Moonshadows

by Julie Weston

  “You knew Three-Fingered Jack, didn’t you? He was the body at Last Chance Ranch. The sheriff knows. So do the Ah Kees.” The more people who knew, the less danger she should be in.

  If Rosy knew about the body, then that confirmed he was the person who moved it. Or maybe he was the murderer, and she was in the wrong place, in the auto alone with him. A chilly memory struck her. When she’d asked Rosy this question once before, he used the word “did.” Then, she assumed he had known Jack sometime in the past.

  “A drunk. Like me.” The auto wandered on the road and Nellie worried Rosy was indeed drunk. “Not always a drunk. Neither one of us. He used to play trumpet with the band in Hailey. Wasn’t no one who knew more songs than Jack. Then he got hurt in the North Star avalanche, back in ’17. Army wouldn’t take him then. He’d been all set to go and fight the Hun.” He shook his head. “Then he got into the opium. Ruined a good man.”

  “Did you play an instrument too?” She tried to imagine Rosy blowing on a trumpet or playing a drum. She couldn’t imagine him killing someone. But she didn’t really know him. Instead of a sometimes good-natured, sometimes bad-natured drunk, he could be evil.

  “Nope, I worked.”

  “Did you go to the war?” He certainly didn’t sound evil.

  “Too old. Bigger worries than some foreigners across the ocean shootin’ each other to bits.” He reached for the bottle but changed his mind midway. “Sick wife. Two kids.”

  “Was Jack married to Gladys Smith? I know it’s a common name . . .”

  “Not married. She acted like they was.” He snorted and slapped the wheel. “Some people don’t know how lucky they is. I’m one of them.” His hand twitched on the wheel and he clamped his mouth shut. A few minutes later, they drove up to the building at the mine entrance.

  It was a cold, clear day and Nellie breathed deeply. Her cough had subsided. She did need to get out. The steep mountains on either side of the pinched valley hardly left room for the town of Triumph, a mine office, a building that stair-stepped up the blackened north slope, a tall wooden derrick-like structure, and a large metal building with an arched brick entrance. Sounds of machines whirring filled the air. There were several other autos parked beside the office, and metal cars creaked and swayed overhead as they moved along a cable stretched from one wood trestle to another up the gulch and over the mountain to the north. Rosy pointed up and shouted, “Ore. Headed over to Independence Mine and down to the railroad tracks.”

  In the office, several men and Mrs. Smith worked at desks. A haze of cigarette smoke hovered. Nellie was interested to see that her fellow boarder also smoked and no one seemed to care. Rosy handed her a long package. Mrs. Smith seemed an entirely different person than the woman Nell had seen at Mrs. Bock’s boarding house. Although her eyes wore dark circles, the rest of her was brisk and businesslike. Even her rosebud mouth no longer looked frivolous. Nor was she surprised that Nellie was with Rosy. When he left Nellie’s side to talk to a man in an outer office about entering the mine with the “lady photographer,” Mrs. Smith watched him with a strange expression, her eyes flat, her mouth working, although she said nothing. The coquettish attitude she’d shown at the boarding house was gone. She ground out her cigarette in an ashtray on the counter without looking down.

  “Mrs. Smith, is this where you spend your days?” Nellie wanted to distract the woman.

  “Nearly every day. I schedule ore trains and help prepare the reports for the borings and samples and type up assay reports. It is quite interesting work. Men don’t seem to want to type, do they?” She simpered, the package still in one hand.

  “You’re speaking a language foreign to me,” Nellie said. “You must know so much about the whole process.” She admired Mrs. Smith for her steadfast work. Even on the worst days, she left early with her ride to the mines.

  “I do. Samples are taken from every ore car sent out of the mine, numbered, and posted to the laboratory in Twin. Borings go to Salt Lake City. All by train, of course. We have a small assay office here to test the silver and lead content in selected samples. This is a promising mine, but we need to dig much deeper. That could take years and the prices of heavy metals have to improve.” She sighed and leaned forward to whisper to Nellie. “When you enter the mine with Rosy, watch yourself. I don’t trust him.” Then she moved back to her desk, opened the front drawer, and tried to stuff the package in. It wouldn’t fit, but she continued in a normal voice. “Would you like to see one of the reports?”

