She slept fitfully, and awakened to a soft tapping. She had no robe, but hurried into the asylum dress, the drab Mother Hubbard, and peered out.
“Tipperary!” she said, opening to him.
“So it is the madwoman,” he said.
She could not answer, but hurried him to one of the two wooden chairs.
“Would you like an apple?” she asked, and they smiled.
“You are safe for the moment,” he said. “But only that. They will expect you here, and spring upon you when they can. Tell me all, spare me nothing.”
She did, beginning with her trip to Helena to confront District Judge Roach. When she got to the exam by Doctor Jerrold Laidlow, and the results, Tip Leary was hissing like a steam kettle.
“I knew nothing about him!” he said. “So that’s how they railroaded you. Without a care about you, who you are, whether or not you’re mad as a hatter. None of it. Just get rid of her, any way they could. And they did.”
“I thought I was all alone, washed up on a beach in a strange land, until yesterday,” she said.
Tip Leary didn’t like that, and glared a moment. Then he reached across the table and took her hand. “You were never alone,” he said. “And never will be.”
She felt embarrassed. If there was one idea that dwelled in her thoughts after being condemned to spend all the rest of her life in an asylum, was that she was alone, forgotten, and beyond help. “Oh, Tip,” she said.
“Now there’s more, Mrs. McPhee.”
“It’s March, please.”
He nodded. “They’ve expanded your mine. They’ve got two shifts, a dozen men, and the ore’s thicker and better every time they blast. They’re running laterals, it’s becoming a big T in there, and the word is, they’ll be taking out a thousand dollars’ worth of ore every day. They’re sinking some capital back in, with timbering, a dormitory, a tailings dump, and all. But they’re running two shifts a day, every day, and your little mine’s a bonanza mine, and even now, just at the start, it’s clearing ten thousand a month, net profit. I hear that from all over. I hear it from Wittgenstein, from half a dozen people at the mill, where that ore goes. And, get this, from Jerusalem Jones, who comes in and brags about it. He’s the big cheese now.”
“A hundred thousand a year,” she said. “Even after expenses. If it lasts.”
“It’s lasting. They say that seam follows a fault, and that fault’s solid quartz full of gold, and it’s now a yard wide and getting wider.” He eyed her. “There’s wagons up and down Long Gulch all day, every day,” he said. “They go straight to the Drumlummon for custom milling. The Roach crowd’s already got its first monthly payout. There’s six principals, and a second generation, they get halves of one share. Maybe twenty. That boy Jerusalem, he comes into my place, and likes to brag. I sure do listen. He got his first half-share payment, and spent a lot of it on suds. He says there’s to be one a month now.”
“I have my work cut out for me,” she said.
“You gonna fight?”
“You just persuaded me to.”
“And you on the lam. You got any ideas?”
She did, but simply shook her head. She wasn’t ready to say anything about that. “I’ll need some help,” she said. “Food. I don’t have a shilling.”
“Consider it done. It’ll be here, on the table, whenever you come here. This place, it’s fine for the moment, but if they start hunting you down, it’s not safe here.”
“I know of some places up high,” she said. “Good until snow comes.”
He grinned. “You are some lady,” he said.
“There’s something you could do,” she said. “Who’s in that clan? Who’s getting paid? If Judge Roach gets a share, I want proof of it. If that miserable doctor, Jerrold Laidlow, gets a cut, I want to know it. If our Constable Roach gets a cut, I’d like proof of it.”
“That’s a tough clan, March. I don’t know why I have a bad time calling you by your given name. They can pinch any man, convict a man, throw the man into jail, seize his assets.”
“Women. Women too, Tip.”
“And worse,” he said. “When you’ve got the police and courts and a crooked doctor, you’re a machine.”
He slipped away, staying in the aspen grove until he was clear of the washerwoman cottage. She watched him cross open fields, and she saw no one eyeing him. It was time to plan her day; or rather, her night.
