Heiress

by Susan May Warren

  “Did you tell this to Abel?”

  “I did. He promised to look into it.”

  Something like panic, or even horror crossed Daughtry’s face.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “I feel sick. I actually thought Abel was behind all this.”

  “Behind what?”

  “Take off your apron and come with me.”

  “Where are we going?” She untied the apron around her waist, set it over the chair, propelled by the earnestness in his voice.

  “You may want to stop the presses for this.”

  * * * * *

  “We’re going down…into the mine?”

  Esme stood in the lamp room, a one-story corrugated metal office filled with all manner of mining equipment—boots, drill shields, shovels, gloves. With this entrance to the mine shut down, the room empty of miner’s voices, the shadows of the twilight sawed eerie lines across the floor, as if daring her to cross into man’s territory.

  “I want to show you something.” Daughtry turned and handed her a soft cap outfitted with a hook for the carbide headlamp about the size of her hand.

  “How far down are we going?”

  “All the way to the bottom, three thousand feet.”

  Oh. Oh. She pressed her hand to her chest and for the first time, Daughtry paused. “I assumed you wanted to go in there. But we don’t have to.”

  “Will it prove the mine is being sabotaged?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe it’s my imagination.”

  “Let’s go.”

  He steered her out into the graveyard of a workplace, toward the opening of the mine.

  “Is this the Horn?”

  “Yes. We officially closed it years ago, but it could still produce ore.”

  The portal, with its timber header over the opening, appeared a guillotine over her as she passed into the blackness, the wood timbers like ribs as she entered the throat of the mine. The headlamps striped the dark tunnel of rock, the horizontal boards with earthen hubris pushing through the slats.

  A large plate metal box hung directly ahead, the door open. Another opening next to it gaped, a gate cordoning off the darkness. A young man waited, standing next to the hoist lever, dressed in a pair of cotton pants, a grimy shirt.

  “Ready, sir?”

  Daughtry nodded. “Thanks, Crandall. We won’t be down long.”

  He stepped up to the box, extended his hand to her.

  She hesitated a moment before she stepped onto the floor, bracing her hand on the wall.

  “The lift cage is safe. I’ve been using it.”

  It didn’t feel safe to suspend yourself in a tiny box over a shoot of darkness that fell a half-mile. Her expression must have broadcast her thoughts.

  “This carries twenty-four men. Sometimes more. And, on occasion, a cart of ore. I promise it can hold us.” He closed the metal doorway. Only a tiny window revealed the dim light from the mouth of the mine. “Ready?”

  “No. But go ahead.”

  “Next stop, a half-mile down.” He gestured to Crandall.

  She pressed herself to the back and closed her eyes.

  The cage dropped, and her stomach with it, and she wondered for a moment if it had been cut loose from its moorings. Oh, please don’t let them free fall into the gullet of the earth. The cables whined, the box clanking against the wooden guides of the shaft. Her courage abandoned her, and had Daughtry not reached out to take her hand, she might have dropped to a ball right there on the grimy floor.

  It seemed to take half her lifetime, although perhaps only two minutes passed as they descended. The temperature fell at first, the breath of the cave cool on her skin. Then, as they descended deeper into the tomb, it heated, the humidity beading upon the back of her neck.

  “I expected it to be colder,” she said, hating how the darkness ate her voice.

  “Wall temperatures down here are about one hundred thirty degrees. The ventilation cools the air down to about ninety-five, but the one hundred percent humidity makes the air thick. A man’s smell can curdle your stomach by the end of a shift.” He squeezed her hand. “Sorry. I should have mentioned you’d need a bath after this.”

  “Why do you come down here?”

  He looked at her, frowned. “I own it. I need to know the mine well enough to make sure the inspectors are giving the miners a fair shake for their ore contracts. And, I like the geology of the earth, seeing God’s handiwork from the inside out. Most of all, I’m fascinated by the engineering of the miners. Sure, the Silverthread company drills the shafts and provides the equipment, but the miners design the inside of the mine, creating the drifts, or the tunnels that connect the stopes.”

