Billy lit out and came back in a few minutes trailing a trio of miners.

  “You sure it’s all right to break off?” asked one. “Miles don’t like it. Says we’re lazy if he finds us not swinging a pick or doin’ something else productive.”

  “Destructive,” corrected another. “When was the last time we found a gold nugget, much less dust?”

  “Get into the elevator,” Slocum said. “That all of you down the drift?”

  “All,” confirmed the first miner.

  Slocum pulled out his tin box of lucifers, selected one, then struck it on the rock wall. A flare of sulphur faded down to a steady flame. He applied it to the end of the miner’s fuse.

  “Got fifteen feet on it. That gives us fifteen minutes to get clear.”

  “Don’t bother me takin’ a break,” the first miner said, “but you gotta square it with Miles. The man ought to be workin’ on a plantation.”

  “He sure enough thinks we’re his slave field hands. Does everything but whip us,” said the second.

  The elevator began creaking its way up to the next level. When it stopped, Slocum chased the miners out into the small chamber built for the unloading of equipment and men before they dispersed down the spiderweb of tunnels.

  “How come you’re comin’ up and leavin’ the others?” asked the elevator operator.

  “What others? Miles said there were just the five of us on the lower level.”

  “Five plus two,” the operator said. “Randolph and his kid are down there, too. Least, I took them down early in the shift.”

  “Before we went down?” Slocum asked.

  “Yup.”>

  Slocum muttered under his breath, then said, “Get me back down there. Miles didn’t tell me he had sent anyone but us to work that level.”

  “They can ride out the blast,” the operator said, licking his lips nervously. His tongue captured a fair amount of dust and grit that made him spit. “Don’t usually evacuate a level to blast.”

  “We’re doing it my way,” Slocum said.

  “Climb on, then.” The operator yanked the bell rope to signal the men at the top that they wanted to lower the elevator. When nothing happened, the operator tugged again. No response.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t know, unless they took their lunch break. It’s early for that, but those yahoos are lazy sons of bitches.”

  Slocum looked up and saw nothing but a tiny dot of light at the head of the shaft. He flopped on his belly and peered down the fifteen feet to the level where he had set the charge.

  He shouted at the top of his lungs but got no response. He looked back over his shoulder.

  “You sure Randolph and his son are down there?”

  “Less they turned into smoke and drifted up this here chimney, they’re down there. There ain’t a back door.”

  Cursing a blue streak, Slocum gripped the edge of the elevator platform and slid between it and the rock wall. He lost some skin but hardly noticed. When his feet dangled free, he lowered himself as far as he could, then let loose. He fell and landed hard, but he was ready for the impact. Bones aching, he got to his feet and tried to figure which of the other three drifts Randolph might be working. Pressing his ear to the rock didn’t work. He didn’t even hear voices. The smell of the burning fuse came to him, but there was plenty of time to get the men to safety. The fuse hadn’t even burned down to the five-fold yoke yet.

  Dropping to his knees and shining his light on the dusty floor, Slocum found fresh boot prints leading away. With the lack of wind in the mine, these “fresh” prints might have been left a couple days ago, but he had to see.

  “Randolph!” he shouted. “Fire in the hole! Get out now! To the elevator!” Slocum craned his neck around and heard the bell ringing furiously. The operator was trying to get the attention of the men manning the winch at the top of the shaft. By the time the platform had been lowered, there’d be scant time to get back to the higher levels.

  “Randolph!” The name echoed down the drift, but he heard no response. He shouted down the other drifts but again got no response. The operator might have been wrong. He might have left his elevator to take a piss, and Randolph and his son might have returned to the surface. Slocum didn’t think so. In his gut he knew they were still in the mine.

  Racing down the drift, bouncing off the rugged walls like some human billiard ball, Slocum finally burst into a large chamber. Randolph and his son pounded away with chisel and hammer. The ringing was muffled by a heavy rag tied to the hammer.

  “Randolph,” Slocum said, gasping for breath. “We gotta get out.” The men kept working.

