by Ponzo, Gary
“Maybe Robert’s in the tunnel. Maybe that’s why Henry brought him here.”
We waited, watching for Shelburne brothers.
Still, while waiting, I looked over this valley with a treasure-hunter’s eye. I could not deny that this place was as good a candidate as we had yet seen. The diorite thumb was webbed, on this side of the notch, to a full diorite hand that slapped against the southern wall, a wall shot through with spotted slate. There was no visible outcrop of hornfels but it surely had to present a face to the elements to erode off pieces of float. It was perhaps camouflaged in the brush, in the trees.
Equally to the point, these solid rock walls would hold an elevated ancient river channel intact for millenia. Indeed, I thought I could make out a high spur of gravel intersecting the rimrock of the southern wall.
Buried in that hillside, perhaps, was a stretch of the deep blue lead.
I wouldn’t mind seeing that. Had I caught the itch, from Walter? I whispered, “What’d you put in the Chili Mac last night?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” I refocused. “Shall we take a closer look?”
He nodded. We inched forward and achieved a small knob of bald bedrock and got a new angle on Notch Valley, as I decided to name it.
Walter nudged my arm.
I nodded. I saw Henry, in the trees. Not certain how I’d missed him before. Perhaps, three yards back, our field of view had been obscured. More likely it was due to the excellent nature of his camouflage.
Brown cap, brown parka, jeans faded to the color of volcanic breccia. Sitting cross-legged, right hand clutching his thigh. His left hand was not visible.
He was still as stone.
As were we, abruptly fossilized in place.
I thought he hadn’t seen us, which was why I jumped when he called my name.
“Cassie.” His fragile voice carried well enough across the little valley.
Walter whispered, “Answer him.”
I called back, “Henry.”
Like we were friends. He hadn’t called either of us by name, back at Shoo Fly Tunnel. And now he did. Using my first name, at that. Of course he knew our names—Walter had introduced us back at the tunnel—but the use of a name is a familiar thing. Like extending your hand for a shake. And I had now replied in kind. I watched. He did not extend his hand and I guessed that he couldn’t without releasing the tremors, but he could have nodded, cementing the Cassie-Henry relationship. He did nothing. He sat rigid as the trunk of the tree at his back. The harder I stared, the more he seemed to blend in, like a deer in the woods. I knew this game. Hide and seek. I’d played this game with my Henry and the trick was to look but not see, let the quarry reveal himself when he was ready.
And then he replied. “I said don’t follow.” Voice now gone shrill.
I had no idea how to pretend to make friends with this wounded soul.
Walter called, “We’ll leave, Henry, once we’ve had the chance to talk to your brother. Where is he? In the tunnel?”
Henry shifted. His left arm moved. Like he was reaching for something.
“Back up,” Walter hissed, flinging an arm across my chest, and as I stumbled my way backward I swore I saw that something in Henry’s hand, flashing silver.
We backed down off the knob and dropped to our knees.
I waited for the sound of a gunshot.
All I heard was the sound of blood pounding in my ears.
Walter whispered, “We can dash back to the notch but I’m not sure how long we’ll be within his field of view. Crawl, perhaps.”
I whispered, “I’m not crawling.”
Walter’s eyebrows lifted.
Well maybe.
And well we might have but for a new voice sounding down there in Notch Valley.
“Hey Bro,” Robert Shelburne’s voice rang clearly. “No go.”
I relaxed an inch. Robert was now on the scene. Must have been in the tunnel. He sounded fine, cheerful even.
Henry was speaking now, in reply to his brother, voice softened again. A murmur on the breeze.
“I’m on board with you,” Robert said, “but I don’t know what I’m looking at in the tunnel. I’m not qualified. What I do is, I hire qualified people. In fact, I hired two of them. I know you want to go it alone, just me and you, the family thing, but we’re failing here. Let’s get smart. Use our tools. We can go back and get them.”
Henry spoke. Voice loud enough to carry now. “They’re here.”
Silence, and then Robert’s cheerful voice. “No shit?”
“Up there.”
“Then invite them down.”
“I will.”
Robert went silent.
Walter and I looked at one another. There was something off about Henry’s I will, something that silenced Robert and caused Walter to shake his head, something that put me on high alert.
“Whoa,” Robert suddenly said.
There came a sound, the sharp sound of cracking ice, a sound I once heard skiing across a frozen lake, a sound that froze me now in place until another, closer sound caused me and Walter to wrap our arms over our heads.
Something struck the bedrock beside my leg.
I twisted and looked. It was a shard chipped off the bedrock knob.
“Come down here,” Henry yelled and there was nothing fragile about it.
He didn’t give us enough time to respond. He fired his gun again, the ice cracked again, and the bedrock knob chipped on the other side, on Walter’s side this time.
My heart slammed. I whispered, “Were those good shots or bad shots?”
“Good shots,” Walter said.
Henry fired a third time and this time he chipped the center of the knob and I wanted to yell stop shooting up the geology but I was shaking too hard to get the words out.
