by D. J. Butler
“Tell us,” Michael said.
“I think it is de railroad, again, damn railroad, and I curse when I say it, you hear me?” He smacked the rolled-up newspaper into his palm. “Dere’s a man, Naaman Rettig, and he works in de Hotel Utah. Denver and Rio Grande Western, de D and RGW. He comes into town, and maybe he talks to Eliza, since she is in de hotel as well. Pah! She has de big house across de way, and she spends de money de miners should be getting to live in a hotel. Eliza and de Rettig railroad man, maybe dey talk. And maybe I’m out of a job.”
“How’s that?” Michael asked.
“I don’t have such a good history with de railroad,” Sorenson replied.
Hiram sighed, trying to find a handhold on the problem. Where to start?
“That doesn’t make sense,” Michael insisted. “Spring Canyon is useless to the railroad. It doesn’t go anywhere, so there’s no point running tracks up here.”
“Papa Charlie Chaplin, what do you say to dat?” Sorenson asked.
Hiram leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “If the railroad had the mine, they’d get the coal at cost.”
“And damn de miners.” Sorenson slapped the newspaper against the wall. “You think our debt is unfair now? Wait until de Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad comes. Dey will pay us pennies. Dere’s a woman, McGill maybe, and she says de boys gotta form a local of her union. She says we can make it fair, and she tries to help, but what can a woman do?”
“Vote, for one thing,” Michael said. “Finally.”
The door to the Sorenson house was thrown open and filled by the three large blond men. “Bill, ve make you stay here,” Goiter said. “Zere’s a meetink, and you aren’t invited.”
Sorenson sprang to his feet. “You mean, something’s happening, and you been sent to keep me out of it. Who did dat? Wagner, wasn’t it?”
With the foreman looming over them, the three men with ax handles looked embarrassed and small. They said nothing.
“You idiots!” Sorenson lurched through Michael and Hiram, spilling them off their chairs. The Germans raised their weapons, surprise evident in their faces, and the foreman battered them back with his rolled-newspaper club, then disappeared out the door.
Hiram stumbled for the door, the cowed Germans scattering at his approach. “Stay here, Michael. Don’t leave the house.”
Michael was speechless, for once, but he wasn’t any more obedient than usual, and bounced right into Hiram’s wake.
Hiram broke out of the house and went to the truck. The groceries were gone. He snatched the Colt from the glove box, praying he wouldn’t have to use it.
With Michael following at his heels, Hiram headed toward the mine.
Chapter Six
Mary McGill found herself trotting, swept along with the crowd of German miners. The sky overhead was a pale blue, devoid of clouds. The mob surrounding her stank of the anger and sweat of working men. It was a familiar smell.
The tipple sat unused, no trucks under the scored chute, and the conveyor belts inside silent. No cars carrying coal emerged from the mine entrance.
“You’ve got to save your outrage for the main event,” she said.
Hermann Wagner was a paunchy German with a perfect cube of a head, its symmetry only barely disturbed by tiny, constantly-blinking eyes and crumpled ears. The ears weren’t even opposite each other—Wagner looked as if he’d bobbed for apples in a bin full of cauliflower, and come up with two florets stuck to random sides of his squared-off noggin.
He had no official title, but by popular deference Wagner was the Head German of the Kimball Mine.
“I can give it to those Greek bastards all night and still have enough for Sam Kimball.” Wagner chuckled. “What did you call it, Gil? A body shoot for young Sam.”
“Body shot,” Mary said. “But Sam isn’t the main event. It’s all the Kimballs. You need the mine open, you need better prices for the coal you pull out, you need no interest on advances at the company store and for your rent, you need the child labor law actually enforced—”
“Hold on,” Wagner said. “My Klaus is a good boy. He don’t mind the work.”
Mary sighed, lengthening her stride to keep up. McClatchy hadn’t wanted her to come out to the mining camps around Helper, but when he’d enumerated the list of reasons why, it had consisted mostly of physical dangers to which his fading sense of chivalry didn’t want Mary McGill exposed: bandits, the remoteness of doctors, bad roads, restless Indians, rockslides, and rattlesnakes. He’d never suggested she might encounter miners too eager to side with the mine owners for their own good.
