Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘If they’re changing shifts, I’ll pass for today,’ said Nat. ‘Besides, I’m meeting Johnny Brown for a drink about mid-morning, and my system is telling me that I could use a drink.’

  Henry thrust his hands into the silk-lined pockets of his thick fur coat as he watched Nat ride off across the sloping hillside and down the gulch. Today, for the first time in a long time, he began to feel satisfied and reflective. Ever since the morning when August Rische had shown him the silver ore he had deliberately given himself no time to think about anything else but hiring miners and blacksmiths, ordering up drilling equipment and milling machinery; supervising the building of the hoisting-house and the mill; borrowing money; visiting assay offices; talking to bank presidents; and sitting up late in bed with the lamp burning low so that it wouldn’t disturb Augusta, poring over books like Silver Extraction: A Metallurgist’s Guide and Mine Management.

  His preoccupation with the Little Pittsburgh had served the secondary but happy purpose of keeping Augusta reasonably satisfied; less tetchy, less sharp. If he had talked at all at the dinner-table during the past few months, he had talked about the mine. He had bored her, he knew, but he had kept her content, and co-operative, because as long as she felt that he was inextricably involved in day-to-day mining in Leadville, she was reassured that he would always come back to her every evening, for meals and rest and whatever affection he allowed her to give him; and at least she would continue to enjoy the dignity of having a husband. She was silently terrified of their accumulating wealth: the thought that they were rising higher and higher on a mountain of shining silver. But so far, the silver remained unspent and she kept her fears mostly to herself, even the ultimate terror that as soon as he was rich enough he would leave her for ever.

  Henry had been modest in his purchases so far. Almost all of his share of the Little Pittsburgh diggings had gone for investment to David Moffat, the one-time bookseller who had founded the First National Bank of Denver. William Byers didn’t trust David Moffat, but Henry did; and David Moffat had shown his trust in the Little Pittsburgh by coming out to Leadville in person, and insisting on being winched right down to the face, his bald head popping with perspiration. Henry’s most extravagant acquisitions since the discovery of silver had been his fur coat, as well as a matching fur coat for Augusta which she rarely wore, and five pairs of handmade shoes. He had even kept the store open.

  But his caution and his modesty and his intensive daily work up at the mine were nothing to do with thrift: they were nothing more than manifestations of his deep inner glee that he was now incredibly rich; that he could now do whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, and shower himself in diamonds, if the mood took him. Augusta should have been alarmed by his sudden diligence, rather than reassured; because even when he was cutting epitaphs in Carmington he had been flamboyant in his dress, and fond of showing-off. Now, as wealthy as he was, he was behaving almost meanly.

  At night, when Augusta was breathing thickly through her open mouth, he would lie with his hands supporting his head, thinking of all the houses he was going to own, all the land he was going to buy; all the silk shirts and bespoke-tailored suits. But it was enough for now that he could afford it all, without having to go out and do it. He had set himself a target. When David Moffat called him, and told him that his bank account had reached $100,000; then, he would spend.

  It was the anticipation of freedom that he relished so much. And perhaps, too, it was the slow punishment of Augusta; watching her face light up into a smile whenever he arrived home; seeing the way in which she grasped on to every tiny nuance in his conversation about the mine, anything that would give her hope that he was going to stay in Leadville, and stay with her, and always be careful with his money, and quiet. Praying that he wouldn’t leave her, baking his favourite pies, running the store and the bank and the post office counter on her own, to please him. While all the time he knew that he would go, one day.

  He wasn’t completely free of guilt about Augusta; nor was he lacking in compassion. In other circumstances, they probably could have been the closest of friends. But Augusta wanted him to love her, which he was unable to do; and he believed that the only way in which he could ever be rid of her was through cruelty. Well: he believed it sometimes, when he was trying to rationalize his feelings towards her, or when she had spent two hours in the kitchen making him Philadelphia scrapple, which he particularly liked.

  He watched Nat Starkey disappear behind an irregular row of dark serrated pines; and then he nodded his head to himself in a self-satisfied way, and began to walk towards the hoisting-house. He had almost reached it when there was yet another deep thumping noise under the ground. He paused, frowned, and then started to jog towards the hoisting-house with his heavy fur coat flaring out behind him.