  “How did you learn everything?”

  “I’ve been around mines all my life. My da worked for a big mining company up north in Kellogg. After he was killed, I worked there too and took care of my brother.” Mrs. Smith’s face softened for a moment. “I moved here to be with him when he got work at a local mine, and then . . .” She tried a drawer in a filing cabinet. The package fit. She dropped it in and slammed the drawer shut. “When I needed work, I came up to the Triumph and they hired me.” Mrs. Smith’s voice broke and she lowered her head for a moment. She seemed close to tears. “This is what I do all day.” She offered up some sheets of paper.

  Nellie stepped behind the counter. She didn’t know whether to ask about the brother or Rosy, but decided on the latter. “Why don’t you trust Rosy?” she whispered.

  “He was fussing around your door one day when you were gone and I found him. I didn’t know if he was coming or going. He might be the one who stole your things the day you were in the bathroom.” She looked over Nellie’s head, and again raised her voice. “Approximately 40 tons of ore go out of here every day.”

  “C’mon, Little Nell,” Rosy said. “We got permission to hike in a ways. There’s electricity along the drift they’re minin’, so’s you can see to take a picture. I told the man if you could use moonlight, you oughta be able to do it with an electric bulb. Here, let me heft that pack for you.”

  Rosy had never offered to lighten her load in the past.

  “I’ll carry it. How about taking my tripod?”

  He reached for the pack, but Nellie avoided him. Then the man came out of the office. “We’ve got a car you can ride in. It’s hooked up to a trolley that’ll take you in ’bout half a mile. You can see some men workin’ a drill. No deeper now, mind you. We’ve had an unstable condition back farther. Rosy, you know what that can do to you.” The man laughed and stepped back into his office.

  Mrs. Smith picked up a paper from her desk. “If you can be finished in an hour-and-a-half, I’ll schedule the trolley to pick you up again.”

  Nellie thanked Mrs. Smith, who walked out to the mine entrance with them, pointing out ore cars on the track. “My assay samples tell how valuable these loads are. What I do is important.”

  Nellie, glad she had worn her wool pants, climbed after Rosy into a car behind a trolley engine. “Take care now,” Mrs. Smith called as the car moved forward.

  The car rumbled along with its two passengers facing in the direction in which it traveled, not quite touching each other. When they entered the mine itself, darkness swallowed them. A weak light at the front of the trolley engine didn’t lessen the darkness more than a whisper. It blinked off, on, and off again. Nellie couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. She wanted to tear open the black. It felt thick, as if it would seal her nose and mouth forever.

  “Rosy?” Her voice trembled.

  “Right here, girlie. Black, ain’t it? We’ll get to some light in a jiffy.”

  With his words, the air seemed lighter, but smelled of creosote, a brown, almost sour odor. Her pack sat in her lap, her arms around it. She was afraid her arm would be snapped off if she reached out. The car swayed as the trolley rounded a curve and Nellie almost lost her balance. At the same time, something jerked on her pack, but she gripped hard as ever. “Rosy, leave my pack alone,” Nellie said, her voice low but as firm as she could make it.

  From the bench opposite her, he answered. “What’re you jabberin’ about? I just changed my seat.”
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br />   Then she wanted to drop the pack. Maybe a . . . a thing was crawling on her. Get a handle on yourself. It could only be Rosy. She better watch out. Mrs. Smith might not be imagining things.

  One more jolt and the black turned gray and then to dim light under bulbs that stretched into a distance off to their left. The car stopped and Rosy helped Nellie out. Nothing crawled on her pack. The engineer saluted and the trolley rattled and rolled away. She noticed Rosy’s eye patch was gone. “Where’s your patch?”

  “Tossed it. Hate that bugger.”

  Maybe that was what she had felt, Rosy knocking against her pack.

  “Follow me. We’re headin’ down this drift.” A deep humming echoed from far away and grew louder as the two of them walked toward it. The tunnel was tall enough to stand in comfortably, but not wide. Damp earth smells mixed with an acidic one that tickled Nellie’s nose and became danker as the walk sloped downward, not steeply, but enough that Nell grabbed for Rosy’s arm so she wouldn’t trip. He didn’t shake her off. Every hundred feet or so was a bare bulb, providing enough light to guide them forward.

