Foxfire

by Anya Seton

  But that won’t take us far, thought Dart sadly, as he crawled up over the rotten timbering to the manway and into the old No. 33 stope.

  He examined the pillars of rock which had been left to support the stope’s roof when the rest of the ore was mined out. Not really high grade, might run around fifteen dollars a ton, but at that a hell of a lot better than the stuff they were pulling from the new Plymouth vein. That was running about nine and not too much of that, at the moment.

  They’d show a loss again this month, and the Eastern stockholders would squawk, but Mr. Tyson would accompany the report with one of his lucid, beautifully philosophical letters giving them hope for next month, when the cross-cut went through, when they hit the vein again. And the stockholders and the Company president in Boston would be soothed, and wait once more. They had faith in Tyson, in the magic of his name and past reputation. Poor old boy, thought Dart, and yet despite his deficiencies the old man still had value to the mine, as a cohesive force no matter how remote, and as a liaison officer with the East.

  Dart tucked his sampling pick in his belt and clambered down the manway again to the drift below. It was not for ruminations about Tyson, nor even for another confirmation of the rotten state of the timbering that he had entered the old workings tonight.

  He wanted to examine the far western end of the old 300 drift. The spot where Red Bill’s original mine staff had given up some thirty years ago.

  On an earlier visit his keen eyes had unconsciously noted some tiny grooves on the rock surface, the slickenside. He found it again now, and the marks made by pebbles when the fault occurred. From the direction and pressure of these marks he suspected that the slip had gone north, and besides there was the tiny quartz outcrop he had seen on surface, hidden in a hollow beneath a jumble of diorite and cactus.

  Maybe only a pocket, maybe nothing, and yet he was almost sure. He’d examine the surface indications again in the morning, but he was as sure as anyone can be in the chancy and romantic science of mining. Drive a blind cross-cut right here, he thought. I think we’d hit something good. That old Shamrock vein didn’t pinch out, it side-slipped in some uncharacteristic way. I’m sure, but who’s going to listen to me? Not Mablett, certainly, nor little Jones who had naturally given this spot perfunctory examination and agreed with the original geologists. Tyson then—thought Dart. I’ll make him listen. He nodded, and turned back to stumble through the maze of tunnels. He lost his way once but went back and retraced his steps successfully, buoyed by a very real optimism.

  It would take patience, he’d have to bide his time and pick the right moment for the effort to convince Tyson. And there’d be renewed clashes with Mablett, of course. But there did not have to be, he thought suddenly. If Tyson could be convinced, Mablett need never know who originated the idea of the blind cross-cut. Dart had absolutely no desire for personal glory, and much as he hated subterfuge, he was prepared to do violence to any of his inherent traits—for the good of the mine. Take the odium and the blame later—if the cross-cut were opened fruitlessly, but for the present and in case of,the success in which he devoutly believed, keep himself out of it entirely except to Tyson.

  He was whistling “My Sweetheart’s the Mule in the Mine” when Mike again appeared down the Plymouth shaft to pick him up.

  “Jeez, Mr. Dartland,” said the skip-tender, his grizzled little face lengthening, “don’t be doing that.”

  “What?” said Dart, stepping into the cage and ducking his head as usual.

  “Whistling underground. ’Tis bad luck.”

  “Sorry,” said Dart, grinning. “But I was feeling good. I didn’t hear any Tommyknockers either, Mike.”

  “They’ve too much respect for you, sir.” Mike grinned, too. He turned his head and addressed the cable, “But wouldn’t you think a young man’d be out raising hell on a Saturday night, ’stead o’ traipsin’ around in a mine when he don’t have to?”

  “Well,” said Dart as they came to the surface and the cage stopped, “there were some things to see to.”

  Mike nodded and he twisted his head towards Dart. “You’re a mighty good foreman, Mr. Dartland,” he said, “I’ve seen plenty of ’em come and go through the years, and I know.”

  “Why, thanks, Mike.” Dart was touched. How rare and startling was praise. Really undeserved, too, when you had a job you loved, when even the setbacks and frustrations and personal squabbles appeared tonight as challenges, as necessary hurdles set by life on the track to any worth-while goal.