“If you made enough for your own work,” she said, “Klaus wouldn’t have to sort rocks out of the mine carts and carry messages up and down the mine. He could go to school. Maybe become a doctor. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“Ja,” Wagner agreed. “Ja, Gil, okay. But first we got to get the mine open, and that means digging out the east seam like Mr. Ammon says. None of this stupid new shaft nonsense like Sam wants. That guy gets a body shoot, him and all his Greek friends.”
Mary bit her tongue.
They passed through two tarpaper shanties and into the open space below the mouth of Kimball Mine. The mine buildings, mortared sheds of the yellow and orange stone poking through the juniper all around Kimball Canyon, lined an avenue that tumbled down from the gaping mine-mouth and then opened into a rough and muddy plaza. Behind a coal shed, and stretching away on two earth shelves that had been created by splitting a long slope in two with a retaining wall of railroad ties, stood the tarpaper shacks and the rickety boarding houses in which the miners lived. The Kimball Mine was the shaft, Kimball was the name of the shantytown in which the miners lived, the Kimball Corporation held the deeds, and Kimball was the name of the family that owned it all. The red Kimball house brooded on the north side of the canyon, across the road and the seasonal Kimball Creek.
Ammon Kimball stood in the lane leading up to the mine. He was a heavy man, all shoulders, whose hanging head and perpetual frown made him look like an angry bull. He wore plain blue jeans and a navy work coat, and he shifted from foot to foot as if he were in discomfort. His eyes were sunk deep in dark pits, like all his family’s were.
The two plaster strips on his neck were probably covering shaving cuts, but they nevertheless made Mary feel abruptly self-conscious about the fact that the entire left side of her face was marked with a large red blotch. An angel’s kiss, her mother had called it. Damn, but that must have been one enormous and excitable angel, her father had said while drunk.
She forced herself not to touch her own face.
Ammon stood glowering at a crowd of Greek miners. Mary recognized Dimitrios Kalakis with his single enormous eyebrow and the waves of eastern cologne he favored; that stuff smelled like cloves and oranges on the verge of going bad. With him stood club-footed Stavros Alafouzos and a third man Mary didn’t immediately recognize; he was small, but he had well-muscled arms crossed over his chest, and a red bandana covering his face.
“Go home,” Ammon growled. “Unless you’re prepared to dig the east seam.”
“Or stand aside and let Germans do the work!” Hermann Wagner thumped a fist to his sternum, then stepped to Ammon Kimball’s side.
Ammon snorted.
That was when Mary noticed the gun.
There was nothing unusual about firearms in Kimball. Even in good times, many of the men hunted deer, rabbits, and elk to supplement the canned peaches and biscuit flour they bought from the company store. But the Kimball Corporation was strict about firearms anywhere near the mine. In addition to the obvious risk of shooting other employees, any kind of spark might ignite the coal dust and the coal in the mine. The miners were forbidden to smoke within a hundred yards of the mineshaft, for the same reason.
So the fact that Paul Schneider—Mary thought of him as “Stinky,” despite the delicate carpentry work he did, because the man apparently never bathed and lived on a diet of the strongest available c
heese—carried a rifle over his shoulder was not strange. The fact that he had the rifle within a dozen steps of the mine shaft opening was odd, and would have ordinarily gotten him docked pay, if not fired.
But if Ammon noticed the rifle, he said nothing.
“Strong Germans, my feet!” Dimitrios Kalakis trilled. Despite his heavy features and the single eyebrow like a black caterpillar slung ear to ear across his face, he had the high-pitched, trilling voice of a nervous woman. “If you want to dig, the only thing to do is to get a Greek, always! Have you heard of Herakles? One of his greatest feats was rescuing the three thousand cattle of King Augeas, who were trapped in their byre, how do you say it? Their cattle shed. And how did Herakles do it? He dug! He dug a hole so vast that in one day all three thousand cows could walk through it! And Herakles, was he a German?”
“If he had been German,” Hermann Wagner bellowed, “he would have done it in six hours!”
Dimitrios waved his fist. “He was a Greek!”
“Stand aside and let us work!” Wagner shouted.
