Then the others were grinning and yelling and throwing their hats in the air, and even Paddy was showing his teeth, and Williams had that flinty smile on his face he didn’t often show. “All right, my lads, we’ll blow out for the day, and I’m recommending bonuses for all of you from Mr. Hale. It’s fine, rich blue stuff, and I’ve no doubt in my mind we’re in bonanza now, for quite a time.”
We started for the tub, and Williams motioned me in first. But I hadn’t forgotten whose idea it all was, and I stepped aside. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like Paddy to have the honor. It was his doing, and I can go up with these other two.”
“Padillo, get in.”
“Yes, Senor Williams. Viva la bonanza!”
Williams pulled the signal wire, while the Mexicans screamed bonanza so I think they heard them on the moon, if anybody was up there, and the cable tightened, and the tub began to go up. Then it slammed down again. Both men hit their head on the side, and we jumped forward to help them out. Then Paddy began to yell, and we clawed hard, because something in his voice struck right into your belly. The cable was coming down, like some long strand of spaghetti, wrapping itself around both men, so every time we got them a little pulled over the edge, they were buried in cable again.
From above, in the shaft, there came a bumping, and then at last I understood this horrible thing Paddy was yelling at us. The pulley was coming down. I don’t know how long it takes a four-foot wheel to fall six hundred feet, but it’s an awful long time. And then nothing but the men’s heads was showing above the coils of cable. And then the wheel struck. And then all over me and the other two Mexicans were the remains of what once had been men.
“All right, Mr. Hale, before we lock up for the night, and while we’re still here in the office and nobody’s around, why don’t we get together on it, what we tell the grand jury tomorrow? So we don’t get it all cock-eyed.”
“Get together? The truth is all I know to tell.”
“Which is?”
“Rigging.”
“And whose fault was that?”
“Duval, why do you ask me that? I know, they all know, whose fault it was. I didn’t want to go into that shaft. But you said leave it to you. You said you’d rig it because you’d rigged boats. Now look.”
“The hoist engineer, he’s got his own ideas.”
“He couldn’t see. I could.”
“He don’t like it, that you didn’t holler.”
“Or that you didn’t.”
“I’ll deal with that little remark when I get around to it, but one thing at a time, as we’re in a little bit of a hurry, as it wouldn’t look so good if the two of us sat up here late, talking things over. The truth, you say, is all you know to tell, and that suits me too. Only one thing might keep me from it.”
“...What you mean, Duval?”
“Being made super.”
“Here? In this mine?”
“That’s it. The good old Dakota.”
“First you rig the hoist so badly you kill two men, then you think I’ll make you super? You must be crazy.”
“I’m not so crazy.”
“Then what are you getting at?”
“The stock.”
“...What stock?”
“Of this mine. Of the Dakota. That you bought today. On the Stock Exchange. That you ran down and bid in before you ever made one move to get those bodies to the top or even find out what happened down there, though you say you saw the pulley gear go right down the shaft, and you must have known there were men under it.”
“Is it against the law to buy stock?”
“No, it’s legal.”
“And how do you know about it?”
“I figured something like that might have happened, and went down there checking on it. It was no trouble to find out. The whole exchange was handing it to you, how you’d grabbed up the stock before news of the bonanza got out. It jumped eight points today, didn’t it? Just before closing, when those bodies were being brought up, and the Mexicans told what they knew?”
“...What else do you know, Duval?”
“About the axe.”
“The—?”
“That you chopped at the cable with.”
“The report says nothing about a chopped cable.”
“That’s right, you didn’t chop any cable. You only chopped at it! Nobody was there, the hoist engineer couldn’t see, because he was in the main hoisting works building, and then came this yell up the shaft. And then you thought fast, didn’t you? They were hollering bonanza, and there was that axe still lying there, the one I used to trim up the gin pole. And you let fly with it, didn’t you? Except that instead of chopping the cable you made a mislick and knocked the cable off the pulley. And when Ed shot the steam, it tore the pulley right off the axle and sent it and the cable and the tackle right down the shaft, didn’t it?”
“I don’t know anything about any axe.”
“You think it just turned to steam on the way down? You think I didn’t know what it meant when I saw it buried in Williams’s head? You think I did it just because I liked blood when I put my arms around him and pulled it out and hid it so those Mexicans didn’t see it? Come on, you son of a bitch, talk business or the grand jury’s going to get that axe and the stock deal and everything else it’ll take to send you to the gallows, and it won’t be a gallows with pulley wheels under it, but one over a trap, with you in it, at the end of a rope.”
“Now, Duval, don’t talk like that—”
“I said super.”
“Yes of course, Duval. You know, you’re a young fellow, but we’ve had an eye on you ever since you came in this mine. I meant to make you super all along—”
“Write your notice.”
“...Sure thing. Absolutely.”
“And that remark. About—”
“Is retracted.”
“Then that’s fine.”
I could hear him, out there in the night, and tears ran down my cheeks, for him and all the little people he loved so well, and for myself too, and how far I’d go, even to a blackmail game on his grave, to get something I ought to be ashamed even to want.
8
They raked me over the fire in the grand jury room till my face had blisters that felt like they’d last the rest of my life, because if there was no axe it was the rigging, and that meant me. But there was nothing I could be indicted for, like something willful, and I had my $600 a month, and that helped with the blisters. It was all over town, and if the men had despised me before, they hated me now. But I kept my gun on me always, and began weeding my mine. I mean, six or eight at a time, every Saturday night, I fired the men I had been miners with, and took on new ones, mostly men that had arrived a few days before and didn’t know me from Adam. Hale paid no attention, because we were making plenty of changes, moving from the big shaft in four compartments to the little one where the strike was. I used special cages I had made, with three decks for cars, so we wouldn’t have to slow down to enlarge the shaft, and specially so we wouldn’t be enlarging it on bank money, but on our own, after we made some from the strike.
Then came the day when I was rid of all the miners that were sore at me, except Olesen, the big Swede, and Gator, the fellow that claimed he was a flat boat man, and would jump up and crack his heels and say his grandpappy was an alligator, and let on he was tough. It was Saturday, and they were to get it that night, and I could tell they knew it. How they found out I don’t know, but in a mine the timekeeper has a wife or a girl or something, and everybody knows what goes on practically before it happens. I could tell, from the way they were just pretending to work, there on the loading platform, rolling on cars, that they’d been told. And then all of a sudden, while I was leaning against a square set, waiting for the next car to come down, it was like some bee had stung me, only a lot worse.