  Slocum went to them and grabbed the younger man’s arm to keep him from swinging the heavy sledgehammer. The miner jumped a foot, his eyes wide and frightened.

  “We gotta go. Now!”

  He frowned, then looked at his pa. The elder Randolph abandoned his grip on the steel bit and came over.

  “How’s that? We’re both a touch hard of hearing.”

  “Then why’d you muffle the hammer?”

  “Keeps down vibration. Don’t hurt the joints so bad.” Randolph spoke a little too loud, in the manner of a deaf man. “What you want?”

  “Fire in the hole,” Slocum said, making sure he faced the man so Randolph could read his lips. “We don’t have much time to get out of here before the blast goes off.”

  “We always work through the blasting. Don’t hear nuthin’, so it don’t bother either of us much.”

  “I’m not taking any chances after what happened to Thompson and Bowden,” he said. Slocum grabbed the men by the arms and steered them toward the elevator. He hoped the operator had succeeded in lowering it. Being in the main chamber when the blast went off would be worse than staying down the drift.

  “Damn shame what happened to them,” Randolph said. His son gestured like an Indian using sign language. His pa responded. “He says he don’t want to be docked for takin’ time off.”

  “I’m in charge. Nobody will have their pay docked for the time waiting for the blast.”

  Slocum neared the chamber where the elevator should have been waiting. He saw that it still hadn’t descended. Cursing, he ran to look up the shaft and saw the elevator going up to the surface.

  He motioned for the Randolphs to stay put in the mouth of their drift, then ran down his own drift to pull the fuse away from his charges. Slocum hadn’t gone five feet when the blast picked him up and threw him backward. He landed hard on his back and skidded, with a rain of dust and rock cascading down on top of him. Slocum sputtered and brushed the debris off his face. He sat up and felt the world spin wildly. His ears had been damaged again, and it would take a few seconds to regain both hearing and balance.

  “You two all right?” Slocum shouted. With the ringing so loud in his ears, he knew how the Randolphs felt. Lookingback over his shoulder through the brown cloud of roiling dust, Slocum tried to find the two men.

  A cold lump formed in his belly when he saw that the mouth of their drift had collapsed. He rolled to hands and knees, then forced himself to his feet. Stumbling forward, he reached the rock fall. The Randolphs had to be trapped behind it—or under it, like Bowden and Thompson.

  “Are you alive?” Slocum knew as he shouted it wouldn’t do any good. Even if they were alive and uninjured, the men were as deaf as posts. He stepped back, judged what had to be done, then grabbed a pick and began working at the top of the rock fall. Putting his back into it produced immediate results. A small dark hole about the size of Slocum’s head appeared to one side.

  He tossed down the pickax and clambered up the slope of loose rock and aimed his carbide light though it. The dust was choking thick on the other side but he saw movement.

  “Randolph!” He waggled the light back and forth to catch the miner’s attention.

  “My boy,” Randolph said, his face suddenly filling the small opening. “A big rock fell on him. It will crush the breath from his lungs.”

  “Help me widen the hole,” Slocum said.

  Randolph dug furiously. Slocum matched him rock for rock and soon had a hole wide enough to wiggle through. He tumbled down the other side and went to the pinned miner. Slocum gestured for Randolph to grab the other side of the large rock. When he had his fingers under the sharp-edged slab, Slocum began lifting. He grunted and his pulse pounded furiously in his temples. He felt veins protruding, but he kept lifting. With a loud shout, he and Randolph moved the rock enough to take the pressure off the son’s chest.

  A groan was their reward.

  Slocum leaned to one side and Randolph followed. They dropped the heavy rock and turned to the injured miner. Slocum saw how hard it was for the young man to breathe. Every time his chest rose, he turned a little whiter under the layer of filth covering his face.

  “Busted ribs,” Slocum said, gently probing. He looked around and found a couple ax handles. Working deliberately, he strapped them onto the young man’s side and down his leg, preventing twisting or much movement in his lower limbs.

  “Don’t thrash around too much,” Slocum said. “Wish we had some whiskey to help you kill the pain, but we don’t.”

