Until that day, he might as well keep mining on his own terms. He thought he had a pretty good nose for sniffing out gold. It would be trespassing and then stealing if he was lucky enough to find any gold worth taking — but he figured it was okay. They still owed him two week’s pay. It may as well be severance.
The Smith and Rochford mining company had hung onto the property as part of its portfolio, hoping that more efficient mining and processing techniques would be developed to make extracting the last traces of gold profitable.
As it was, gold mining was an expensive operation. It was almost impossible to make money digging the rock out of the ground by hand. Almost impossible. But all the easy veins had been found and extracted a century or more ago. Then all the easy veins of other metals — silver, lead, copper, coal, molybdenum, aluminum, zinc, even a little iron — had been tracked down.
Improvements in technology had led to strip-mining, that ugly process of peeling off layer by layer of rock and running it through processors that chemically broke down the minerals, atom by atom, and left them at the bottom of a pool of toxic sludge.
Nobody could deny the method was efficient.
But it still wasn’t efficient enough to make the Queen Maggie Mine profitable. Not if the machines chewed up the mountain and spat out every atom of gold.
The original owner, John D. Blair, had gone bankrupt trying to extract every last bit of gold in the mine in 1910. Smith and Rochford had bought up the mine and had managed to eke out a profit until three years ago.
Since then, the rock had sat idle.
The gold ore that was still in the mountain wasn’t even a matter of faith, but of record.
Jesse reached the end of the tunnel where he’d been working the night before. He ran the beam of his helmet light over an intricate web of quartz. Most of it was entirely useless. There was gold in there, for certain, but at such low quantities to make it entirely worthless to extract. It was a delicate operation. He was following the quartz reef trying to sniff out the most viable vein to work. Without heavy machinery, he had to be very specific with his targeted mining. He stopped and, using a pickaxe he’d left leaning against the wall yesterday, he chipped out some of the grayish quartz from along the end of the shaft.
Then he inspected it with his helmet light.
The stone was light gray with paler flecks running throughout. It was an ugly stone, the kind that always reminded him of half-melted and refrozen snow mixed with dirt. “Snirt,” they called it as kids, and “snirt rock.” But as a miner, he had learned that this was the stuff of magic.
He flipped the piece of quartz over.
Several flecks of gold greeted him. In an entire ton of it there might be half an ounce of gold — if the mine was an exceptional one. More often, one might have to go through twenty tons of gold ore in order to pull out an ounce of the stuff, which would be worth about $1300 dollars, or just over $21,000 per pound. The gold bars that one saw in movies about stealing gold from Fort Knox were 400 troy ounces of gold — or about 25 pounds each. One gold bar, half a million dollars…and at least 800 tons of ore stripped out of the ground. The calculations making gold worthwhile to take out of the ground were delicate and situational.
He kissed the “snirt rock” and shoved it in his pocket. He’d keep it as a lucky piece.
Then he picked up the pick and swung again. He had no intention of digging an entire ton of gold ore out of the mountain by hand, but it felt good to get into the rhythm of the swing. Chips of rock flew all around him. Under the pick, the song that the rock was singing changed slightly. He frowned, then took off his goggles to examine the rock more closely.
If he didn’t know better, he would have said the black rock in front of him was obsidian.
It was as strange as finding, well, a volcanic silicate in the middle of a bunch of quartz crystals. Colorado had several known sources of the stuff, but they were all much farther to the north or south of the state. No, wait. There was some down in a couple of mines near Nathrop, Colorado, only about fifty miles to the south. Wouldn’t that be something, if the vein ran all the way from the Queen Maggie down there?
The vein of gold-filled quartz seemed to get richer as it mixed with the obsidian. He stepped back and studied the rockface. The beam of his helmet light reflected off the thick pieces of gold-encrusted quartz zigzagging through the black, glossy, volcanic stone that shone like a royal mirror.
It was a geological phenomenon he’d never even heard of.
This one find could be enough to make the past three years worthwhile. The seam of gold running into the obsidian wall appeared to increase in size and quality. He felt the pace of his heart quicken. Would it lead to the motherlode?
He was going to have to drill, bring down some explosives, and blast the obsidian out of his way. It would make some noise and someone might hear it, but it was unlikely anyone would come to investigate a strange sound coming from an otherwise abandoned mine.
Over the course of the next few hours he drilled several blast holes into the obsidian and filled them with ANFO, a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. He’d even put in a couple of sound-and-vibration dampeners, three-foot-thick layers of sand fill and another of aggregate. He was so far away from the blast that he didn’t expect to hear it so much as feel it, through the rock underfoot. Even on the surface, however, he wore his safety equipment.
It was time.
He pressed the detonator and waited.
It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. He strained his ears to catch the first hints of the sound. The light breeze and faint birdcalls seemed to roar in his ears.
Then he began to hear the deep, grinding sound of the stone breaking away underneath him. It seemed to reach him from every direction at once, not just at the opening of the mine shaft.
DANGER: OPEN MINE SHAFT KEEP OUT! EXTREME DANGER!
He smiled. The unimaginably deep sound coming out of the mine shaft was music to his ears. It was a shame that all that obsidian was going to waste, but then it was going to waste anyway.
He waited until the rumbling had died down. Now came the waiting for the dust and gasses to settle. If a professional mining operation had been running this blast, it would have been easier and faster, with powerful air filtration units, motorized hauling and digging equipment, and other tricks of the trade. But for a solo operation, it was just him and a bunch of higgledy-piggledy equipment. He fully intended to clear the waste rock using a small ore trailer towed by a secondhand quadbike.
He stopped to have lunch, while he waited for the makeshift sprinkler system he’d rigged to do its job of grounding the fine dust that filled the mine shaft.
An hour later, and with the impatience of a much younger man, he switched on his helmet light and reentered the mineshaft.
The sprinklers had brought the dangerous fine particles down to an acceptable level. He switched the system off and stepped through.
He wended his way through the tunnel. The sides didn’t look bad, not bad at all, although of course there was always a risk when blasting underground. The digger waited for him in front of a pile of aggregate. A hole at the top of the tunnel had revealed a clear area on the other side that had sparkled in the darkness, decorated with the glitter of shattered glass.
When he’d first looked through, he’d been exhausted. Too easy to make a mistake.
He’d backed out. Today was the day that he’d climb through.
He edged up to the hole, pushing a powerful flashlight, and a heavy sample bag. He said a little prayer and crawled through.
On the other side was a glass wonderland.