  “Stopes?”

  “The chambers where the mine is ored. We do contract mining here—the workmen are assigned to a stope, and the miners of each stope are in charge of taking the ore out. They’re paid a base wage plus an incentive, calculated by the tonnage of their ore. So, the harder workers might get more tonnage, more money. Sometimes, however, they take shortcuts on reinforcing their stope.”

  “Every miner has their own stope? Is there enough to go around?”

  “Not everyone that works here is a miner. Some are timberers—they work to reinforce the drifts and stopes. Trammers help haul the ore out in cars, and mawers, or shovelers, and drillers and blasters—they all work with the miner and get a portion of his haul. The drift miners—those that create the tunnels—are paid by the foot, as are the raise miners—those men who make tunnels vertically between levels and into stopes.”

  “How big are the stopes?”

  “They start out small, but they get bigger as the ore is mined out of them. They can grow to be as large as sixty to eighty feet high, about two hundred feet across. The men finish clearing a stope, then dynamite out another section above it, then mine out the ore that is loosened. The problem is, the highest grade ore comes from the weakest rock, so the best stopes are the most dangerous.”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “Not if the mine has been properly timbered.”

  The cage slowed then stopped with a hard jerk, bouncing and shuddering as all three-thousand feet of cable stretched.

  “Are we here?”

  He let go of her hand and opened the cage door, then the gate at the shaft station.

  Sweaty heat rushed into the cage as her eyes adjusted to the small timber-girded room. Electric light from the fixtures in the walls cast a shadowy glaze.

  She stepped off the lift into the domed room. From the chamber ran a series of tunnels, their mouths black with secrets, dangers. Moisture glistened off them like tears. On the floor of each tunnel, steel rails aligned in the center of the shafts, where the mining cars ran. Despite the pervasive heat that slithered into her pores, she shivered.

  “I’m going to light your lamp,” Daughtry said, and turned to her, unclipping the little bronze pot and lamp from her hat.

  “It won’t light my head on fire, will it?”

  He laughed. “No.” He unscrewed the bottom portion of the pot. “I’m putting a piece of calcium carbide into the bottom chamber. Then I’ll pour water in the top. The chemical reaction between the water and the carbide forms calcium hydroxide and creates a flammable gas called acetylene. The gas then flows out through a small hole in the burner tip at the center of the lamp reflector.”

  “Which you light?”

  “Yes. Then the constant drip of water into the carbide keeps your lamp lit.” He put the carbide—pale little pebbles—into the bottom of the chamber then screwed it back to the top. Then he opened a tiny portal in the top chamber and poured water from his canteen into it.

  “Without catching my hair on fire.”

  “You know it’s considered bad luck to bring a woman into a mine.” He looked at her with a grin. “I promise, your hair won’t catch fire.”

  He took a match, stuck it against the rock floor, and held the blaze to the lamp. It caught, and he adjusted the fla
me with a lever on the top of the canister. The flame shot out, flared, the light so bright it appeared almost blue. She squinted against it as he continued to adjust it down to a bold glow.

  He adjusted the cap back onto her head. Smiled down at her, lifting her chin. “Not as dirty as a miner, and definitely more beautiful.”

  Suddenly, the ground below, the very walls began to quiver. She nearly leaped into Daughtry’s arms as a piece of the ceiling shook off, crashed onto the rock floor. Dust boiled up around her feet and she covered her mouth, her eyes smarting. Her headlamp barely cut through the debris now filling the chamber as thick as fog. Her nose burned with the smell of smoke.

  Daughtry had his arm around her, moving her away from the edge of the cave. “Best not to be standing under a Creeping Pete.”

  She glanced up and spotted an overhang carved out by the explosion.

  “What happened?”

  “Blasting in one of the tunnels. You never know how it’s going to affect the entire Silverthread mine. The drifts are all connected down here. They blast at the end of the shift. By morning, the air will clear.”

  “I didn’t think the mine was open.”