  Randolph touched Slocum’s arm and pointed to the rock fall, then made digging motions.

  “I need to rest first. If there’s any mercy in the world, Billy will be back with a crew to do the digging for us,” he said. Slocum was tired to the bottoms of his feet. Having done all he could for the younger Randolph, he needed to rest a few minutes.

  Randolph sank beside him but kept a close watch on his son.

  “You risked your life,” Randolph said. His speech was curiously slurred. Slocum reckoned that he and maybe his son had been born deaf. Or partially deaf. “Thank you.”

  “My own fault for not checking better before I lit the fuse, but Miles didn’t tell me he had sent you down here, too.”

  “He will be unhappy,” Randolph said.

  “From what I can tell, Miles is always unhappy about something.”

  Randolph looked at him curiously.

  “What?” Slocum asked.

  “You have not heard why? High-graders.”

  “People stealing from the mine?” Slocum knew that might have been why Miles and his henchmen had tried to search Bowden, Billy, Thompson, and himself before Bowden and Thompson died. It wasn’t out of spite but real need to maintain security. What Slocum could fault the foreman for was not choosing better whom to search. None of them was the kind to steal—or had been.

  “They try to find out but they cannot discover how it is done. A new vein is found and it peters out fast.”

  “That’s bad luck.”

  “It has been mined,” Randolph said. “We open new chambers and find gold already gone. How this is possible, I do not know. No one does.” Randolph shrugged his massive shoulders.

  Slocum turned when he heard the rattle of pebbles. He directed his light toward the small hole he had used to reach the Randolphs and saw Billy poking his head through.

  “You gents are still alive. Fancy that,” the young miner said.

  “One’s real bad off. Ribs broken. Doesn’t look as if a bone has punctured a lung, though.” Slocum had watched the younger Randolph’s mouth and nose for any trace of pink froth showing a lung had been breached, but other than a nasty wheezing sound, nothing else came out.

  “Won’t take us a minute to get through. Got half the crew here.”

  “Why’d the elevator go up?”

  “Damn fool atop is brand-new and got screwed up on the signals. He thought he was supposed to raise, not lower. But no harm, eh?”

  In less than ten minutes the miners had reopened the drift and worked in new timbers to hold the roof. Randolph and his son left, taken to the surface to find a doctor to patch up the busted ribs. Slocum knew a plaster patch would let the young man get back to work in a day or two. Depending on how much they needed the money, he might be back to work tomorrow.

  “I want to see if the blast did anything more than almost kill me,” Slocum said. “The fuse burned a hell of a lot faster than I thought it would.”

  “Might have been defective.” Billy looked at Slocum and shrugged as he held out his hands, palms up in apology. “It happens. Mr. Haining’s not always buyin’ from the best suppliers.”

  “Cheap gets you killed,” muttered Slocum as he picked his way through the rubble to where he and Billy had planted the five charges. The dust had settled enough for him to examine their handiwork.

  “This is one fine job of blastin’, Slocum. Thompson couldn’t have done better.” Billy picked up a rock the size of his fist and examined it closely. “Glory be, this is gold! We hit the vein we lost a couple weeks back.”

  Slocum noted how uniformly the rock had been blasted. He had wondered if he had the touch to do that. The muckers would come in and shovel the rock into a skip car much more easily since they didn’t have to break up the rock further.

  More than fifteen feet of new tunnel had been blasted. Slocum picked up a few chunks and examined them. He had a good eye for color. Gold. Plenty of it. There were even a few small nuggets the size of the tip of his little finger among the larger rocks.

  “This ought to keep the Low Down in the black for a spell,” Slocum said, pleased at how well this had worked out.

  He looked up when he heard boots approaching. Turning his head a mite sprayed light across Lucas Miles’s ugly face. Behind him came Herk and Singer. Neither of the henchmen looked at all pleased.

  “What do you mean sendin’ my miners up while you work?” Miles demanded. “They put in a full day’s work or they get docked!”

  “It was dangerous blasting here. The drifts haven’t been properly shored.”

  “One collapsed. So?”