She had things to do. First, she needed to stow away her things. She would stay here off and on, meet Tip here, pick up supplies here, but she wanted the place to seem unoccupied to any casual observer. And she feared that soon there would be not-very-casual observers.
She put on the men’s clothing that she wore out of the asylum. It was dark; the britches fit, and it would take some scuffing. Then she stored most everything else, including the pink dress and hat, in a closet. She put a few things, mostly food, in the carpetbag; those would go with her. She debated taking the men’s straw hat, and decided she would even though it was light colored and visible. But it hid her hair.
When she was ready, she locked the door behind her, studied the quiet world, the long limbs of the mountains, the distant town of Marysville, and then headed across open country, far from anyone, heading quietly toward Long Gulch and the dangerous trip toward her mine.
She entered the gulch as if stepping into a narrowing funnel, knowing that if she encountered one of those many ore wagons, she might have no place to hide. But for the first hour she met no one, and when she did see a heavy wagon coming down from the mine, drawn by a six-mule team, she had no trouble slipping into a rocky defile choked with brush, and the wagon rumbled by. That was close to where she intended to leave the gulch anyway, and so she started climbing the timbered slopes, negotiating her way around deadfall and ledges. She saw no one now; the woods shaded and closeted her, and she slipped through as lightly as a doe, heading for the vaulting cliffs and scree not far from her mine.
She spotted no one; no one saw her. She reached her hideaway and found it untouched, except perhaps by animals. She found nothing that suggested the miners nearby had located it.
She settled in, and then climbed toward another overhang to the left, even higher, making sure that Kermit’s supplies were where she had hidden them long before.
They were all present. The Bickford fuse, the copper caps, the crimping tool, the lamps and igniters, and the box of waxy red DuPont dynamite.
Twenty-three
March marveled. The McPhee Mine was large and busy. From her vantage point, shadowed by forest, she noted that large stacks of timbers waited to be taken into the mine. Shiny rails erupted from the mine head and ended on a low trestle where one-ton ore cars could unload rock into a growing tailings heap at one point, or into ore wagons at another spot. She saw two steep-sided wagons, with their teams, awaiting loads to haul to Marysville. Just outside of the portal, two sorters separated quartz and country rock in mixed loads. Timber men were shaping posts and crosspieces, and sending them into the mine on empty ore cars.
The powdermen were using Kermit’s powder safe, located well to one side of the shaft. Even as she watched, two muckers hand-pushing an ore car appeared at the portal and the surface men took over. The muckers rolled another car into the gloom. She saw Jerusalem Jones, apparently the straw boss, wandering about, a sidearm prominent at his hip. She backed away, slipped into the welcoming forest, and headed for another vantage point a hundred yards lower. Her canvas house had vanished, and in its place stood a crude, tarpaper barracks, the paper held onto rough lumber with battens. The remote mine had crews on hand at all times.
A bell clanged and three burly miners, wearing dust caps, slowly emerged from the portal, blinking at the bright sun after hours in deep dark.
“Fire in the hole,” yelled a powderman, walking deliberately out of the portal, and turning sharply left. Several miners stood well away, and a few seconds later a muffled rumble broke loose, a burst of dirty air boiled out, foll
owed by several more thuds, and then silence. That would keep the next shift busy. And if this mine was true to form, the second shift would start an hour later, after the choking dust had mostly settled. No one was collecting at the portal just yet.
She had been watching much of the afternoon, getting a sense of how the McPhee was being run. Every carload of milky quartz that tumbled into a freight wagon sent a pang through her. That was her gold. She waited patiently, watching a red squirrel hide pine nuts against the looming winter. The next shift collected only a half hour later, but this shaft was still very short, and the blast had actually blown much of the dust and debris out of the portal. She reckoned that the second shift would finish up at midnight. It would be working the other lateral, not the one that had just been blown. Under the lamps, or candles, the muckers would shovel ore or country rock into cars. If they had laid a turning sheet on the floor ahead of the blast, the rock would have landed on sheet iron, making the shoveling much easier, and making it possible for someone to turn an ore car around and back onto its rails.
