“In what way?”
“They follow a lode, yes?”
“You can’t blame them for that.”
“Follow a lode, and all a time, a tunnel, a crosscut, estope, all slide down a mountain — must one time come out in air, yes?”
“Looks like it.”
“Real lode is dip.”
“How you figure that out?”
“No figure, fill. Dees goddam owner, especially Hale, too chip to buy estoff he need to go dip. Try near top, follow liddle pocket, have a bonanza one day, bad borrasca next, all because no dig a mine in big way, in rill way, only liddle way, chip way.”
“So?”
“Is old shaft up there, uphill, no?”
“The little one they abandoned?”
“We go down, try for big bonanza, dip under hill, yes?”
“I’ll have a hell of a time with Williams.”
“You tell, soon ’e have borrasca.”
“How do you know?”
“You see. Soon no ore, only rock.”
It came the next week, as a matter of fact. The vein began to narrow, and instead of a deep blue-black, the ore began to run a slaty gray, a blue-gray, a dull gray, and Hale was down there every half hour, breaking off specimens with his hammer and putting them in a box for the assayer. Then all of a sudden we were getting nothing but rock, and had to lay men off. That night I stopped by the office to talk with the super and lay it out what Paddy had said, and I thought he’d be sore when he found out I was handing him stuff I had got from a Mexican working in my gang. He wasn’t.
“They’re fine miners, the Mexican lads. They have a real skill with timber, and an instinct for metal. An instinct for a process and an instinct for a vein.”
“He says the real ore’s under the mountain.”
“He’s probably right.”
“Then how about letting me dig?”
“Duval, I’m employed by Hale and I can tell you without hearing any more what he’ll say. He’ll agree with everything I tell him, roll his big black eyes, thank me for the suggestion, weep on me collar, open a bottle of rum — and do nothing. He thinks of costs, and the deep stuff is expensive.”
“The borrasca is worst of all.”
“So I’ve told him.”
“And he’ll wind up with no mine. You know what happens. They run bonanza a little while, then they run borrasca as long as they can, which means till they’ve spent the stake the bonanza piled up, and then some bank takes over.”
“Stop talking about banks!”
We had it again that night, with Hale, at the International Hotel, and he did just like Williams said he would. He wept, and told us how his mother was killed over in Hungary in 1848, and how much he loved America, because it stood for liberty. He said he didn’t ask anything of anybody except justice. He said was it fair he had to pay four dollars a day for his help when that very minute, for roustabouts in St. Louis, they were paying twenty cents an hour. It seemed to mean we couldn’t do what I wanted, so I said: “Will you let me prospect just one entry? Off that small shaft that you abandoned last year? The one up the mountainside from the big one we’re using now?”
“It would cost too much.”
“For what?”
“For hoist machinery. For gallows frames. For cable. For men, for pumps, for everything.”
“Suppose I do it for fifty dollars.”
“For — how much?”
“In the first place, the guides have been left in, for the lifting tub, and all we have to do is inspect and repair, if repairs are needed. The old cable was saved, and it’s in good condition. It’s old-time hemp cable, but all I have to do is stretch it and mark it. We got the old lifting tubs for that shaft, in the shed, still right where they were stored. And I won’t need any gallows frame. I can do it with a gin pole.”
“That means riggers, and—”
“Riggers? I’ll rig it myself.”
I told how many boats I’d rigged, and then I knew I had won, because his black rat eyes never left my face, and you could see him adding up figures and seeing where he was coming out. So next morning I was up the slope with Paddy and three helpers, and by night we had made plenty of progress. I didn’t even have to move a winch up there. I used a spare one in the main hoisting works, cut a slot in the side of the building to let the cable through, and a little eye for my signal wire. I guyed the pole over the shaft, dropped a falls from the end of it, and to that attached my pulley. Pulleys are all different sizes, from the big ten-and twelve-footers over the big shafts, to smaller ones for different uses. The one I used was four feet. After it was in place and all safety attachments on the tub inspected, we dropped a man down, generally me or Paddy, to give signals, and when he was down we made a chalk mark on the cable at the drum. Then we pulled him up again, dropped him again, and marked again. At first we kept getting a three-or four-inch stretch, then we didn’t get any. We marked with paint, then, a long red stripe to show the tub was 100 feet from the bottom, at the 600-foot level where we were going to dig. Then we marked a narrow white stripe for the stop.
The men did plenty of laughing, especially at the idea I could rig something, but Williams didn’t and Hale didn’t. They were around all the time, and when we started to work, Williams was signaling for the tub two or three times a day, and coming down, watching us move rock. We weren’t sending any of it to the surface yet. Our tub wasn’t fixed to take cars, and wouldn’t be without considerable rebuilding. But we had room, on the platform where our entry met the shaft, to pile the rock we were taking out, so we could keep going in, first undercutting, then drilling, then shooting, then timbering, and then undercutting again. The big danger, of course, was the hot water, because while we had plenty of shaft for it to run into, we had no pump connected up, and if we hit a real gusher, it would mean everything below us would eventually be flooded, and ruin this part of the mine, whether we found anything or not. Williams kept feeling the face every time we’d shoot, for heat. One time he said to me: “Don’t you find it warm, my lad, in that coat?”
“I don’t like shirtsleeves.”
“Could it be a gun you’ve got there?”
“It might be.”
“I don’t like it.”
“They ganged on me once. They don’t do it twice.”
“One of the things that appealed to me about you, in addition to your education, was your size, and when you stretched Trapp on the rails, I was still more impressed with you. But a man with a gun impresses nobody. They’re talking about it, and you’ve lost ground. They feel like convicts.”
“They should have thought of that when they let me have it from behind. I felt like a sailor on the Shanghai water front. I’m wearing it awhile, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ll regret it.”
He wasn’t the only one feeling the rock, and watching every crack and splinter in it like a hawk. Paddy was, and so were the other two Mexican miners we had with us, that could almost tell silver by inhaling. We shot down a face, and one of them picked up a hunk of red rock and began turning it over under his candle. It was cinnabar, the stuff they get quicksilver out of, and it didn’t mean a thing, except we hadn’t found ore of any kind since we’d been down here, and mercury and silver often go together. We mucked and timbered, and on the next shot Paddy got in there quick with his crowbar. He came out with something, and nothing was said, because it was soft and black, with the blue cast on it, and we all knew what it was. He rammed his bar in, got a boulder to rocking, and all of a sudden prized it out, so we had to jump to keep it from mashing our feet. And then here came the ore, just pouring out like a coke pile, where he kept ramming his bar into it and working it around. One of the Mexicans was the first to yell it: “Bonanza!”