Joe Hill by Wallace Stegner

besides yours. Would you be willing to give us your songs for a book like that?”
    In their faces he saw their eagerness that he should do it, and he felt how his own vague plans had fitted into larger plans. “Why not?” he said.
    The hat was back on Barnabas’ smooth head, tipped over one eye, and Barnabas rose with the big booming, something-settled satisfaction in his voice. “Good! Good. Can I take them along?”
    “These are the only copies I’ve got.”
    “Can you copy them for me?” He hesitated. “I’ll be so wound up with Herb and the strike committee …”
    “Sure,” Joe said. His resentment of Barnabas’ magnetism was gone. Now he was an accepted partner, not a local boy being patronized. “How soon do you want them?”
    Barnabas was already pulling paper and pencils from the suitcase. “I’ll have to see the stevedoring company with Herb, and later we’re talking with the committee over at the brotherhood office. Do you talk at the street meeting tonight?”
    “I’m no good on the talk.”
    The eyes were sharp and shrewd on him. “You ought to be organizing, with your knack for making songs.”
    “I’d make a bad soapboxer,” Joe said. “Organizing, that’s allright, but I haven’t got the gift of gab like Herb and some of the others.”
    “Well, we’ll talk about that later,” Barnabas said on his way to the door. “Maybe Betty can help you copy them off now.” He hung in the doorway, and Joe intercepted a curious quizzical look that passed between him and the girl. “You want to come along, or stay here, Betty?”
    “It’s too hot to be running around,” she said. “I guess I’ll stick here, unless you need me.”
    “No,” Barnabas said. His eyebrows lifted, the corner of his mouth went down slightly, and with a fleeting, odd, half-humorous glance he went down, his heels sharp on the brass binding of the stair-treads.
    Boxcar Betty stood up from the bed, felt in her hair as if she were used to having a pencil stuck there, and said, “Well, shall we get busy?”
    Silently Joe passed her half the sheets. The room was stuffier than ever, and though the door into the hall stood open it seemed almost unbearably intimate for the two of them to be writing here. Joe’s constraint had gone with Barnabas. Now every detail of the room, bed and pitcher and washstand and slop jar and the mirror in which he could see the top of Betty’s head, was suggestive. His nostrils quivered with the belief that he could smell her. It took an effort to bend his head and copy “Mr. Block.”
    A movement of her arm made him lift his eyes alertly. She was lighting a cigarette. Across the exhaled smoke her eyes brushed his in the friendly, amused, comprehending look he had noticed several times before. But somehow her look was more intimate, less careful, than what she said.
    “What got you started writing songs?”
    “I don’t know. I always liked to fool around that way.”
    “Hillstrom, that’s Swedish, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’ve hardly got any accent at all.”
    Because he could think of nothing to say, he kept still, and she bent her head to the copying. He had just brought himself back to his careful round transcribing when she snorted with laughter and slapped the pencil on the suitcase she was using for a table.
    “What is it?” he said.
    “Nothing.”
    Half rising, he saw that she was copying “The White Slave.” “Is it as funny as all that?” he said.
    She came twisting around on the chair toward him, and he saw that in her face was an almost incredulous mirth. “I love it. Don’t you?”
    Slow heat began to burn in his face. “I can’t tell about them,” he said and returned to his copying.
    He knew she watched him for a while; he heard the sound her clothes made when she finally looked down. Once, when their eyes met during a break in the writing, she pulled her arm slowly up from the varnished surface of the suitcase, showing him how the heat had stuck