  “So that was the one where Randolph and his son were working. I tried to get them out before the powder went off, but I didn’t make it.”

  “You were lollygaggin’, too. I’m dockin’ yer pay a full shift, Slocum.”

  “Even when he just made Mr. Haining a small fortune? Might not be a big fortune, but it’s surely a good one.” Billy juggled three rocks and then tossed them to Miles and his two cronies. Miles and Herk caught theirs. Singer fumbled and dropped his.

  “Take a good look, Miles,” Slocum said. “I’m not an expert, but assay ought to show that’ll yield forty or fifty ounces a ton. Might be more.”

  “More,” Billy assured him.

  “Them rocks look mighty uniform in size, boss,” said Herk. “That’s the mark of a good blaster.”

  “Shut up,” snapped Miles. “You aren’t foreman. If I want men workin’, they will damn well work! Do you understand, Slocum?”

  “Yeah,” Slocum said. “I understand.”

  “See that you do. I don’t give a pair of bull’s balls how good you are, you cross me, you counter my orders, and you’re fired.”

  “Might be worth leaving’ anyway,” Billy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Haining said we get a bonus for exceeding quotas, finding more gold—”

  “Shut up. I pass out the bonuses, and I don’t see nuthin’ other than the usual ore. All worthless rock.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I put a few chunks of this ‘worthless’ ore into my pocket for a keepsake?” Billy laughed when Miles swept his paw of a hand through the air and knocked the gold-bearing rocks back onto the pile.

  “Don’t go pushin’ me, boy.”

  “Just wonderin’ how it is,” Billy said, squaring his shoulders and almost bumping chests with the taller, heavier Lucas Miles. “Is it worthless or do we get a bonus? Has to be one way or the other. Fact is, I hope you tell me it’s worthless. I’ve taken a real fancy to the rocks Slocum blasted free for you.”

  The foreman growled and pushed Billy away. He spun and stalked off, Herk and Singer following at his heels.

  “You’re playing a dangerous game. Never pays to bait a grizzly like that,” said Slocum.

  “If you can’t get rich in this life, why not have a little fun?” Billy said. He picked up the rock and stared at it. “Sure as hell ain’t us gettin’ rich, but I’m glad Mr. Haining is.”

  From what Randolph had told him, Slocum wasn’t sure Morgan Haining was seeing a fraction of what was mined in the Low Down.

  6

  Slocum left the mine feeling tired but good that he had blasted open a new vein that might bring the Low Down back into profitability. The idea that he and the rest of the miners would get a bonus wasn’t too bad, either. He hadn’t been around that many mines, but the notion that the owner thought so highly of his workers that he gave such a lagniappe made Slocum feel that Lady Luck had smiled on him when he got the job.

  “Slocum,” came a gruff voice. He turned and saw Randolph and his son. “You have found new vein, eh?”

  “Seemed to. Hunks of rock are on their way to the assay office to see how good it is.”

  “We had vein before but it petered out. You found it. You make us all money!” Randolph slapped him on the back. “I buy you drinks!”

  “Done,” Slocum said, grinning. “Let me get to the bunkhouse first.”

  Randolph was already heading for other miners to tell them what had happened. The Low Down was a profitable mine again. Word spread fast. Slocum began making his way up the hill to the run-down bunkhouse when he saw Lucas Miles almost running along a path in the direction of the mine’s main office. He slowed and then watched as Evangeline Haining came into view. From his vantage it looked the world like Miles was laying an ambush for the woman.

  When she saw the mine foreman, she stopped and the set to her body changed. She had been intent on her errand and hadn’t noticed him until she almost ran into him. Slocum was too far away to hear, so he changed his own path and worked higher on the hill, trying not to be too obvious about eavesdropping. The rugged hillside worked in his favor and he got within a dozen paces.

  From a distance it looked as if they were swapping pleasantries. Closer, Slocum heard what was being said.

  “I have no interest in that, Mr. Miles.” Evangeline crossed her arms and rocked back, looking at him down her button nose. Try as she might, she couldn’t look ferocious, but she made an effort.