“But I’m going to have his baby,” I blurted out.

He shut his eyes and shook his head.

“You aint told him?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Good. You’re strong that way, you’ll be just fine. Now help me with this here place before the shooting starts.”

We carried the students’ desks outside and set them beneath an elm tree. I poured water from the creek into a jar, dropped in a metal ball filled with English tea I’d bought in Charleston, and set it in the sun. Light brown currents swirled through the water like liquid marble. Inside the school we pushed a table next to the teacher’s desk to make an operating table, emptied the bookcase and set out medicines, scrubbed the floor and the window sills, pumped water and built a fire.

At dinnertime we ate ham sandwiches and sipped tea cooled in the creek. A Dr. Mason joined us. Dr. Booker met him the day before at Clothier. Dr. Mason claimed no politics but said he was once an army doctor and knew how to dig a bullet out of a man. He said it with such relish that I shuddered. His white hair was greasy and he smelt of alcohol, but we let him stay.

“I was over in Logan two days ago,” Dr. Mason said. “The place was crawling with armed men.”

“Who are they?” I asked. “Where do they come from?”

“Well, lots of Baldwin-Felts guards, of course. Sheriff Chafin’s deputies. Townspeople from Logan and Justice, Welch, Bluefield. Bankers, lawyers, doctors. A few American Legion Posts. Saw their flags. And college boys down from Morgantown on their summer vacations. Boys who were too young to fight in the big war, I suppose.”

“I reckon they think they missed something,” Dr. Booker said.

“They’re all armed to the teeth. In fact, one of them already got drunk and shot his own man accidentally. But they’ve got plenty of machine guns. And they’re building bombs.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Got a regular factory in an old warehouse over there.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what these miners think they’re going to do. Even if they make it to Logan and Justice, do they think they can run things? Of course, they probably wouldn’t do any worse than the rest of these hillbillies.” He laughed heartily.

I stood up so fast I spilled my tea, and turned my back on him. Just as I did there came a loud tearing sound from the ridge that spread the length of the holler, as though the jagged edge of the mountain top had caught on the sky and ripped it open.

We froze, our eyes turned upward. The gunfire continued without ceasing.

“I served in the war with Spain,” Dr. Mason said slowly, “and this gunfire’s as heavy as anything I heard there. How many of these medical stations do the miners have?”