Mary kept her eye on Stinky. The man shifted from foot to foot and licked his lips.
“You do not decide what work gets done in this mine!” Dimitrios shrieked.
“No!” Ammon roared. “But I do!”
The door of the shed behind Dimitrios slid open, revealing Samuel Kimball, flanked by two more Greeks. Samuel looked like a lighter version of Ammon; they were the same height and had the same eyes, but the younger brother might have had fifty percent of Ammon’s weight removed from each limb. Where Ammon glowered and stared into each step he took, Samuel stood as if perpetually recoiling, his long, pale, stained fingers fluttering over his chest.
Black feathers protruded from the neck and sleeves of his shirt. Had he pasted them there, or had Samuel Kimball been sleeping in a literal crows’ nest?
“Samuel!” Ammon snarled. “Get off my land!”
“No, brother!” Samuel’s sudden arm movements looked like the flapping of a bird’s wings. “I’m a Kimball and I will have my say! And you know as well as I do that the east seam is petering out. Not to mention the things, Ammon, the things we’ve seen down there in the deep, in the dark, down, down, down below. It’s a poisoned place. We need to sink a new shaft. You know it to be true! You know!”
Mary wanted to slap him.
“I know no such thing,” Ammon growled back at his brother.
“You know it.” Samuel stroked his own nose. “You know it the same way that I know it.”
“Nonsense,” Ammon snarled.
“He must have told you.” Samuel stared with large eyes magnified by his glasses.
“Gil,” a German miner at her elbow whispered, pointing. “Look!”
The crusty old foreman, Bill Sorenson, charged to the edge of the ring, just a few steps to Mary’s right. Behind Sorenson came someone new. He was tall and lanky, and he would have been handsome if he’d had a little more meat on his bones. It was hard to tell with the fedora he wore, but Mary guessed he was in his forties. He wore a faded Army coat over blue overalls, and his hands were in his pockets. Behind him came a tall young man—slightly taller than the fellow with the fedora, and with a solid chest—whose complexion and features suggested he was some kind of Indian. Navajo, maybe? The kid wore a sneer, and looked around at the entire mining camp as if he couldn’t believe his surroundings.
“You’ve been smoking that horseshit again!” Ammon’s faced was turning red and the muscles in his neck stood out like the straining lines of a ship running before a strong wind. “No wonder the money ran out!”
“The money ran out because of you, you, all because of you, and your pig head! Your big, pig head!” Samuel crowed. “I know you know! It’s time to sink a new shaft!”
* * *
“Everybody calm down dere! Right now!” Bill Sorenson bellowed.
Hiram surveyed the two groups of miners. The Germans clustered around the larger of the Kimball brothers, Ammon. With them was a woman who was strikingly free of the black coal dust that stained all the miners’ clothing. Hiram didn’t know what to call her outfit, but she had a kind of navy-blue woolen suit coat with a matching skirt that dropped to below her calves—he tried not to look too long at her legs—and a wool coat over the top. She looked like she belonged in a city.
Plumes of white breath rose from all present. The place smelled of rough men, lathered up for a fight.
What had gone wrong between the two brothers?
Why did Samuel seem to believe that he and Ammon shared a secret?
A flicker of black caught Hiram’s eye, standing out in this grim world in which almost everything was coated with a thin layer of gray. Downhill from the mine entrance, a woman stood beside the passenger’s seat of a Model T on the camp’s main track. The woman’s dress was as black as the paint job of the car; her eyes were sunk in two dark pits below her brow and her face was angry.
Hiram turned back to the fighting men.
“I’m going to mine the east seam,” Ammon growled. “Hermann Wagner and his men will mine it for me, ghosts be damned. Dimitrios, if you and your men don’t want to get paid anymore, you can clear out.” The older Kimball shifted as he talked, an expression of discomfort and irascibility on his face. Caused by the boils Sorenson had mentioned? “Just pay your bills before you leave.”
A German with a cube for a head folded his arms across his chest and nodded. Hermann Wagner, presumably.
“Not ghosts be damned!” shouted one of the Greeks in the crowd. “I have seen them!”
There was a round of nodding among the men, and not only on the Greek side of the mob.
