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Chapter 30
"Hey, Mike," George Lindquist said down at the Spearfish Lake Cafe the next morning. "You still interested in those guys that used to run dog sleds around here?"
"Yeah," Mike said. "You hear of one?"
"I found one," George explained. "It took some asking around. You still want a story on him?"
"Who is it?" Mark asked.
"Old guy over in Warsaw," George explained. "Must be close to 80. Worked in the mill, but he ran a trap line on the side for maybe twenty years, all with a dog team, and gave it up about the time snow machines got popular. Jim Horton. You know him?"
"The Jim Horton that's on the village council?" Mike asked. Lindquist nodded, and Mike went on, "Sure, I know him. He's in the book."
"What book is that?" George asked.
"Oh, right after the Warsaw fire, I got the wild hair that I might be able to write a book about the fire and sell it, so I spent a lot of time interviewing people that were involved with the fire. Let me tell you, we tend to remember the firemen, and Bud Ellsberg and the
railroad hauling in all those fire departments on flatcars when the road bridge was out in the middle of that snowstorm, but there were a lot of unsung heros that I never found out about until after it was too stale for the newspaper."
"Jim was one of them?" Lindquist asked.
"You bet," Mike said. "Like I said, just one of many."
"Well, don't leave us hanging," Mark said, putting down his coffee. "What did he do?"
Mike shook his head, then realized that he might as well tell the whole story. "About a day into the fire, about the time that the main plant started burning, they'd pumped the water tower dry, and were running straight off the village pumps. Well, Jim had his head
screwed on, and realized that they'd been going wide open for a while, and that maybe he'd better check on them. He discovered that the biggest pump, an old one built back around the turn of the century, had bearings that were running red hot. Well, Jim knew that they didn't have
enough water to begin with, and if they lost that pump, they'd lose half of what little they had. To make a long story short, he spent most of the next two days on his belly with an oil can in his hand, trying to lubricate the bearings to keep that pump going, knowing all the while that if
it seized up while it was running, there could be impeller parts coming through the pump casing right where he was laying."
"Wow," Mark said. He'd been a paratrooper, and knew a little about courage. Jumping out of a plane was one thing; spending two days in a situation like that was something different. "It didn't blow up on him, I take it."
"No," Mike said. "Funny thing about that, though. After they got the fire pretty well out, and the water tower pumped full again, Jim saw that he could finally shut the pump down. So, he did, then went home and slept for a day or so, then decided to go over and see if
he could fix whatever was wrong. He threw the switch, and nothing happened. The pump was locked up tight. It never turned again; they scrapped it the next spring. They lost enough of the town as it was, and they could have lost all of it, if it hadn't been for Jim keeping that
pump going on its last legs."
"I never heard about that," Lindquist said.
"Lots of people never heard about that," Mike said. "There's probably not a dozen people, even in Warsaw, that know about it. There's lots of stories like that. Most people around here never heard of the girl from Lordston that broke her back trying to keep the D&O
train going, and a retired fireman from Coldwater got out of his wheelchair, no kidding, to play a key part in her rescue. That whole thing was an epic by itself, but I never heard about it until it was too stale for the Record-Herald. That's why I decided to do the book."
"Did you finish it?" Lindquist asked.
"Yeah," Mike said. "I sent it off to maybe a dozen publishers, and never got a nibble. `Not enough national interest,' one of them said, so I finally said the hell with it."
"I'd love to read it some time," George said. "Do you still have it?"
"I've got a manuscript, and I've got it on disk," Mike said. "Unfortunately, the disks are formatted for Apple, and I don't have one of those any more."
"I've got a conversion program," Mark offered. "I'd kind of like to read it myself."
"You're probably not the only one," the historian commented. "We don't have a lot of money in the society, but I'll bet that we could sell a few hundred copies locally, if we were to be able to get someone to back us. That might be a project I could take to the Donna
Clark foundation, maybe."
"Interesting thought," Mike said. "It never occurred to me. It'd be nice to see it in print. I've got just about the only photos of the fire, too."
"I knew that," George said.
"How'd you come by them?" Mark asked.
"I took them," Mike said. "I took two still cameras and a video camera with me, rode up there in the caboose on the second run there, shot up all the film I had, got more, and shot it up, too." He didn't mention that he got the extra film by running into Pictor's Drugstore
while it was on fire, and essentially stealing it. He'd always considered that had been one of the dumber things he'd done as a reporter. "Biggest story I've ever covered," he went on. "Got two state awards out of it, and it was nominated for a Pulitzer."
That was as far as Mike was going to blow his horn on the matter, even though he'd been pretty proud of a story of his own that never made it into the book, much less the paper.
He'd gotten back to Spearfish Lake in the evening hours, and he and Webb and Kirsten and the staff that could make it into the office had thrown together a special issue of the Record-Herald. He'd heard that Bud Ellsberg was considering a run down to Camden, and
when the train left in the morning, with all the available railroad engines except a little industrial switcher and an ancient steamer, to break through the heavy drifts, Mike and the flats for the Record-Herald had been riding in the cab of the second engine. Mike had been able to
have a partial press run printed and loaded back aboard the train before it left Camden, carrying a boxcar load of foam making chemistry.
That special issue was an instant collector's item, and while Mike had waited on the printer, he'd sold some photos to the Camden Herald and the videotape to one of the Camden TV stations -- the one that hadn't sent a reporter to the fire. The Ken that the other TV
station sent was scooped by three days, and the last Mike heard, was reading hog futures on some 200-watt radio station. A clip from Mike's video made the national news, and his photos made the Associated Press.
Mike had been pleased in an abstract sense, but he had still been bothered by looting Pictor's to get more film, so when the checks came in, he'd just signed them over to the Warsaw relief fund.
Mark and George were unaware of what was going on in Mike's head just then. "Sounds like this Horton might be the guy we're looking for," Mark said. "You want to take a run over to Warsaw this evening?"
"Yeah," Mike said, a little absently. "It'd be good to see Jim again."
