that gift of imagination which had imagined even contentment, played traitor and made havoc. Laws, conventions, mean respectabilities, seemed only cobwebs now. Love swept them all away, and nothing mattered. Jesse! Jesse!
"Them devil-squids," he was saying, "has a habit of throwing out ink to fog the water, so you won't see what they're up to until they lash out to grapple. That's where they're so like this Polly. She's a fat, hearty, good-natured body, and it's the surest fact she's kind to men in trouble. Anybody can have a drink, a meal and a bed, no matter how broke he is; and Spite House is free hospital for the district. She'll sit up nights nursing a sick man, and, till I went an' lived there, I'd have sworn she was good as they make 'em. That's the ink.
"Then you begins to find out, and what I didn't see, mother would tell me. She'd been three years there. Besides, I seen most of what we calls sailor towns, and I'd thought I'd known the toughest there was in the way of boardin'-houses; but rough house in 'Frisco itself is holiness compared with what goes on there under the sign of Mrs. Jesse Smith. That name ain't exactly clean."
"That's enough, I think, if you don't mind. I'd rather have news about our old friends—Captain Taylor, for instance, and Iron Dale, and how is dear Doctor McGee?"
"Dear Doctor McGee, is it? Well, you see he lived within a mile of Polly. She got him drinkin', skinned him at cards, then told him he'd best shoot himself. The snow drifts through his house.
"And Iron Dale? Oh, of course, he was Jesse's friend, too. I'd forgot. She got him drunk and went through him. That money was for paying his hands at the Sky-line—wasn't his to lose, so he skipped the country. The mines closed down and there wasn't no more packing contracts for Jesse."
I began to understand what Billy meant, and it was with sick fear I asked concerning my dear man's stanchest friend, his banker, Captain Boulton Taylor.
"You'd better know, mum." There was pain in the lad's face, reluctance in his voice. "Being the nearest magistrate, he tried to down Polly for keeping a disorderly house. But then, as old man Taylor owned, he didn't know enough law to plug a rat hole. There ain't no municipality, so Spite House is outside the law. But Polly's friends proved all the good she done to men who was hurt, or sick, or broke. Then she showed up how her store and hotel was cutting into the trade of Hundred Mile House. She brung complaints before the government, so Taylor ain't magistrate now. The stage stables got moved from Hundred Mile to Spite House. The post-office had to follow. Now he's alone with only a Chinaman. He's blind as a bat, too, and there's no two ways about it—Bolt Taylor's dying."
"Dunno about that. She uses a lot of law."