  ‘Mr Grover!’ he called. ‘Mr Grover! Who’s blasting? Mr Grover!’

  R.P. Grover appeared at the open doorway of the hoisting-house. ‘No warning was called, sir! Don’t know what happened!’

  ‘Anybody down there?’ Henry panted, as he reached the door. Two or three dusty-faced miners from the night-shift stood aside to let him pass, and said, respectfully, ‘Mr Roberts, sir.’

  ‘Don’t know for sure,’ said R.P. Grover. ‘Most of the nightshift are up. None of the day-shift have gone down yet. Bully! Where’s Bully?’

  ‘Bully’s still below,’ called one miner.

  ‘Bully! Who else?’

  ‘Young Jim Pickings. He stayed behind with Bully, to help him pick up blasting-caps. Bully’s particular about blasting-caps.’

  ‘Nobody else? Just those two?’

  ‘Far as I know, sir,’ replied R.P. Grover; but he said it in an odd way, in a noticeably suggestive tone of voice; so that Henry turned and looked at him but didn’t quite know what else he was trying to say.

  ‘Come on, Mr Grover,’ he said, tugging off his coat. ‘You—and that fellow there, what’s your name?’

  ‘Jackson, sir, no relation to George Jackson.’

  ‘Let’s get down there and take a look,’ said Henry.

  ‘If that’s what you want, sir,’ said R.P. Grover. And at that moment, Henry guessed what might have happened; what must have happened; and he stared at R.P. Grover with a feeling of incredulity and dread which he hadn’t felt since Doris had died.

  Eleven

  The Little Pittsburgh lode, for the first two hundred feet of its depth, was almost vertical; and so it had been mined simply by sinking a vertical shaft alongside the lode, and hammering into it with compressed-air drills and picks, and blasting it where necessary with giant powder, and sending the excavated ore straight up to the surface in buckets. Deeper down, however, the lode had begun to slope away, and so the miners had been obliged to dig beneath its slope, and support their excavations with square-sets, so that as they dug into the diagonal ceiling which loomed above them, it didn’t collapse and crush them.

  Henry climbed into the winding-cage with R. P. Grover and the young miner called Jackson, and with a rattling of steam and a high-pitched purring of steel cable, they were lowered down quickly to the hundred-foot station. It was hot and gloomy and chokingly dusty down there, and the flames of the few candles which burned on wall-brackets were vitiated and dim. Henry tied his handkerchief tightly around his mouth, and then said, ‘Come on, let’s go further down.’

  They climbed out of the unsteadily-swaying cage, and crossed the rocky floor of the station until they reached the neck of the incline shaft. Henry took down a candle and peered into the incline, but all he could see was denser dust.

  ‘Blown themselves up, most like,’ said R. P. Grover.

  ‘Bully wasn’t careless, was he?’ asked Henry. ‘Not like some.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ agreed R. P. Grover. ‘Not like some. Dan Scott tried to knock a piece of giant powder into a hole in the ceiling, thinking it was wood, and blew both his eyes out.’

  ‘I think you can save us your horror stories,’ said Henry. Just then,
the large flywheel at the head of the incline began to turn. It was connected by driving-belts to the hoisting-engine on the surface, and so someone down at the bottom of the incline must have tugged the bell-rope to have themselves brought up. After a few moments, the top of a giraffe-car appeared through the billowing dust, and inside it, staring up at them with grimy faces, were ‘Bully’ Brett and Jim Pickings. The young miner called Jackson let out a whoop, and said, ‘Safe and sound, boys! Safe and sound!’

  ‘Bully’ Brett lifted himself out of the giraffe with a grunt, and dusted himself off with almost fastidious gestures. He was short, powerful, muscular, with a face as ugly as a gargoyle; but a body which would have delighted a sculptor. He wore nothing more than a tight woollen cap and a pair of long johns cut off at the knee; and his body gleamed with sweat. By comparison, Jim Pickings looked thin and runty, although his shoulders were well-built, and his hands were thick-fingered and strong.

