by Anya Seton
“Forgot what?” Dart snapped, annoyed by the soft hissing voice.
Tiger scratched a minute piece of mica from the rock wall beside him with his finger nail. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it, sir—I forgot—I better get to the face now, them drillers’ll never lift a finger until I make ’em.”
“Wait a minute,” said Dart. “There isn’t any secret about my Apache blood, and I’m not in the least ashamed of it. That clear?”
“Yes, sir,” said Tiger—moving away. Something in the obsequious gliding motion provoked Dart’s rare anger. “For that matter, I’ve heard you have Mexican blood and do make a secret of it.” He bent his head so that the light of his carbide lamp shot down full on the meager figure in front of him. The face was averted, but Dart thought he saw a stiffening, an involuntary sideways jerk of the head, and his anger vanished, partly dissipated by the tolerance of a big man for a small one. This cringing gliding little creature was not fair target. “But that’s your own business,” he added cheerfully. “Go on to your drillers. I just want to have a look at the timbering we did yesterday.”
He did not see the look that Tiger gave him from under the hooded lids. He could not know that the shift boss’s palms were wringing wet, and that in the tortured brain the long-smoldering hatred had burst into a blaze of revenge. “I’ll get him for that crack—” The words screamed like whistles through Tiger’s head, their clamor so shrill that when he was out of Dart’s sight he sank down on a pile of lagging unable to walk on. He had long been awaiting opportunity, but now at last under the impetus of this new fury, a plan sprang forth crystallized. Nor did caution desert him, the devious contrivances which had let him out from the slums of Nogales, a nameless Mexican bastard whose mother had been raped and killed by Geronimo’s band. He had slowly forged himself a new personality, as he made himself a new name and nationality. Not again would he let himself be betrayed by the desperate sweetness of blood-lust and outward revenge as he had been in his younger days. This time he would be canny, because this time it would not be a senseless killing, there was a further object to be gained. Ambition. Promotion. And as he perfected details of his plan his chest swelled with a voluptuous pleasure. Smarter than any of them. The little greaser bastard, smarter than any of them with their college degrees and their patronizing contempt. Next week, he thought, when I’ll be on night shift, they’ll be blasting down here. The hoist.... Take care of the hoist man, Bill Riley—the thermos full of coffee—that was easy. Half an hour would do it, less.
He rose from the pile of lagging, and walked to the rock face where the drillers had finally started the holes for the morning’s blast. They’d just be starting the cross-cut next Monday. He looked back toward the shaft station—not more than a dozen feet away. Good.
Dart waited until eleven o’clock, inspecting work in various parts of the mine, then from the 700 level he signaled the hoistman and returned to daylight. He knew from experience that this would be the best time to find Mr. Tyson. The manager, however, had not come to the mine office that morning. A clerk said that he’d heard the old man was sick again.
Dart sighed, hung up his hard hat and washed his hands in the change house, then swung down the path which led into the canyon by the mill and up the other side to the six-room frame bungalow where Tyson lived.
The house sat in a neat desert garden; chollas and bisnagas, and hedgehog cacti all planted in symmetrical formations and outlined with brilliant rock specimens. There was an anemic orange tree and window pots of geraniums. All these were the special charge of Manuel, the Filipino houseboy.
Manuel appeared in answer to Dart’s ring, and his greeting was uncordial. “Mr. Tyson not see nobody. He resting. Go ’way pliss.”
“Is he really sick?” demurred Dart. “I don’t want to bother him, but I would like to see him a minute.”
“Go ’way pliss.” The houseboy guarded his master with an obstinate tyranny, and Dart would have been defeated by this except that a voice was raised from the bedroom. “Who is it, Manuel?”
Dart pushed past the Filipino and walked to the open door. “It’s me, Mr. Tyson. I’m sorry you’re sick again. I just wanted a word.”
The old man sat in his wheel chair by a table on which were spread out a quantity of broken sherds, pottery fragments dug from the prehistoric Indian village down the canyon. He fondled a piece of glazed, red on buff, Hohokam painted ware in his thin veined hand. He looked up slowly, and Dart saw the effort he made to pull himself back from this hobby which usurped most of his waning energy.