It was impressive. They were taking several tons of rock a day out of that portal. They were running three or four ore wagons down to the mill, for custom processing, every day, including Sundays.
Probably at midnight the second shift would finish, the powdermen would fire a charge in the face of the other lateral, and the mine would rest quiet and dark until before dawn, when the morning shift would start in all over again. That quiet time was what she was waiting for.
She had seen what she needed to. But she hovered patiently, feeling the cool evening air slide down the slope and eddy through the forest. The season would change soon, and the freedom of summer would give way to cold rains, snow, and struggle. She watched the crew straggle back to the tarpaper barracks. A stovepipe in the roof leaking white smoke told her that someone was cooking. It would be a rough life, breaking up the bitter rock, shoveling tons of it, breathing the flinty, gritty air lingering in the shaft and laterals. It was a grim labor for these womanless men.
She saw no sign of Jerusalem Jones now, and surmised that he rode to town each evening and showed up only during the day. That was good. She saw no dog, and that was good. A barking dog would be the last thing she wanted. One of the men emerged from the shack, headed to an odorous place, and drained himself. Maybe that was good, too. She needed to know what sort of traffic the night might bring.
She was cold and weary, still worn from her escape. But the sooner she did what she must do, the better. She slipped through the forest in last light. She could see twilight through the treetops, but it was night in the forest. She paused at her hideaway, which seemed cold and uncomfortable in the changing climate. But it would shelter her now. She collected Kermit’s DuPont Giant Powder, waxy red cylinders of dynamite, which was simply blasting oil, nitroglycerin, mixed with fine clay to stabilize it.
She had a dozen sticks, not very much for the task at hand, but it would have to do. At the back of the walled-off overhang, she lit a carbide lamp. It hissed quietly, popped, and threw ghostly light around her shelter. She had watched Kermit perform the next steps—he had crossly urged her to leave—and everything she did now would be modeled on what she had seen. She was preparing two bundles of dynamite which she intended to ignite at the faulted area that had doomed Kermit. That was the only spot in the shaft where loose dynamite might do some serious work. The badly faulted area was about fifty feet in. She would need three feet of Bickford fuse, which burned thirty seconds to the foot. The rule was to walk, not run. Runners stumbled and fell and perished. She cut the three feet and picked up a copper fulminate of mercury blasting cap, and gently slid the fuse into the copper tube, and carefully crimped the fuse tight, using Kermit’s special crimping tool as gently as she knew how. The spark burning up the center of the corded fuse would need to reach the fulminate. That would ignite the cap. The cap would ignite the stable dynamite.
Her pulse climbed.
She gently sliced open one red stick of the DuPont, and eased the cap into the soft giant powder, as it was called, and carefully wrapped a thin wire around the fused stick, holding the fuse tight. Now she had a very dangerous primed charge of dynamite. She gathered five more sticks around the primed one, and wrapped wire around them, completing one bundle. She peered outside, saw that there was an alpenglow that would light the way, and carefully carried the bundle down to the mine, placing it behind some rock. She eased up to her hideaway even as the last glow faded into night, stumbling now and then.
The second shift was hard at work, but no one was outside. Shifting light from carbide lamps bled from the mine portal. It was too dark to do anything except work on the face within, the men double jacking holes into the face and filling them with DuPont sticks just like hers. Apparently this smaller group simply drilled and loaded charges and blew them, and went to bed. In the morning, the muckers would start shoveling ore from each lateral.
She understood the way things worked at the McPhee.
The stumbles were a warning, and she heeded it. She would not charge the second bundle. Instead, she put the remaining sticks back, returned the caps to a separate notch in the cliff, and stowed the rest. Now she would wait. She tried lying against the hard stone, but it hurt her cruelly. Even the stern little bunk at the asylum brought more comfort than this.