  Henry loosened the handkerchief around his mouth and pulled it down around his neck. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Are you both all right?’

  ‘A little deaf, sir,’ said Bully, banging his left ear with the flat of his hand. He glanced with piggy little deep-set eyes at R.P. Grover, and this time Henry caught the glance, and what it probably meant. You didn’t say that Mr Roberts would come down here, asking questions; not straight after.

  ‘There’s been an accident, sir,’ Jim Pickings put in.

  ‘Accident? What kind of accident? Has the roof caved in?’

  Bully gripped Jim Pickings’ wrist: Henry could only guess how tightly, but the boy closed his mouth at once, and his mouth stayed closed. Bully put on an exaggeratedly mournful expression, and scooped his hat off his head so that his hair stuck out, and said, ‘Mr Rische, sir. Fell bad luck, sir. Fell bad luck.’

  ‘Mr Rische is down there?’

  ‘What remains of him, sir.’

  ‘In that case, I’m going to have a look. Mr Grover! You’re coming too. Mr Brett—tell me what happened.’

  Bully smeared his woollen hat all around his chest and under his arms, to mop up some of the sweat, although Henry guessed that it had probably reached saturation point long ago. ‘Well, sir, nothing to it. We’d finished blasting, and we was ready to come upstairs, when Mr Rische said we had a missfire; and that we dursn’t leave it for the next shift to stick their drills into. I said right you are, Mr Rische, I’ll pick it out, don’t you have no fear of that; but he said that he was a miner, too, and that he could pick it out as well as anybody. And before I could utter a single word, sir, not the word of a warning, the poor damned fellow had thrust his pick into -the charge-hole sir, and young Jim and me were lucky not to get what he got. The walls of that tunnel are red, sir, red as paint, and not a single sign of Mr Rische nowhere, so we was just coming up to get some lime, sir, to dress the tunnel with, before the next shift comes down; on account of not wanting to leave a mess.’

  Henry said, ‘I want to look,’ but R.P. Grover caught his arm.

  ‘If you’ve never seen the like of that before, Mr Roberts, it’s probably better not to. I went down once after something like that, only the second time I was down in a mine, and I looked up, Mr Roberts, and there was a fellow’s kidney hanging from the candle-bracket. So, better not to, sir, on the whole.’

  Henry was trembling. The heat and the suffocating dust were more than he could stand. His clothes clung and slid around him, heavy and chafing with sweat, and every breath that he took smelled of dust and blood and giant powder. He said, throatily, ‘You’ve killed him.’

  R.P. Grover looked at Henry and almost imperceptibly shook his head. ‘No, sir. Nothing like that. You heard what Bully had to say. It was just a consequence of inexperience, sir; Mr Rische not knowing much about giant powder. I’ve seen it before. And you know how particular Bully is with his explosives, sir, even down to his blasting-caps. Fellow I knew at the Yellow Jacket mine left his blasting-caps everywhere, and one day someone got one mixed up in his pipe-tobacco. Blew his pipe to pieces and the nose clean off his face. None of us stopped laughing for a week.’

  Henry said, ‘You’ve killed him.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said R.P. Grover, placidly. ‘Not us.’

  And it was the way in which he said ‘not us’ that made Henry think again about that conversation on the hillside this morning. R.P. Grover had been asking him for something: for support against August Rische. And R.P. Grover had made it patently clear in that peculiar sideways manner of his that he was going to deal with Mr Rische in the most effective possible way. Had it occurred to Henry that he intended to kill him? Henry sought through his conscience as frantically as a man searching through a portmanteau for a vital paper which will save his life. Had Henry known that R.P. Grover would kill August Rische, if he were simply to show that he supported him; and that he would turn a blind eye? Or was it nothing more than an echo of guilt about Doris; and Augusta; and a feeling that luck would never be with him, no matter how ferociously he grasped for it?

  ‘I want to see him,’ Henry insisted. If he had murdered August Rische, by carelessness, by intention, by a nod or a wink, he wanted to witness what he had done.

  ‘Not the best idea, sir,’ said ‘Bully’ Brett.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Henry.

