Heiress (30 page)

Good men are hard to find in this town, Esme. Isn’t it about time for you to fall in love, to be happy?

It was the quickening of her heart to that image that made her shake her head. “I’m sorry, Daughtry. I can’t.”

She had to turn away from his disappointment.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple. We live in two different worlds, and soon enough you’re heading back to New York City, and I’m staying here, with the miners of the Silverthread.”

“With Abel.”

The sudden hardness of his voice rocked her. She looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I know he kissed you after the union meeting the other night.”

“What, are you spying on me?”

He flinched at that. “No. I was working late. The Silverthread offices overlook the recreation center.”

Yes, they did.

“I didn’t know he was courting you.”

“He wants to, but—”

“He kissed you without your permission?”

“No, but—”

“Then you wanted him to kiss you.”

“No! He just did it.”

“Then he did steal a kiss!”

“Yes, but that’s not the point—”

“I’m going to kill him.”

“He kissed me because of you!”

Daughtry stared at her. “Because of me.”

She shook her head. “I refuse to get between you two, be used as some sort of taunt for the other.”

“I never saw you as a way to hurt Abel. That’s absurd!” Daughtry looked genuinely hurt, and she nearly reached up, pressed her hand to his face to soothe the wound from it.

“Abel is still so angry with you, he actually accused you of sabotaging the mine. Orrin’s death is still horribly fresh.”

His voice dropped. “What do you know about someone sabotaging the mine?”

“Nothing, but it seems strange that the mine has gone for years without a serious accident. Then, suddenly, they start occurring, right about the time your father falls ill and you return to sell.”

“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 flame 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.”