Distinctly Montana Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.distinctlymontana.com/i/913324
W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA NA . C O M 33 D E PA R T M E N T L I T E R A R Y L O D E DASH BY DAVID ABRAMS Little came out of the boarding house in his underwear. No, not "came." Pulled. Dragged. e first of the skin peeling from the tops of his toes where they caught the sidewalk, the curb, the street. On the other foot, his cast scraped and rumbled in sympathy. Eight men pulled like plowhorses, heading for the Cadillac, while the lady who ran the boarding house stared at us from behind the curtains in her first- floor parlor. She watched like we were some sick, sober version of the Keystone Cops. None of us were doing this for laughs. is was serious Com- pany business in the dead of night. Likewise, none of us were the law. I came the closest, but even then I don't know how far the agency, not to mention the Old Man, would back me if I said I was there as a curi- ous bystander. "Wrong place, wrong time, Hammett," the Old Man would say. I couldn't disagree. e plowhorses grunted, the cast rumbled, and the jerked-from-his-sleep gentleman stayed silent as the grave. I looked past the boarding house at the city built on the hill. It was an ugly town in an ugly notch between ugly mountains, all of it dirtied by poison smoke that settled in a grit you could never completely clean. Eight men pulling one man, barely out of his sleep grog. Still in his long underwear, his union suit. More than a dozen hands seized the rabble-rouser with grips strong as handcuffs. I was one of the eight. I'd been told to expect a big payoff if I went along. I never said "yes," but I never told them "no," either. I was in wait-and-see mode. One of our posse gave a hard shove to his back and a couple of us lost our hold on him. Little stumbled, tried to catch up with his legs, but couldn't. It took him a while to get back on his feet. No one helped him. A heavy man with a cork-blackened face said, "Yer lookin' a little wobbly today, Red." ey laughed. Not me. ere's nothing funny about setting a table for a poison meal. Before his writing career got underway, mystery novelist Dashiell Hammett (e Maltese Fal- con) worked as a Pinkerton detective for several years, including a detail to Butte in 1917. On Aug. 1, 1917, labor leader Frank Little was lynched in the streets of Butte after trying to organize a strike against the Anaconda Mining Company. e following is a fictional account of what might have happened if these two lives intersected. Frank Little Dashiell Hammett