  He glanced at his watch, as he entered the change house again. Three o’clock now, and if it weren’t for Amanda he would not have left the mine, since at seven-thirty he wanted to be here for the day shift. How much simpler to turn into the bunkhouse for a few hours, as he had often done before their marriage. He could phone from the mine office, doubtless waking up Mattie’s niece, Cora, at the switchboard, and then get her to run up to Amanda with a message. Even as the idea crossed his mind he rejected it. He kicked off his muddy boots and yanked down the pulley with his good clothes, before starting for the showers.

  He raced down the mountain in the cold dawn air, jog-trotting in the effortless gait Tanosay had taught him long ago, and he let himself into his shack just as the gilded flickers began to dart from their nests in the giant saguaros, twittering their tiny “Wake-up! Wake-up!”

  Amanda was asleep but she stirred as he came in and opened her eyes. He saw traces of tears on her face, and she looked up at him with bewildered reproach. “I thought you were never coming,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he said. “Poor baby.” He sat down on the bed and gathered her up in his arms.

  She smelled of perfume, and she had put on a new ecru lace and chiffon nightgown. It slipped down below her breasts as she slowly, reluctantly raised her arms to him. “You said you’d be right back. It was so lonely here.”

  He began to kiss her, hard and deep, dissolving from her eyes the darkness of resentment, and dissolving from his own heart the first impulse of exasperated pity, as he saw her lying there, waiting to be made love to, perfumed and beautiful and ready for the act of love which alone seemed to give her reassurance.

  They were happy there in the sunrise hours, islanded in content, whispering and teasing a little, floating in the voluptuous aftermath of fulfillment. With tenderness he shared her mood; he let her pretend that Lodestone did not exist, or the mine and its problems, or the cluttered shack and lumpy ill-made bed on which they lay.

  He gave her willing respite for those three hours, and when he at last got up and started for the kitchen to light the stove, he laughed softly at her expression of dismay.

  “Oh, God,” she said rousing herself from the drowsy peace. “Dart, you’re not going back to that damn mine already!”

  “Yes, my love,” he said, “I must. Get out of the hay, trollop, and put the coffee on while I shave.”

  She made a face, and touched one foot to the floor, then she turned around and fumbled in the bed. “I suppose I ought to put something on.”

  He glanced at her through the open kitchen door and snorted. “Well, maybe, until we can buy some shades. But hurry up with the coffee, naked or not.”

  She pulled on her nightgown and pattered over the linoleum into the kitchen. Dart, already dressed in his khaki pants, was crouching to see in the mirror over the sink while he shaved. The mirror which was hung for Amanda was much too low for him. Amanda, flinging coffee into the percolator basket, looked at him with eyes of deep love. Even semicrouching, even shaving, Dart had a lean easy grace.

  “Oh, darling—” she said with a laughing catch in her voice, “I love you so. Can’t we always be close together like this? Then I could stand anything.”

  He wiped his face and hands on the grayish, sodden towel, turned and smiled at her.

  “Is there really so much to stand?” he questioned, without reproach, but she flushed and bit her lip.

  “No—of course there isn’t. I’m a pig.
A spoiled brat.” She cracked an egg on the edge of the frying pan, hurrying, and some of the white flipped onto her lace and chiffon nightgown. She dabbed at it while she tried to spread grape jam on bread for Dart’s lunch box.

  He leaned down and kissed her head on one of the rumpled yellow duck-tails. “Sweet brat,” he said, “you’ll grow up, someday.”

  “I don’t want to,” she answered laughing, as she scooped the egg on the plate and gave it to him.

  He had been gulping his coffee, but for a second he put his cup down and glanced at her unconscious rosy face. She looked extraordinarily pretty, fussing over his lunch box, her sea-blue eyes dark with concentration. No, she doesn’t want to, he thought.