  The hum turned to a whirring so loud Nellie wanted to close her ears. The light bulbs ended and Rosy lit a candle he pulled from his jacket pocket. Along another short tunnel, they entered what felt like a large cave where three men worked. One held a machine at one end, another guided it into the rock wall above their heads, grinding out dust and bits of rock. Candles in sconces on the walls illuminated their labors. The third man stood with an iron bar in one hand. None of the men wore a shirt, and indeed, the temperature felt much warmer than outside and the air moist. Sweat slickened their bare chests. Their hair, where it wasn’t wet, was dusty. Black streaked their faces almost as dark as players in a minstrel show. Mighty knotted arms rippled in and out of the shadows their bodies cast. They looked like demons in one of Dante’s rings. She wanted a photograph of this tableau.

  “Hey!” Rosy’s shout attracted the men’s attention and the drill stopped. The sudden silence was almost shocking. “This here girl wants to take your picture.” He pushed Nell forward. “See that drill? I was operating one of them and a piece of rock flew out and hit my eye. Had to walk back to the adit, blood spurtin’ all the way. Thought my eyeball was gonna drop out. I bet if them lights were better, you could still see the trail.”

  Nell winced at the image and the pain Rosy must have felt. She touched his arm, but he shook her off. The men all grabbed shirts and crowded together, already posing for her. But she didn’t want a pose; she wanted the scene.

  “Hey, Rosy, want to get in it too? That eye of yours would make us look handsome!”

  “Can I get one to give my wife? She don’t think I work for a living. Says I take naps in here all day.”

  The candlelight wasn’t going to work. These men could not hold still as long as she would need for the light to accumulate. Nell went about setting up her tripod for the camera anyway. She would have to use a flash pack, something she didn’t want to do in this cave space, and she only had one. They had left in such a hurry, she didn’t think of bringing more. She fiddled with her camera, trying to think where she would set the f-stop.

  Nell handed the flash pack to Rosy and explained where he was to light it and how to hold it. While she went through her usual steps—covering her head to focus, adjusting how the men stood, and getting them to hold the drill between them, fine-tuning the focus—all four men talked back and forth about the ore being mined and the chances the Triumph too would close down, just like the Minnie Moore and the Croesus outside Hailey.

  “Okay, I’m ready. When I say so, Rosy, light the fuse. Get a match ready first.” He pulled a small box from his pocket, rasped one, and a flame leaped up.

  “One, two, three, light!” Nell opened the shutter while she counted, and after the flash exploded, shut it again. The illumination was so strong it hurt Nell’s eyes, like a lightning strike up close. Smoke billowed and the rancid smell of sulfur and gunpowder choked her.

  “That’s the only flash pack I have.” A coughing fit stopped her for a moment. “I’d like to come back again, better equipped. I thought there would be electric lights.” The air in the tunnel through which Nell and Rosy had walked drew the smoke out, and the space around them cleared. “The best thing would be light bulbs in here or a less enclosed space for my flash packs. Would either be possible?”

  The guffaws told her it wasn’t. “We could all go outside, lady.”

  “I won’t know for a few days whether the flash pack worked. I’ll tell Rosy and he can tell you.” Her exposure had been only a guess. “Thank you so much. I’d love to come back and take photos of you working.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Rosy said, glaring at her with his one good eye.

  “Sure, come back any time,” the beardless young man said. “Leave old Rosy home, though. He’s ugly enough to break a mirror.” The men laughed, including Rosy. He passed a few insults, commenting on the speaker’s lack of beard because he was so young, another’s bushy chest, calling him “ape-man.” The men situated the drill and the iron stick and began work again.

  “Let’s go,” Rosy said. He stood on one foot and then the other and small drops of sweat rolled off his temple near his blind eye. “Hot in here.”

  To the contrary, Nell was feeling cold, but she hefted her pack, letting Rosy take the tripod, and they walked back to where they’d been left off. No trolley or car waited for them.