Would they come looking for her? Most certainly. They would find this place. She would leave nothing here. She thought the remaining explosives would be safe in their niche in the cliff well above, invisible unless one stumbled on the little hollow. She would leave them. She was wearing black pants and a blue chambray shirt, and only her straw hat and pale face might give her away. She thought to abandon the hat. It was a man’s hat, and she would leave it there, for the searchers to find.
Time stretched slowly, and now the night was cold. When she judged the time to be about midnight, she eased down the slope, gingerly crossing the talus that slid from above, and made her way to the mine. It glowed in the white light of a quarter moon. She waited, wary of a sentry, but saw nothing. There was no reason for the miners to post a sentry; they simply had folded for the night. She stood at the dark mouth of the mine, peering into the gloom. She saw no shifting lights, no sign of work. She eased in, her passage lit by moonlight, her eyes sharp in the deep gloom. She wasn’t sure at first where the dangerous area was, the loose and splintered rock that had killed Kermit. But then she knew. It was where the timbering began. The first fifty feet remained without support except at the mouth, where timbers protected against loose surface rock.
She couldn’t see the lagging, the heavy planks resting on the crossbeams to catch any caving stone. She also couldn’t see what space existed above the lagging, space where she intended to place her charge. She would briefly need to light a lamp to see what she was doing, and could only hope no one down below would see the light.
She chose a candle in a reflective holder, something she could blow out in an instant. Kermit had mostly used lamps, but he kept a few candles handy. Quietly, she plunged into the gloom, reached the point where the timbering began, and lit the candle. She studied the lagging, and the rough space above it. She wasn’t tall enough to see what lay above, and she wondered whether she should wait until she could know where to place the charge.
She felt herself being watched, turned, and found two small eyes, bright buttons of light, near the portal. Some wild creature. It ambled off. Skunk, badger, marmot, raccoon, who could say? She retreated from the shaft, worked her way around equipment, and reached the spot where her charge rested. Six sticks, primed and ready.
She wondered if they would be effective. Dynamite worked best when confined by solid rock. Miners even plugged the charge with a little muck to increase the explosive force. But her charge would rest on thick planks under the unstable faulted area, and not even six sticks could equal the force of a charge resting inside solid rock. But she had learned a few things, and one of them was that unstable areas followed t
heir own rules. A low-level blast could trigger a landslide.
That was her hope.
Gingerly she carried the charge into the portal, and worked through the gloom, found the timbering, and reached upward. She slid the charge into the few inches of space and eased it as far as her arm could push. She felt the fuse, the rat-tail, hang from the lagging, ready to ignite.
She was a little shaky. A charge that could ignite from a sharp blow, and could blow her to bits, did not induce calm in her.
“Well, Kermit,” she said aloud, “I’m ready. This is where you fell. This is where our fate is sealed.”
She heard nothing, but thought he was there, listening, smiling.
Now she needed another sort of courage, the will to walk out, not run, because if she panicked and fell, she might never again see a sunrise.
She scratched a match, watched it flare, found the fuse dangling from above, but the match died. She caught the fuse in her hand and scratched another match to life. Powdermen did not use matches. They held a flame to the fuse until they were sure it was spitting sparks. That match expired, so she tried the candle, getting a flame going, and then, her hands trembling, holding the steady flame to the fuse. In a moment she saw sparks, heard it hiss, and she knew she had ninety seconds to vacate the mine and turn away from the portal and the powerful blast that would erupt from it.
She walked. In fact, walking proved to be easier than lighting the fuse. She walked carefully, the fuse spitting behind her, walked toward the open night ahead, walked step by step, walked into the starlit night, turned sharply right, kept on walking through the night, wondering when, when, when, and then as she reached the edge of the little plateau, the earth bucked under her, and a throaty boom rumbled through the night, and the peace of the mountains was ruptured.
She could not see the result. She could only hope that the charge would trigger a landslide, and the unstable area would seal up the shaft for a long time. And keep them from stealing any more of her gold.
Easy Pickings Page 15