  “I think I’ll be down off the hill by six, anyway, Andy,” he said quietly. “I’ll try not to be late tonight.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS two weeks before Amanda went up to call on Calise Cunningham in the ghost town, and there made a discovery which profoundly affected her life. Amanda had been interested in Dart’s suggestion that she go see Calise, but she caught a stuffy head cold and the resultant lethargy left her no energy for anything but chores.

  On the morning of February second, Hugh dropped in, as she was pumping water onto the breakfast dishes.

  “How are the snuffles now?” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Want some more nose drops? And have you got a cup of coffee left in that funeral urn?” He pointed at the large old-fashioned percolator the Dartlands had found in the shack.

  She nodded and poured him a cup. “Snuffles about gone,” she said. “But I don’t seem to have much pep.” She wiped a plate and put it on the shelf.

  Hugh looked at her keenly. She was thinner than she had been when she arrived, and pale, though of course without make-up most women looked pallid. “You ought to get out more,” he said. “Bustle around. This climate’s supposed to be quite healthy, you know.”

  “Well, I am going to the post office, pretty soon,” she said with a faint smile. “Might be letters from home. There isn’t much else to do, and at least Tessie Rubrick throws me a kind word now and then.”

  Lonely and homesick, he thought, but she doesn’t make much effort, either. “You might take an interest in the life of the town,” he suggested, “it’s colorful enough, plenty of quaint characters. Some of them quite nice.”

  She shrugged, picking at a hangnail on her index finger. “You’re a fine one to talk. I can’t see you do much mingling with the local color.—Gosh, I wish I could get—or afford—a decent manicure again.”

  “Dishpan hands?” said Hugh. “How sad.”

  “Oh, shut up.” She gave an unwilling laugh. “How’s business at Medical Center today?”

  “Booming. One miner with a carbuncle, another one with a broken toe, and one of the mill crew with a belly-ache which I trust is not appendicitis, because there won’t be time to send him to Globe or Ray.”

  “Can’t you operate yourself?”

  “Certainly. On the kitchen table. Maria makes a simply splendid anesthetist. It happens that I’m rather short of equipment like retractors and clamps, but then I suppose I might use paper clips.”

  She looked at him frowning. “Hugh, don’t you ever regret—I mean, I know you came from the East—were trained there, this seems so——”

  She stopped, confused by the cynical amusement with which he watched her flounderings.

  “No regrets at all,” he said. “I was kicked out of the East for unethical practices, and here I can be as unethical as I damn please. I can also get drunk when I feel like it, and sleep with Maria.”

  “Oh,” she said. She sighed, for at moments she liked him, and the romantic mold in which she had first tried to fit him seemed appropriate. His deliberate crudities did not shock her, but the sadistic streak which she had seen without understanding in his treatment of Maria did. That and the indistinct recognition of his ambivalence, “two men within my breast.” One might be trusted and the other not.

  So different from Dart, she thought, and a warm feeling came into her heart. “Hugh, have you ever been in love?” she asked on impulse.

  “Repeatedly.” Nothing in his square freckled face changed; the little mustache, the green eyes under slightly swollen lids, the thick sensual mouth, all confronted her unchanged, and yet she felt that a warning had flickered far beneath.

  She persisted nevertheless. “No, I mean really. With one woman and stuck to her, for quite a while anyway.”

  And now the warning flickered up into his eyes, which grew hard as emeralds. “This sort of sentimental questioning, my dear, usually means that the questioning lady has hopes herself. Have you? I’d be most flattered.”

  She felt herself flush, but a rush of annoyance was at once tempered by surprise. For perhaps there was really someone. “Oh, don’t be idiotic,” she said. “I love Dart, and you don’t attract me in the least. But I can’t help being curious about your love life.”

  He got up abruptly, and his eyes still were hard and green. The look, if Amanda had known it, which he had turned on Maria the day she questioned him about the photograph in his shirts.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.” He left Amanda to astonishment. For a moment he had shown none of his characteristic cynicism or detachment. He had shown straight, uncomplicated anger at being questioned. But the doctor’s peculiar reactions did not interest her for long. Lassitude descended upon her again. She moved languidly about the shack, tidying a little. She looked with loathing at the basket full of dirty clothes. They could wait until tomorrow. She glanced at the window. That was one thing about this place anyway: no need to take advantage of a sunny day. They were all sunny—and dry. In the corner of the bedroom on the floor there was a little package of recent books Jean had sent her. Mary’s Neck by Booth Tarkington, The Fountain by Charles Morgan, What We Live By by Ernest Dimnet.