  R.P. Grover indicated with a cursory nod of his head that Bully and Jim Pickings should make their way to the surface. ‘You go, too,’ he told young Jackson. ‘There’s nothing more that you can do now.’

  Jackson hesitated, but Henry said, ‘Go on, boy.’

  Without a word, R.P. Grover helped Henry to climb into the battered, dusty giraffe; then swung himself in beside him. He tugged the rope which was the faceworker’s only contact with the hoisting-house, and after a moment or two the flywheel began to turn, and Henry and he were lowered gradually down the steep incline into the choking lower levels of the Little Pittsburgh mine. Henry felt as if he were being slid into some giant’s dark pocket, amongst the rubble and the rubbish and the snuff of death.

  At the lower end of the incline, the shaft was blind with dust. It had stopped swirling now, but as R.P. Grover lifted his lamp, Henry could see that it hung suspended in the air like the silt from the bottom of a stirred-up pond. They listened for a moment, before climbing out of the giraffe, but all they could hear was the creaking of the square-sets which supported the sloping roof, and the endless running and rustling of the rats which inhabited every mine.

  ‘Are you sure about this, sir?’ asked R.P. Grover.

  Henry said, ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  They felt their way with shuffling, crunching footsteps through the fog. R.P. Grover kept the lamp aloft, but it illuminated very little except a halo of dust particles immediately around it; and the flame began to dip and gutter because of the lack of air. The explosion had consumed almost all the oxygen in the face-workings, and it would take time before fresh air would circulate down through the ventilation pipes.

  Henry coughed. ‘Where do you think he could be?’ he asked R.P. Grover.

  ‘Anywhere, Mr Roberts,’ said R.P. Grover. ‘Or everywhere.’

  They cautiously shuffled along a little further, Henry said, ‘This morning, on the hillside out there—’ But R.P. Grover touched his arm and said, ‘Ssh! Don’t you hear something?’

  Henry listened, his hand held over his mouth to suppress his breathing. Nothing but rats running; and timbers deeply complaining; and dust settling and settling and settling in an endless whispered requiem for August Rische. And for something else, too: the death of Henry’s innocence.

  ‘There,’ said R.P. Grover. ‘Listen again.’ And Henry listened again, but still heard nothing. He looked at Grover through the brown-tinted gloom, and Grover looked back at him for a moment or two, and then beckoned, silently, and began to make his way across the gallery in which they were now standing, stepping over the base-timbers of the square-sets with a practised hoist of his left leg that made him look as if he were limping.
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  Quite suddenly, they came across August Rische. The spectacle was so horrifying that Henry’s legs seemed to lock at the knees, and he was unable to move. What made it even more frightening was that for one split second before Henry realized what they had found, he thought that August’s body was a sack or a kitbag that had somehow become caught up in the pulley-ropes that looped from the ceiling of the gallery; and to realize then that it was the remains of a man was almost more than his mind could accept.

  R.P. Grover held up his lamp. ‘It’s him all right,’ he said, and although he was trying to be nonchalant about it, the veteran of a hundred grisly mining accidents, Henry could hear the constriction in his voice.

  Henry at last managed to step forward, although his terror at what he was seeing was absolute. August must have been blown out of the face-tunnel, almost ninety feet away, and his body must then have been caught by these loops of rope. His arms were held out on either side of him like Christ crucified, and his head sagged down between his shoulders. His legs had both been blown off, however, and the lower half of his body was an incredibly complicated tangle of flesh and bone and sinews, all mingled up with shreds of cotton and leather. He was bleeding on to the dusty floor of the gallery in a long black stream, like an emptying basin.

  With a trembling hand, R.P. Grover raised August Rische’s head. The body danced on the loops of rope like a marionette, and blood spattered all over Henry’s shoes. Miraculously, Rische was still alive, although so close to death that it hardly mattered. The shock which so often killed miners after comparatively slight injuries had sustained him for a few minutes after the blast, numb, and unaware what had happened to him.

  ‘August,’ said Henry, in a voice dry with guilt and dust. August opened his mouth. A bubble of blood glistened and then burst.