“Hello, Dartland,” he said in a faraway voice; then in a brisker tone with a shade of embarrassment, “nothing wrong on the hill, I hope?”
“No, sir. Nothing special.” Dart hesitated, checked by respect and the old man’s obvious frailty. “But I did hope you might feel up to going underground soon, down in the Shamrock, you remember we talked about it some months ago.”
Tyson nodded, he put the sherd down reluctantly. He turned on Dart the friendly smile that had kindled the loyalty of manv a man. “Of course. You’ve got some sort of hunch about the old vein, you want to jam through a cross-cut.”
“It’s more than a hunch, really, sir. If you could get down there you’d see too. Look, I made a map.” He pulled it from his pocket, pointing with his pencil—slickensides, the direction of the drift, the fault here not there as the old engineers had said, a hidden outcrop aboveground beneath a thicket of cactus.
Tyson listened, but his eyes strayed to his specimens. The exhaustion which plagued him became intensified by all this youth and energy. Eager young men with ideas—yes, that was fine. I used to test them all out unless they were too crackpot, but now it doesn’t seem worth-while. We’re getting by somehow—why doesn’t he leave me alone.
“You better tell Mablett about it,” he said vaguely. “See what he thinks. That’s the proper thing to do.”
“But Mr. Tyson—” Dart burst out in dismay, then he lowered his voice. “You know Mablett won’t listen to me. He doesn’t have any knowledge of geology, either, but if he did, he wouldn’t see what I asked him to. You know that, sir. Don’t you remember we talked about it before? You asked me not to cross Mablett in any way for a while, and I haven’t, though I’ve seen a lot of things that could be bettered. Don’t you'remember?”
Tyson frowned, his bluish lips tightened. “Of course I remember! I’m not doddering yet. And that’s why we’ve had some peace at the mine lately. You’re learning to co-operate.”
Dart reddened and swallowed. “You’ve been good to me,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you how I appreciated that loan...”
“My dear boy”—the manager raised his hand—“I like to help my young men—plenty helped me. Now I’ll get down to look at your precious cross-cut one of these days, but I’m very tired now and——”
“I know, sir. I’m sorry. Never mind the cross-cut, but there is one thing I’ve got to say”—he spoke desperately against the coldness on the transparent face—“it’s a matter of mine safety, or I wouldn’t bother you...”
“Well...?”
“There’s no telephone connected down to the new 1000-foot level. Mablett won’t okay the order for more cable.”
Tyson made a brushing-away motion with his outstretched hand. “He’s doubtless and very properly cutting costs this month. You don’t need the phone immediately, the signals are enough. Now listen, Dart, I backed you up on that timbering job you were worried about, but if you’re going to come running to me with every little thing...”
“I don’t, sir.” Dart drew himself up and gazed stonily out of the window, “but the generator failed last week, and the signals didn’t get through. The men are blasting right near the shaft, it’s close timing.”
Tyson checked a sharp rejoinder. Irritation born of guilt jabbed down to the bedrock of fairness which still lay beneath. His hand dropped to his lap. “I’ll speak to Mablett,” he said after a moment, and then he smiled the warm smile
. “Cheer up, young ’un, the troubles of the world aren’t all on your shoulders!”
Dart plodded back up the canyon to the mine. He was unused to moods of discouragement or depression, and while he breathed deep of the hot shimmering air, drawing from it the comfort that any contact with nature always gave him, he tried to detach his emotions from the situation and appraise it. Tyson was largely ineffectual, but he was still the boss, and despite his ill health and semi-withdrawal from the mine he still commanded respect. There was nothing to do at present but wait for the inevitable change of one sort or another which life always provided. Once identified with a course which seemed right to him, patience and endurance were as instinctive with Dart as the necessity for determined action when his sense of justice was outraged.
He could accept the defeat of his own plan this morning and be content with victory in the matter of the telephone cable, which, no matter how trivial it appeared to Mr. Tyson who had lost contact with the underground world, or to Mablett whose bullheaded economies and lack of imagination made him take the wrong chances, Dart knew to be of immediate importance. In mine management as in other enterprises, it was the little things that counted, and eternal vigilance was the price of success in an operation so constantly exposed to dangers.