  “This shaft isn’t, but we haven’t closed down the entire mine. The shaft I brought you down was the old Horn. The blasting is from our new shaft, the Neck. All the shafts are owned by the Silverthread Mining Company.”

  He slid his hand down to hers again. She clung to it, coughed, but it didn’t clear her throat. She pressed her hand to her mouth.

  “I won’t let you go, I promise. Come with me, we have a bit of a hike.”

  He led them down one of the dark portals into the catacombs under the earth, their boots scuffing, kicking out stones. Every few feet, the mine had been braced by great twelve-by-twelve timbers. In between, smaller slats kept the walls from trickling in.

  “This drift needed more cribbing than others.”

  “Cribbing?”

  He pointed to the ceiling, then to the sideboards.

  Now and again, she stumbled, her boot catching on larger rubble. The pitch blackness, even with her headlamp, seeped into her skin, the musty, dirty heat of the cave embedded her pores. Sweat ran in rivulets down her spine. Daughtry’s hand turned moist in hers, sealing their grip.

  The tunnel seemed about eight feet wide, the same distance tall. Sometimes, other tunnels jagged off it; rough-hewn ladders, crudely lashed together, would lift now and again off the floor and when she looked up, they vanished into darkness.

  “Those are rises between levels. We can take a ladder all the way to the top of the mine if we have to.”

  “They don’t look very safe.”

  He said nothing as they walked along. She took it as an assent. She’d never felt so soggy, so rank. Her lamplight didn’t seem to possess the strength to push back the edges of the tunnel and the farther she went, the more the darkness pulled her in, closed around her.

  Her eyes teared, probably from the smoke, but she refused to whimper.

  A person could wander these tunnels forever, perish in the darkness when his carbide ran out.

  She cupped her other hand over Daughtry’s, her fear nearly audible by the time Daughtry finally led her into another domed area, the Pipe’s shaft station. Timbers again lined the wall, shoring back the smaller rocks. The electric lights shone, her eyes blinking in the shadowy brightness, coming out of the pitch darkness.

  “This is it. The lowest level of the Pipe shaft, where the accident happened.”

  She didn’t release his hand as she surveyed the site of the accident. Five feet away, the debris from the destroyed cage lay crumpled, as if someone had taken a hand and pressed down, the metal plates contorted and in pieces on the dirty, greasy floor, the steel hoist rope in a tangle nearby.

  “This is where they died?”

  “No, they died seventy feet below, at the very bottom of the shaft. We rigged up a jib and dragged the cage up to investigate.”

  He took her over to the carcass of the lift. She noticed the gnarled metal where the steel cable had sheared off from the top of the lift. Claws on the sides of the cage appeared as mangled hands, ripped and torn.

  “What are those?”

  “Those are the dogs. It’s a braking mechanism. If the hoist rope breaks, it’ll stop a fall. But look at this.” A spike protruded from the hinge point on one of the dogs. “It looks like this one was tampered with. And there’s more.”

  He pointed to where the hoist cable’s frayed edges had loosed, broken from the line. “Right here, see this? The cable’s been cut.”

  She tried to angle her headlamp down, to see where he might be looking. Indeed, the metal seemed to have been shorn, or sawed into a crisp line over halfway through.

  “After hauling men up and down so many times, it would have broken free.”

  “Dropped them to their deaths.” She said it on a ghost of a voice. “Sabotage. Someone could have done this in the middle of the night, after the last shift of the day. These men were murdered.”

  “Indeed. But by whom?”

  “That’s a very good question, Hoyt.”

  The voice seemed to echo through the chamber, slide over her skin. She turned to the glaring lamplight of a miner.

  “Abel,” Daughtry said, without warmth. “What are you doing here?”

  “You brought a woman into this mine?” Abel advanced on him, his eyes glittering. “You know that’s bad luck.”

  “Esme needs to see this, and so do you.” Daughtry showed Abel the hoist cable then the dogs. Esme watched as Abel’s expression turned to fury.

  “I was just down at the site of the last ladder fall,” he said, his voice lethal. “Or rather, the scene of the murder.”