  She had read part of The Fountain in the afternoons or evenings waiting for Dart. But she had not finished it. Reading wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. She looked at her wrist watch. The mail stage from Hayden Junction never got in until noon, and then you had to allow time for Tessie to sort the letters. But she might as well walk over early. Buy myself a nice cold coke, she thought. That’ll be exciting. She looked in her purse. Two dollars and sixty-five cents to last until pay night. Damn, I thought there was more than that.

  She put on her heather tweed suit and fixed her face by the little wall mirror in the kitchen, and was about to leave when she remembered Dart’s renewed suggestion that morning. About going up to the Cunningham mansion. He had left a trunk of his up there in the room he had occupied. “I think there’s an old blue suit in it that I had at college. I wish you’d look at it and see if I couldn’t use it for work clothes, anyway.”

  Poor lamb, she thought, except for the one good suit he’d been married in, his clothes were certainly terribly shabby. “Stop in and see Mrs. Cunningham, won’t you,” he had added. She was faintly amused at his insistence. Mrs. Cunningham was apparently another “character.” Arizona seemed to be full of characters, eccentrics of one kind or another of which the natives were proud.

  She ran a comb through her hair, and walked outside into the brilliant sunlight. She blinked in the blinding glare, then began to walk slowly down the dusty road toward town. She passed the hospital but did not see Maria’s face in an upstairs window.

  Maria stared down avidly with sulky resentment masking her envy of the tall blonde girl in the beautiful suit, like Carole Lombard’s in the movie Maria had seen last year in Tucson. Doc had been calling on that girl this morning, too. Maria had seen him come out of the Dartland cabin not so long ago. Bet that poor husband don’t know what’s going on, thought Maria. She had admired Dart from afar, and only recently heard that he had Indian blood, as she did. There was a real man for you, big and dark and quiet. He’d be good in bed, too, Maria knew from considerable experience in such appraisal
s. That dope she don’t know her luck, she thought, continuing to stare angrily at Amanda’s retreating figure.

  Amanda was thinking about nothing at all. The air and the sunshine began to revive her a little. She reached the crossroads by the first saloon on this end of town, a small wooden building with a false front and portico. The windows were shuttered and it was euphemistically labeled “Cafe” for the benefit of possible prohibition agents. These, however, seldom bothered Lodestone and when they did there was always plenty of warning. Nobody worried about them.

  From the backroom through open windows there came the usual sound of clinkings and men’s voices, the click of billiard balls, the rattle of dice and the monotonous ping of the slot machines. Somebody laughed and a voice cried jovially, “God damn it to hell, you old cow poke, if I don’t love you better’n a brother! Set ’em up, Joe!” And there was more laughter.

  Well, they were enjoying themselves anyway, thought Amanda. I wish I could join them. She thought of the fun she had had in New York speakeasies with Tim, of the five hundred francs she had won at roulette in Monte Carlo. But here ladies didn’t drink or gamble. Here you conformed to Mrs. Mablett’s standards, or you were a bad woman. These were still the standards of the old frontier. They had seemed very romantic when you read about them.

  Instead of continuing as usual down the mine road, past Bosses’ Row where the Mabletts lived, and then veering left to Creek Street and the business block, she turned at once into the canyon behind the saloon and headed for the forbidden short cut, Back Lane, where the cribs were. Hugh told me to see the town, she thought.

  Three of the four separate little dolls’ houses were quiet with the blinds drawn, their occupants asleep. But Big Ruby was sitting on the steps in the sunlight in front of hers, drying her brassy hair which was rolled up in kid curlers. She wore a voluminous pink cotton kimona with green parasols printed on it and her fat white legs were bare above red felt bedroom slippers. She was reading a True Confession magazine and smoking. A bottle of home-brew frothed on the step beside her.