Danny held up a hand. “Thanks, no. I buy ’em in the packs.” He pulled his Murads from his shirt pocket and placed them on the table.

Nathan lit his. “How’d you get that scar?”

“This?” Danny pointed to his neck. “Methane explosion.”

“In the mines?”

Danny nodded.

“My father was a miner,” Nathan said. “Not here.”

“Across the pond?”

“Just so.” He smiled. “Just outside of Manchester in the North. It’s where I grew up.”

“Tough country I’ve always heard.”

“Yes, it is. Sinfully dreary, as well. A palette of grays and the occasional brown. My father died there. In a mine. Can you imagine?”

“Dying in a mine?” Danny said. “Yes.”

“He was strong, my father. That’s the most unfortunate aspect of the whole sordid mess. You see?”

Danny shook his head.

“Well, take me for instance. I’m no physical specimen. Uncoordinated, terrible at sports, nearsighted, bowlegged, and asthmatic.”

Danny laughed. “You leave anything out?”

Nathan laughed and held up a hand. “Several things. But that’s it, you see? I’m physically weak. If a tunnel collapsed and I had several hundred pounds of dirt on me, maybe a half-ton wood beam in the mix, a terribly limited supply of oxygen, well, I’d just succumb. I’d die like a good Englishman, quietly and without complaint.”

“Your father, though,” Danny said.

“Crawled,” Nathan said. “They found his shoes where the walls had collapsed on him. It was three hundred feet from where they found his corpse. He crawled. With a broken back, through hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of dirt and rock while the mining company waited two days to begin excavation. They were worried that rescue attempts could put the walls of the main tunnel at risk. Had my father known that, I wonder if it would have stopped his crawling sooner or pushed him on another fifty feet.”

They sat in silence for a time, the fire spitting and hissing its way along some logs that still held a bit of dampness. Nathan Bishop poured himself another drink and then tilted the bottle over Danny’s glass, poured just as generously.

“It’s wrong,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What men of means demand of men without them. And then they expect the poor to be grateful for the scraps. They have the cheek to act offended—morally offended—if the poor don’t play along. They should all be burned at the stake.”

Danny could feel the liquor in him turning sludgy. “Who?”

“The rich.” He gave Danny a lazy smile. “Burn them all.”

Danny found himself at Fay Hall again for another meeting of the BSC. On tonight’s agenda, the department’s continued refusal to treat influenza-related sickness among the men as work related. Steve Coyle, a little drunker than one would have hoped, spoke of his ongoing fight to get some kind of disability payments from the department he’d served twelve years.

After the flu discussion was exhausted, they moved on to a preliminary proposal for the department to assume part of the expense of replacing damaged or severely worn uniforms.