“Listen, this is a men-only army.”
“Then you’ll have to leave it.”
“God, do I want to!”
“Where’ll we go?”
“I guess not to Biloxi’s.”
“Oh Roger, the most awful thing happened. They set her out in the street. And the piano broke down the boardwalk and went sliding down into a yard back of one of the houses on B Street. And Renny tried to stop it, and it mashed him, and he’s hurt. Biloxi moved him to Arthur Haines’s.”
“Arthur’ll take care of him.”
“You think so?”
“I know it.”
“But where can we go, Roger?”
“I know an old mine.”
“All right.”
“It’s no International Hotel.”
“I won’t mind.”
So how I left the U. S. Army was walk off and leave it, her hand pressed in mine, take an omnibus to Virginia, pick up my blankets and clothes that had been sent to Mrs. Finn’s, get my gun again, and then take her to Pioneer for her stuff that was checked there. Then we climbed the mountain. We went up to an old drift Paddy and I had run across when we were all over the place organizing the union. We cut pinon branches with my jack-knife, and laid them in the tunnel mouth, and on top of them made our bed. We didn’t make very quick work of it, on account of being in each other’s arms all the time, and I don’t know which was most exciting, tearing that uniform off at last, or tearing off her clothes. Except that the little black dress didn’t seem to need much tearing. She was wriggling out of it and into the blankets even before I took hold of it, and when she slipped into my arms, all naked and warm, she closed her eyes before she kissed me, and her face looked like she was in church.
“Roger, this never happened to me.”
“To me either.”
“Nothing like it. Ever.”
“Do you know when I knew you were mine?”
“When, Roger?”
“That night, under the pier.”
“That was sweet...Roger!”
She raised on one elbow and looked down on me with eyes so big they frightened me. “...What is it, Morina?”
“I never been had by a man before!”
“You really mean that, don’t you?”
“Of course! It’s the first time!”
And so in Brewer’s blood we washed out all she had been, and said we were married, and that she was a virgin until this night, and that I was.
12
We stayed there two days. We both had a little money, and she’d drop down in the town and buy stuff and carry it to the mouth of the gully, and I’d meet her and carry it the steep part of the path, and then I’d tie a string to the basket handle and she’d climb the ladder that led to our drift mouth and pull it up. In the mine a little way was a spring of the cold water they generally struck at the upper levels, and in a toolbox I found an old lunch bucket, so we were all right for something to boil in. For firewood I used mine timbers that I broke up with a pickaxe that was in the box. Late the first day, in the brush, I spotted some quail and got two before they rose. Broiled, with an old mine needle run through them for a spit, they were pretty good. The second day, while she was down in the town, I looked up from the paper she had brought the day before, and in front of me, coming across the ledge, was a young goat, what they call a kid. In Virginia there’s no grazing for cows, but goats can make out, and a few people keep them, for the milk they give, and to eat. I got out my gun, and laughed at how I’d clean my visitor and skin him before she got back, tell her it was a lamb that must have strayed from some butcher’s yard, and then have a joke on her after she’d eaten a few slices. But then I thought: How the hell did he get here? We used a ladder, but he couldn’t, even if he was a goat. And there wasn’t any other way up there, that I knew of.
He kept coming and I kept quiet, where I was sitting at the head of the ladder, so I could watch the mouth of the gully. When he saw me he stopped, but after he thought it over he came on again and turned into the drift. The blankets and stuff slowed him down too, but pretty soon he went in. I tiptoed over and peeped. The water was what he wanted, and as soon as he sucked up a bellyful he came out, looked me over again, and started back. I followed, and he ran. And then he just wasn’t there. It was like some trick on a stage, where the fellow waves a tablecloth and the rabbit is gone. I went over to the last place he was, and all I could see was a straight face of rock. But then I happened to step to one side, and all of a sudden, from that angle, you could see a hole, kind of a crack, about four feet high, and ten or twelve inches across at its widest place, which was at the bottom. I lay on my belly and looked. As far as you could really see, the crack went straight into the rock, but further inside there was some sort of a reflection that looked like there was an opening. I got some candles from the toolchest, lit one, and crawled in.
The crack, I suppose, kept on for twenty or thirty feet, but then it led into an old stope, one of those rooms they kept working on until it’s as big as a three-story house. This was that big at least, but the weight of the top had crushed the timbering, so everything had caved in, and probably opened the crack I had come in by. But when I worked past the rubble my heart almost stopped beating at what was dead ahead of me, part of the raw rock that had been uncovered by the fall of the top. It was ore, and while I couldn’t tell and nobody could tell, until the assayers got busy, if it would run $3,000 to the ton or $300 to the ton, anybody could tell it was sulphuret of silver, a beautiful blue-black, as nice a strike as had been made on the lode since Comstock sold out for $11,000. I climbed over on a fallen twelve-by and dug a piece out with my knife. It was soft, and crumbled in my fingers. It was wonderful, just to touch it.
Somewhere a pebble fell, and I remembered my little goat. I had to know how he got here, because if I had followed him in, anybody could. I put out my candle and waited. After a long time, a half hour maybe, my eyes got used to the dark so it wasn’t quite black any more. Then, opposite the crack I had come in by, I saw where the light was coming from. It was the upper part of an entry, the bottom all blocked by rock. I got over there and looked. A few feet inside was a winz that dipped down to a drift mouth on the other side of the hill, and that explained it. When animals go in a mine, they’re generally looking for salt, and that’s what had probably brought my friend in. But I kicked down enough rock to block that entry altogether, so he couldn’t come back.
“I won’t give it up, Roger, all that beautiful money.”
“We’ll have to, until after the war.”
“Why do we have to? All you do is take an option. On an old run-down mine like this, that’s been abandoned for years, they’d think they were lucky to get a hundred dollars for a thirty-day look-see. Then when your papers are signed you uncover your bonanza, and you can get all the money you need to start mining, from the bank. It’s done every day.”
“I’m talking about the army.”
“They let you buy your way out.”
“Either that or they shoot you.”
“They never do that.”
“They almost never do it. It’s only occasionally they do it, when it’s necessary to make an example of somebody to remind all soldiers that they can do it when they want to, and they will do it if they have to. Unfortunately, I don’t know if now is the time they feel they’ve got to make an example, or just the time when they take a broad-minded attitude.”
“We’ve got to have this money.”
“I’m all for it. But how?”
“And now. Somebody else might find it.”