  “What?”

  “The ladder between level 2900 and 3000 was all but cut through. It didn’t break, it was cut. We thought it was rotten until I took a good look. Two men fell eighty feet.”

  She held his gaze, saw the grief in it. “Abel.”

  He marched up to Daughtry, put his finger to his chest. For his part, Daughtry didn’t move. “You swear to me the Silverthread had nothing to do with this.”

  Daughtry’s voice came out low, even. “I swear.”

  I swear. His words sank into her as they trekked through the drifts back to the Horn shaft. Abel walked behind them, his breathing hard, as if trying to sort through what truths he could believe.

  She wanted to weep when they came out to the shaft room, saw the cage waiting for them. But as they walked toward it, suddenly it jerked, the gears at the crust of the earth grinding.

  And then, even as Esme leaped for it—to do what? Grab a hold of the bottom and ride it to the top?—the cage lifted and disappeared into the shaft.

  “Can you make it come back?” She didn’t even bother to disguise her panic.

  Daughtry leaped at a box mounted at the side of the shaft. A rope hung down, and he pulled on it. A bell rang. Next to the box, a chart listed the bell signals. “It should ring on the surface, to Crandall in the hoist house. It’s the bell signal, and every level of the mine has its own signal.” He gave it eight rapid shots. “That’s our emergency signal.”

  Esme stood there, tasting her heartbeat. Looking at Abel, back to Daughtry.

  The men stared at the empty shaft.

  Daughtry rang the bell again. And then, a third time.

  They stood, headlamps flickering, waiting for rescue.

  “Where is he? Where’s Crandall?”

  “I don’t know, Esme. Shh.” Daughtry glanced at Abel, who shook his head.

  “We’ve been abandoned,” Esme said, her pulse so thick in her head she thought she might collapse. She looked up the shaft again, felt the cool lick of fresh air snaking down from the surface.

  “Who would do that?”

  “The same person who would kill our miners,” Abel said. He looked at Daughtry. “Now what?”

  She felt her knees start to wobble. Was that another blast? She put her hands
against the wall. And then, as she watched, Daughtry’s carbide lamp flickered out. His face darkened in the shadows. She stifled a hiccough of fear, her breath leaking out in a whimper.

  “Esme. It’s okay. We’ll get you out of here.”

  “How?” Oh, she didn’t mean to sound so delicate, so needy, and her voice echoed off the walls, probably down every chamber. “What if my carbide runs out? We’ll die down here.”

  Daughtry reached out and she didn’t care that Abel watched as she clung to him. “Shh.”

  “We’re trapped!”

  “We’re not trapped. All the shafts are connected by drifts. Abel, can you get us to the new Neck shaft?”

  Esme stared at the dark maws. “Go through those tunnels again? What if my light goes off?”

  “It’s either that, or we can climb up three thousand feet of ladder,” Daughtry said. “And Abel has a light.” He took her hand. “Abel, you’re the boss. Save us.”

  Something flashed across Abel’s face, a flicker of surprise, perhaps. “Follow me.”

  He took them down yet another tunnel, this one rougher, filled with boulders and the broken timbers of the ore car rails, earth dribbling through the cribs, some of the bracing timbers broken. She wiped her hand down her cheek, hating her tears.

  Abel led them through passages as wide as a street, others that might turn a man sideways. Other passages led off the first, but Abel led the way without pausing.

  “How do you know where you’re going?” she finally asked, because speaking seemed better than listening to their breathing or their feet scrubbing on dirt.

  “I grew up down here. I know every nook and cranny of this mine,” Abel said.

  Her light flickered out, then, and it took every ounce of strength for her not to cry aloud.

  They finally emerged into another open chamber.

  The gate over the entry to the shaft was closed.

  Abel walked over to the bell box, pulled on it, a series of short, then long signals. The sound was returned. From the top, she heard the clanking of the lift cage.

  “Welcome to the Neck,” Abel said, a smile edging up his grimy face.

  Daughtry extended a hand. “You saved us, Abel. Thank you.”