“We have families!” This came from one of the Greeks, a lean man whose face was covered by a red bandana. Maybe the bandana filtered out the coal dust from the air to protect his lungs.
“If you go down into that mine,” Samuel Kimball said to the Germans, “you’ll be trespassing. I’ll have you shot as you come up.” He waved an arm, and black feathers drifted to the ground.
“I’ll do the shooting personally,” a Greek with a single thick eyebrow over his entire face and a woman’s voice said. Was the smell of wassail coming from him? “Greeks are wonderful shots. Do you know the story of story of the great hunter Orion?”
“You wouldn’t dare, Dimitrios!” Wagner told him.
“It would give me joy!” the Greek answered. Beside him, a Greek miner paced back and forth with a traipsing, curious gait; some kind of club foot.
“No one will do dat!” Bill Sorenson bellowed, hurling himself into the ring. “No one will go into de mine without my direction. Anyone who does will answer to me.”
“And if I fire you, Sorenson?” Ammon Kimball shouted.
Bill Sorenson laughed. “If you fire me, den you will have to deal with all dese pigheaded sons of bitches on your own.”
Ammon and Samuel both glared, Samuel stroking his own temples.
And then Hiram realized who the woman in black must be. He turned just in time to see her getting into the Model T. An unseen chauffeur then drove her away, and as the car turned Hiram saw the word taxi painted on the side of the Model T in bright yellow.
Eliza Kimball.
“I can replace you, Bill,” Ammon growled.
As if that was a signal, Hermann Wagner reached into his pockets and stepped forward. When he pulled his hands from his pants, he held a short length of iron bar in each fist. The bars were too short to swing as clubs, but by holding the iron in his hand, he was weighting his punches.
With a nod to Samuel Kimball, Dimitrios stepped forward, too. He drew a sock from his coat pocket and gave it a swing to test its heft. Hiram heard the jingle of coins in what had become a makeshift sap.
The Greek and the German advanced on each other.
Michael bounced at Hiram’s side, antsy.
Sorenson laughed and got between the miners. “You know what de word ‘chickenshit’ means, boys?” He shoved both sleeves up over his elbows a
nd swatted the air with his newspaper.
Hiram hung back, not sure what to do. Michael stood close to him. Again, a motion drew Hiram’s eyes away from the unfolding fight. In the same dirt lane barely vacated by the Model T taxi, a Ford Model B with helper city police painted on the side threw open its doors and disgorged two men in blue uniforms. One was a tall, scowling colored man, and the other was a pink-faced gasping white man weighed down by a thick ring of belly fat. The white man staggered with the fingers of one hand splayed open, crawling his way through the air as if by main force, and the fingers of the other clenched tight into a fist.
Hermann let out a yell. “Ammon!” His side echoed him.
The others, led by Dimitrios, responded with a battle cry of “Samuel!”
Sorenson shoved Hermann back, raising his newspaper in warning. Dimitrios took that opportunity to whirl the sap around to strike at the Dane. Hiram leaped forward; he spun the Greek about and knocked the weapon out of his hands.
Dimitrios snarled and grabbed at Hiram’s throat. Hiram feinted back, drawing the man in, then punched the miner in his breadbasket, knocking the wind out of him.
By that time, Hermann had dodged his foreman to go after an Oriental miner. The German’s fists were still loaded with the iron bars. His punches could prove deadly, and the very last thing Kimball Mine needed was a murder.
So when Hermann charged forward, Hiram kicked his legs out from under him.
“No!” the woman in blue shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
Hiram whirled. One of the Germans had stepped forward and was now pointing a bolt-action rifle at Samuel Kimball. The woman had grabbed the rifle with both hands and struggled to get control of it.
Time seemed to slow down and accelerate at the same moment.
Hiram threw himself toward the woman.
“The gun, Pap!”
Hiram touched his left hand to his protective amulet and grabbed for the rifle. The chi-rho amulet protected Hiram from enemies. Were these miners his enemies?
They were if they shot at him.
With one hand only, Hiram was at a disadvantage in the three-sided struggle. He succeeded in jerking the barrel away from Samuel Kimball’s direction. Hiram ended up in front of the rifle.