Dart reached the collar at the shaft and waited for the cage in a renewed mood of acceptance. Why then should there be an element of foreboding which no amount of common sense quite dissipated? Somewhere impounded in the deepest recess of his mind there was a fluttering of unease, a quiver of warning. During the rest of that day he inspected every foot of the active mine with doubled concentration, but the compressors and ventilators, the drills, the pumps, the ore trains, the electric power—all the complicated machinery for extracting ore from the reluctant earth were functioning with exemplary smoothness. In the afternoon on the swing shift he even mentioned his disquiet to his friend Tom Rubrick, who laughed at him.
“Gor-blimey, Mr. Dartland, that I should see the day you’d be getting sendings and queasies! Why me Cousin Jacks ain’t even ’eard the Tommyknockers of late. Ye work too ’ard, that’s wot it is. There ain’t nothing wronger with this mine than normal. Ye shouldna fret.”
Dart laughed too. He and the shift boss went off to do a little sampling near the No. 74 stope.
All that morning Amanda lay on her bed, wilted by the heat, and the state of her stomach. By noon the nausea had passed and she dragged herself up, washed her face and dressed in a loose, brown cotton smock bought at the General Store. Her figure had not thickened much yet, and she might still have squeezed into one of her other dresses, but the smock was cooler. She combed her hair which clung lankly to her head and powdered her nose, giving an indifferent glance in the mirror. She killed a scorpion and two stinkbugs with the same stony indifference. There was no keeping them out of the house in summertime. One got used to things, she thought, even bugs, even heat. But underneath her indifference there lay purpose. She was going to see Hugh.
She extracted the envelope with the material on the lost mine from her dressing case where it had lain so long undisturbed and walked outside. A hot dry little wind blew in fitful puffs raising dust-devils on the road. The desert which had been so brilliant three months ago had now flattened to a duncolored monochrome. The giant saguaro on the corner had shrunk into sharp folds, patiently enduring until the rains should fatten it again. Amanda choked on the dust and walked as fast as she could to the Company hospital, praying that Hugh was sober and in a reasonably good mood. She found that he was both, but that it was office hours and the dingy, stifling waiting room was full of patients.
Hugh stuck his head out when he saw her and said, “Sit down, Andy, you’ll have to wait.”
She sat down on the wicker bench squeezed next to a fat old Mexican woman with sore eyes—and a smell. The woman greeted Amanda with a toothy smile, and pointed at her capacious belly. “I got pains—” she whined. “Mebbe I eat too much chili. You think Doc fix?”
“I’m sure he will,” said Amanda, drawing as far away as she could. Now that she had made up her mind to consult Hugh, this delay exasperated her. And none of them looked very sick, she thought impatiently. A miner with a bandaged hand. A little boy with ringworm crusts on his head. A blowsy blonde in maroon silk who sat in the far corner on an up-ended packing case, one of Big Ruby’s girls doubtless come in for monthly inspection.
It would take an hour to get through them all, thought Amanda, and there was nothing to read. She sat and tapped her foot. She thought of the last doctor’s waiting room she had sat in. Two years ago, accompanied by her mother who was always so anxious over any of Amanda’s slightest ailments. It must have been a cold she had had, because the doctor was a Park Avenue nose and throat specialist. She remembered the waiting room hung in gold brocades, with a moss-colored rug, all the latest Vogues and Vanity Fairs and New Yorkers on the inlaid central table. She remembered the two soft-voiced smiling nurses, the efficient secretary, the four gleaming white cubicles for the use of the specialist and his assistants. There had been an atmosphere of reassurance and smooth, charming warmth.
And did I ever think poverty was romantic? Why shouldn’t we cushion ugliness and pain if we can? If we can. Her hand clenched on the envelope until it crackled.
The last patient left at four, it was the blonde crib girl, and as she stumbled out her slack mouth had dropped open like a gasping fish, tears streaked mascara runnels down her cheeks.
“What’s the matter with her?” whispered Amanda as she walked into Hugh’s office.
