On that July morning when it all began I drove down to the Trading Post to buy some bacon and pick up our mail. Neville had planned to make the trip so that I could get started on the textbook project, but after several rainy days the sun had come out and during all the rainy spell he’d been praying for a few hours of sunlight to photograph a stand of pink lady’s slippers that were in bloom a short distance below the bridge just beyond the Lodge. He had been down there for several days in the rain, floundering around, getting soaked to the skin and taking pictures. The pictures had been fine, as his pictures always are. Still, he needed sunlight for the best result.
When I left, he’d had all his equipment spread out on the kitchen table, selecting what he’d need to take along. Neville is a fussy photographer—I guess most photographers are, the ones who are interested in their work. He had more gadgets than you can imagine, and each of those gadgets, as I understand it, is built for a specific task. It’s his fussiness, I suppose, and all those gadgets he has collected, that make him the outstanding photographer he is.
When I arrived at the Trading Post, Humphrey was there, sitting all by himself in one of the several chairs pulled up around the cold heating stove that stood in the center of the store. He had the look of someone who was waiting for a victim, and I didn’t have it in my heart to disappoint him. So after buying the bacon and picking up the mail, I went back to the stove and sat down in the chair next to him.
He didn’t waste any time in idle chatter; he got right down to business.
«I’ve told you, I think,» he said, «about the lost mine.»
«Yes,» I said. «We have discussed it several times.»
«You recall the main thrust of the story,» he said. «How it was supposed to have been discovered by two deserters from Fort Crawford who were hiding in the hills. That would have been back in the 1830s or so. As the story went, the mine was discovered in a cave—that is, there was a cave, and cropping out in the cave was a drift of mineral, very rich, I understand.»
«What I’ve never been able to figure out about it,» I said, «is even if they found the mine, why they should have bothered to try to work it. It would have been lead, wouldn’t it?»
«Yes,» said Humphrey, somewhat reluctantly, «I suppose it would have been.»
«Think of the problem of getting it out,» I said. «I suppose they would have had to smelt the ore and cast it into pigs and then bring in pack animals to get out the pigs. And all the time with the Army with an eye out for them.»
«I suppose you’re right,» said Humphrey, «but there’s magic in a mine. The very idea of finding riches in the earth is somehow exciting. Even if there’s no way to work it …»
«You’ve made your point,» I said. «I think I understand.»
«Well, in any case,» said Humphrey, «they never really worked it. They started to, but something happened and they pulled out. Left the country and were never seen again. They are supposed to have told someone that they cut logs to conceal the cave mouth and shoveled dirt over the logs. To hide the mine from anyone else, you understand. Figuring maybe some day they’d come back and work it. I’ve often wondered, if all this is true, why they never did come back. You know, Andrew, I think that now I have the answer. Not only the answer, but the first really solid evidence that the old story is not a myth. I think as well that I may be able to identify that hitherto unknown person who got the story started.»
«Some new evidence?» I asked.
«Yes, quite by chance,» he said. «Knowing I am interested in the history of this area, people often bring me things they find—old things, like letters or clippings from old newspapers. You know the kind of stuff.»
I said, indeed, I did. He had me interested, but even if I hadn’t been I’d let him get started on it and I had to hear him out.
«The other day,» he said, «a man from the eastern part of the county brought me a journal he’d found in an old box in the attic. The farmhouse had been built by his grandfather, say a hundred years or more ago, and the farm had stayed in the family ever since. The man who brought me the journal is the present owner of it. The journal apparently had been written by his great-grandfather, the father of the man who originally settled on the farm. This great-grandfather, for several years when he was a young man, had run a trading post up on the Kickapoo, trading with the Sauks and Foxes who still were in the area. Not much of a business, apparently, but he made a living out of it. Did some trapping on his own and that helped. The journal covers a period of about three years, from 1828 well into ’31. Entries for almost every day, sometimes only a single sentence, but entries. At other times several pages filled, summarizing events of the past few weeks, previously only mentioned sketchily or not at all …»
«There was mention of a mine?» I asked, getting a bit impatient. Left to himself, he could have rambled on for hours.
«Toward the end of it,» he said. «August of ’31, I think. I can’t recall the date. Two men who I take to have been the deserters came to the post late one evening, seeking food and shelter. It had been some time since our journalist had seen another white man, and I would suspect they made a night of it, sitting up and drinking. They would not have told him what they did if they’d not had a few too many. They didn’t out and out say they were deserters, but he suspected it. The fort authorities had asked him some time before to be on the lookout for them. But it appears he had been having some trouble with the military and was not about to help the fort. So it would have been safe enough for the two to have told him they were deserters, although apparently they didn’t. They told him about the mine, however, and pinpointed it close enough so he could guess that it was somewhere in these hills. They told him the story that has come down to us, little changed. How they cut the logs to cover up the cave mouth before they left.
«But they told him something else that has not come down to us—why they fled the country. Something scared them, something they found in the mine. They didn’t know what it was; they never got close enough to it to find out. It ticked at them, they said; it sat there and ticked at them. Not regular, like a clock, but erratically, like it might be trying to talk with them, they said. Warning them, perhaps. Threatening them. When they first encountered it, apparently, they went out into the open, like a shot, scared stiff. It must have been an eerie sort of feeling. Then, getting a little over it and feeling sheepish about being scared so easily, they went back into the cave, and as soon as they stepped inside it, the ticking started up again. That did it. You must remember that more than a century ago, when all this happened, men were somewhat more inclined to superstitions than they are now, more easily frightened by what might appear to be supernatural. I remember a fine old Irish gentleman who lived on a farm near my father’s farm. When I was a small boy he was well into his seventies, and I, of course, did not hear his story of the graveyard ghost. But in later years I did hear my father tell it many times. It appears that one night, driving home in a cart that he habitually used in his travels about the countryside, he saw or thought he saw a white-sheeted ghost in the graveyard only a few miles from his home. Ever after that, when he was out at night and coming home, upon approaching the cemetery he would whip up his horse and go past the cemetery as fast as good horseflesh could carry him.»