The Killer Mine

He gave a little shrug and his lips stretched to a thin smile. He lit a cigarette. I watched the deliberate movements of his hands. They had long, slender fingers and small wrists — the hands of an artist or a man who lives on his nerves and drink. 'I was just trying to decide whether I could trust you,' he said at last. Again the smile. 'You see, I don't know very much about you, do I? We drank together at the Pappagallo, that's all.'

'I might say the same about you,' I answered, my eyes on his hand, which he had put back in the pocket of his jacket.

'Yes, but I don't carry your life in my hands.' He nodded towards the fire. 'Suppose you sit down and tell me about yourself,' he suggested.

I hesitated. The hair was prickling along my scalp as I looked into the utter blankness of his eyes. I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to get that gun — to get it before he used it. 'Sit down.' It was softly spoken, but there was a harshness in his voice that made me obey without further hesitation. 'Now let's have your story.' He had seated himself across the fire from me. He was puffing nervously at his cigarette. In the bleak light that came in through the entrance his face looked wretchedly drawn, the lines etched deeply into the white skin.

I began to tell him how I had left England when I was four, moved to Tin Valley in the Canadian Rockies, had started washing dishes in one of the local saloons when I was ten, became a miner when I was twelve. But he interrupted me. 'I don't want data. I want your background. Why did your father leave England and go to Canada?'

'My mother left him.' I sat staring into the fire, thinking back down the lane of my life. 'If you want my background,' I said, my father was a drunk. He drank to forget. My mother was very lonely. I found a photograph of her amongst my father's things after his death.' I pulled out my wallet and took from it my mother's photograph. Across the bottom was written in a found, childish hand — To Bob, from his love — Ruth Nearne.' I passed it across to Dave. 'My father talked of nothing but Cornwall. He was desperately sick for home. But he never made his fortune and he wouldn't come back to be mocked. That's what he used to tell me. He was afraid of being mocked for having lost his wife. She went with a miner from Penzance. My father hated her and loved her all in the same breath.'

I had forgotten why I was saying all this. I'd never spoken about it to any one. But suddenly, up on those bleak moors in the derelict waste of that old tin mine, it seemed right that I should be talking about it.

'I don't know about Welshmen,' I went on, 'but Cornish miners go all over the world. There's not many mines that haven't got Cornishmen working in them. And they cling together. Up there in the Rockies my father found plenty of Cornishmen. He'd bring them back to our hut and they'd talk mining by the hour over potties of bad rye, feeding pinewood into the stove until the iron casing became red hot. And when there wasn't any company he'd tell me about our own country and the mines along the tin coast. Botallack and Levant — he'd worked in them both, and even now I reckon I could find my way around in those mines from the memory of what he told me of them. He was a thin, wiry little man with sad eyes and a hell of a thirst. That and silicosis killed him at the age of forty-two.'

'Did you ever hear from your mother?'

I looked up. I had almost forgotten that Dave was there, so absorbed had I become in my memories. 'No,' I said. 'Never. And I was never allowed to refer to her. The only clue I ever got as to her whereabouts was when he was raving drunk one night and mouthed curses upon a place called Cripples' Ease.

There's a village of that name near St. Ives. I found it on the map. But I shall never go there. He was dead drunk for a week then. I think he must have heard something. He died when I was sixteen. I think I would have asked him about her when he was dying, but he had a stroke and never regained consciousness.'

'Oh — that's terrible!'

I looked up to find Dave with a look of genuine sadness in his eyes.

'And you never found out what happened to her?' he asked.

'No,' I said.

'But now that you are in Cornwall?'

I shook my head. 'No,' I told him. 'Let the past lie buried. He wouldn't have wanted me to try to find out. He may have been a drunk, but I loved him.'

That secret smile was back on Dave's lips. But this time it was different. It was as though he was really amused at something. 'Maybe the past will not lie buried.'

'What do you mean?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and handed back the faded print.

After that we sat in silence for a long while. Outside the rain swept across the waste of mine workings in a leaden curtain and the grey light glistened on the piled-up mounds of slag. At length Dave got up and sniffed at the weather. 'It'll clear up after midday,' he said. 'You'll be able to start out then. Our ways part from here.'

'Where do I go?' I asked.

'Botallack,' he replied. 'Ask for Captain Manack. And give him this.' He tossed his gold cigarette lighter across to me. 'That'll prove that I sent you to him. Now I'm going to get some sleep and I suggest you do the same.'

'What about your arm?' I asked.

'Indeed it's all right,' he said and curled himself up in his raincoat in front of the hot embers.

For some time I sat staring out into the black curtain of the rain. At length I grew sleepy and dozed off.

When I woke the sun was shining and I was alone in the cave. I went outside. The moors looked warm and friendly and the rubble of the old mine workings steamed gently in the warmth of the sun. The gold of the gorse shimmered in the heat and birds were singing.

I called. But no one answered. Dave had gone.

CHAPTER THREE Cripples' Ease

The sun was westering as I climbed Cam Kenidjack. The great granite blocks of the earn were black against the flaming sky and the heather of the hillside was dark in shadow. But when I reached the top and stood on the huge, flat-topped slabs, I felt the faint warmth of the sun, and the heather on the farther slope glowed a warm purple. The moors spilled away from under my feet to a coastline that was torn and broken by old mine workings. It was as though one of the giants of Cornish legend had rootled along this rugged coast in search of boulders to hurl at some neighbouring Titan. The sea beyond was like a tray of burnished copper. A line of storm clouds lay black along the horizon, their ragged edges crimsoned by the red disc of the autumn sun. The wind blew strong and salt in my face.

So this was the Cornish tin coast. There was a lump in my throat. Since I was old enough to understand, my father had talked to me of little else but this strip of Cornwall where he had lived and worked until he married. And I was actually standing on Carn Kenidjack — the Hooting Carn. This was where the two tinners were supposed to have watched the Devil's wrestling match.

Below me three tracks sprouted from the heather and thrust dirty-brown fingers down to the stone-tilted roofs of the miners' cottages on the coast road. I got my bearings from my map. That was St. Just, away to the left there, and Botallack, and Boscaswell where my father had been born, and Trewellard. Yes, and there was Pendeen — I could just see the white pimple of the lighthouse peeping above the rim of the coast. A little to the left the two shafts of Wheal Geevor showed black scaffolds against the copper sea. And that waste of broken rock down by the cliff edge, that was Levant.

I knew the line of the coast by heart as though I had spent my boyhood exploring it. I needed no map to tell me which was Cape Cornwall and Kenidjack Castle. I had felt a sudden excitement as I found Botallack Head and recognised, in the scored cliff-top behind it, the surface workings of the Botallack mine. I could even pick out the various shafts, getting my bearings from the broken ruins of the old engine houses that were the only ordered things in that chaos of tumbled stone. The mine was derelict now, but in my father's day it had been a great copper producer. He had taken me through it gallery by gallery, describing each level in the minutest detail, so that looking down on it from Cam Kenidjack I could almost see the outline of the underground workings just as my father had so often traced it for me on the dusty floor of our hut.