“Lump in her breast,” said Hugh curtly. “And no doubt what it is, either. She’s let it go too long.”
Amanda exhaled her breath, staring at his square emotionless face. “Oh, Hugh, how dreadful. Did you tell her...?”
“Of course I told her. She’ll have to go to Tucson at once for amputation if she wants a whack at a thousand to one chance of recovery. But it’s hardly worth-while.”
“Would she have the money for an operation?” asked Amanda slowly.
Hugh shrugged. “Probably not. Now what may I do for you today?”
She looked down at the envelope in her hand. “Hugh, you’re so heartless, so callous....I don’t know. I’m sorry I came. I wanted to ask your advice about something but you’d sneer....”
Hugh leaned back and crossed his legs. “Okay so I’d sneer. I haven’t had a really good sneer for ages. What is it, brand-new symptom?”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” She fingered the envelope uncertainly. Too precious, too beautiful a dream, and she had no right——
“Ah, I’ve got it,” Hugh cried. “Dart’s been writing love letters to another woman, and you’ve snitched one!”
The swift angry color ran up her face. “How dare you!” she cried. “Dart would never do a thing like that!”
Hugh burst into a roar of laughter. “How dare I! How pat the language of hick melodrama flies to the lips of outraged vanity. Do you think you’re the only one who can indulge in a little playful adultery on the side?”
“I didn’t,” she cried momentarily too stunned for anger. “That isn’t fair—you don’t understand about that trip.” She got up, putting the letter in the pocket of her smock. “I don’t know why I was such a fool as to think I could turn to you.” Her voice trembled, and helpless angry tears blinded her. She started towards the door.
“Oh, Jesus—” said Hugh. “Women, tears. My misplaced humor. Sit down, and get it off your chest.” He pushed her back into the chair and took the envelope from her pocket.
“No—don’t—” she faltered, but she stopped her protest watching him as he read the inscription. “Notes on the Lost Gold Mine, ‘Pueblo Encantado,’ copied from those made by Dart’s father Prof. Jonathan Dartland.”
She waited for his mocking laughter, but the face he raised to hers was blankly astonished. “What in the world...” he said, “what in the world have you got here?’’
The mildness of his w
ords decided her. “Well, read it,” she leaned back in her chair. “Read it aloud, will you? I’d like to get a fresh impression.”
Hugh glanced at her, then began to read in his harsh, clipped voice the Professor’s cautious preamble.
“There exists here in this southwestern land an inordinate amount of myths and legends referring to so-called ‘Lost Mines’ and buried treasure. I believe the majority of these ‘lost mines’ to be as illusory and illusive as the various forms of ignis fatuus—(the will-o’-the-wisp, Jack o’lights or foxfire) which are popularly supposed to guide the gold seeker to their exact location.”
Hugh continued reading through the adventures of the two Franciscan missionaries, and Amanda could tell nothing from his face, but his voice slowed gradually, and dropped lower. He read the sentences, “The next morning they investigated the cliff dwellings which ... seems to have inspired both men with a great and strange fear. They reported that it glowed in the night ‘Like an enchantment.’ They persisted however, and holding their crucifixes in front of them they explored the dead city and the reaches of the cave behind it. Here there were corpses (‘Los Muertos’—probably mummies), and here also at the back of the cave they were stunned to see a wall of glittering gold.”
Hugh stopped. His lips were tight-compressed beneath the short mustache. She watched him puzzled, for he got up, strode to the door, opened it sharply and peered outside. He then slammed it shut. So steeled was she for his derision that she did not understand this action.
“Maria,” he explained. “Supposed to be upstairs with the patients but one never knows. I think I better read the rest to myself.”
He’s taking it seriously, she thought in amazement so great that it left no room for triumph.
Silence fell over the little office except for the flick of turning pages and the sound of Hugh’s breathing. He finished the notes, examined her tracing of the copper map, and then read the notes again. His green eyes held an expression of intense, painful concentration, more than that, she thought, suddenly a little frightened. His eyes were like those she remembered in a painting of Savonarola—fanatical—then the burning light was veiled. He looked at her intently, with utmost seriousness he said, “Why did you bring me this? Does Dart know?"