  CHAPTER 19

  “Guess we gotta hike from here. Ain’t too far.” Rosy pointed to a cable running above their heads. Nell looked up, lifting her hand toward it.

  “Don’t touch that! You’ll fry.” He slapped her arm down.

  “What do you mean?” Her eyes grew big.

  “That’s the electric cable. Juices the trolley along the rails here.” He kicked the track.

  “Then why aren’t there lights in the tunnel?”

  “Blamed if I know. Probably ain’t working or all the juice goes to pull the ore out.” Rosy was sorry now he’d brought her. He didn’t feel like hiking. He was thirsty. He couldn’t remember why he thought it was important to bring her into the mine. He’d wanted to prove something, but whether it was to her or to him, had escaped him.

  “But it’s coal black up that tunnel. How will we find our way?” Her voice shook, then firmed up.

  “Only goes in one direction. And I’ve got my candle.” Rosy struck a match from the box and lit the wick again. He began walking. She scurried after him. He stopped and motioned for her to go first so the candle would give her some light. They moved along slowly, not talking. Nellie picked her way over the slats between the rails. The walls were rock and dirt, sometimes with water dripping along them, sometimes with timbers holding up the hanging wall, sometimes with pieces of lagging along the sides. He felt at home.

  After the first bend, except for the flickering candle, there was no light. Even the smallest sound was amplified: the girl’s half stumbles, the creaking of the pack on her back, his own heavy breathing. It felt like they could be at the center of the earth, walking along, with time no longer an ingredient of living and light unknown.

  “Scary in here, ain’t it?” She turned to him and he pulled his face into a Halloween grin, thinking he’d frighten her some. Maybe she wouldn’t be so cocky. Then he stumbled and dropped the candle. Crimey, he thought. He’d forgotten how Stygian the dark was.

  “Rosy? Are you all right?”

  He heard her take a step, then two, while he dropped down to find the candle. Getting clumsy in his old age.

  “Rosy?” The girl’s voice was edged with panic.

  His knees soaked up mud. Hell. He groped around, felt the track, felt the rough wood where it met the ground, then felt something give. It was the girl’s foot. She jerked it away. “Rosy!”

  A distant grumbling gathered force. The ore train, not the trolley, Rosy knew. The sound grew to a roar, filling the tunnel like a huge animal, and the rail near his h
and vibrated. An engine light rounded the corner and bore down on them. Then the light blinked off.

  Thunder filled the chamber, threatening to split Rosy’s eardrums. He moved as swiftly as he could—grabbed Nellie, pushed her hard toward the wall. She stumbled and fell to her knees. He pulled her up again, grabbing some of her hair because it came to hand, shoved her against the wall, pressing her and the pack against it with his own body. He felt rather than heard her scream. At the same time a searing pain burned his ankle. The mass boomed by and its slipstream threatened to suck them into it. Thick dust sifted into his mouth, choking him. As soon as the train barreled past, he let go of Nellie and sagged down. She fell with him. He gagged and coughed, trying to clear his mouth.

  “Rosy?” Her voice exploded in the fading clatter of wheels on rails, so close he could have bitten her.

  “Goddammit, girl,” he answered. “Twisted my ankle.” He searched his pockets and found the matchbox. He fumbled and almost dropped it too. “Hang on.”

  He scratched the match, twice. “Can’t find the goddam candle.”

  The bright flame filled the tunnel, briefly. The girl was almost behind him, on her knees. He tried to raise himself on one leg, but lost his balance. “There it is. Hand it to me.”

  When she didn’t, he shouted. “You gonna stand there like a flea plastered against the rock all day?” The flame reached his fingers and he yelled. Again, they were steeped in tarry night.

  “No. No, I was . . .”

  Rosy lit another match. Nell picked up the candle and handed it to him, her hand trembling. Then she rubbed her head.

  “What was that?” she asked. “You saved my life.”

  “Goddam ore cars. Coulda squashed us like bugs. Someone’s gonna pay hell.” He handed the candle back and managed to stand on one foot.

  “What do you mean? Someone did that on purpose?” In the light, her eyes looked big as dinner plates. “If you hadn’t grabbed me, I’d be dead. So would you.”