There was a micro-moment in which Walter and I considered our options, glancing at the path back to the notch, trying to do the geometry of angles of fire, and then Robert yelled at us, “He’s coming up.”
I nodded and Walter yelled, “Henry we’ll come down once you say you won’t shoot.”
“I won’t,” Henry called, “once you come down.”
Walter pushed up to his knees and I followed suit, thinking I sure hope we’re all clear on the timing of coming down and not shooting but once we were standing and I had a line of sight down into the valley my fears eased, slightly.
Henry stood watching, his gun barrel pointed groundward. He gripped the weapon with both hands and I guessed that was to counteract the tremors or maybe it was a sharp-shooting style but it looked for all the world like he’d had to wrestle the gun out of firing position.
Henry had shed his parka. He wore a brown long-sleeve shirt tucked into his jeans. He wore a belt holster.
Robert stood a few yards behind Henry. He was making no move to tackle his brother.
Walter and I came down off the knob to join the Shelburne brothers.
~ ~ ~
It wasn’t an Old West six-shooter in Henry’s hand. It was a modern-day Glock, carried by cops everywhere or at least at the crime scenes I’d worked. Henry’s Glock was matte black except for the slide, the metal there silvered where the finish had worn off, which left me thinking Henry Shelburne handles this gun a lot. Or maybe Henry ‘Quicksilver’ Shelburne had sanded the finish down to silver on purpose.
He still gripped the gun with both hands. He pointed it somewhere in the neighborhood of our six legs.
Robert, Walter, and I stood side-by-side in a lineup in front of the tunnel.
Henry spoke to Walter. “I am hiring you.”
Walter said, gently, “We prefer not to work at gunpoint.”
“It’s just in case.”
“In case of what, son?”
“Just in case. Just in case.”
Walter said, more gently, “All right.”
Henry raised his hands, and the Glock. His hands shook. The gun oscillated. “A geologist needs to go in.”
/> “Cassie will go,” Walter said promptly.
I got it. Henry didn’t know that Walter was the expert on the auriferous channels, Henry just knew we’d been hired to get his brother here. And given that we’d followed the float and found our way, I guessed Henry got that right. By now, either one of us would do. And Walter delegated me. I got it. He’ll stay outside with crazy Henry while I get to go on the treasure hunt. He thought he was protecting me. He always has. When I was a kid assisting in his lab and he took me to my first crime scene, he bought me a whistle in case we got separated. All these years later and now we’re doing the tricky dance of who is protecting whom. Vigilance is in his DNA. It’s tattooed on his soul.
There’s a man with a gun. And Walter is stepping up.
I stole a glance at Robert. He stood rigid, watching his brother. Not overtly afraid but then I’d not seen Robert Shelburne show fear. I did not know how he would exhibit fear.
I refocused on Henry. He looked a little lost, as if he’d come out of hiding too soon. His face was more weathered than the teenager in the photo but the Sherpa wool cap now cupping his head made him look young again. Still, he did not have teenage Henry’s cool squint. His eyes were reddened, blinking. Lack of sleep, trying to get a wet fire going, crying, who knew? His nose was pinkish, sunburned, peeling. I guessed the weather had been clear and sunny before we joined the hunt, although I wondered why an experienced outdoorsman like Henry Shelburne had not used sunscreen. His peeling nose—like the preposterous earflaps—made him look like a kid. I ignored that.
Robert Shelburne’s kid brother. Not mine.
Henry let go of the gun with his right hand and lifted it, gesturing at the tunnel.
I stared at his hand. The palm was pink, peeling, and I got a sick understanding that we weren’t talking sunburn here. Jesus Henry, what have you been into?
Robert suddenly lunged.
Quick as a snake strike, Henry had both hands on the Glock, had the gun aimed at his brother’s head.
Robert raised his own hands. “Chill Bro.”
I said quickly,“I’m going in.”
Henry pulled his arms into his chest, bracing his elbows, steadying his aim. “Thank you.”
Cautiously, I answered, “You’re welcome.”
And so now it became my show. I assumed I didn’t need a gas detector, or Robert would not have emerged from the tunnel alive. I started for the tunnel. Henry stopped me. Told me to leave behind my pack. Told me to take only my tools. Told me to bring him a sample. I rummaged in my pack and got the field kit and headlamp, fitted the headband, and started once more for the tunnel.
As I passed into the mouth I heard Henry call to me, “Go all the way.”
15
All the way where?
The tunnel was black as a catacomb.
I snapped on my headlamp and the bedrock lit up. Bedrock walls, bedrock ceiling, bedrock floor, a sturdy incursion into the mountainside, a strong tunnel that needed no timbering, a tunnel with drill holes in the ceiling to ventilate, the only sort of tunnel I felt remotely comfortable traversing. When my eyes had adjusted and my nerves settled, I identified the bedrock as metamorphic slate.
As far ahead as I could see, the tunnel ran straight.
Perhaps somewhere farther ahead there were side branches, offshoots, whatever it was they were called in a mine, a term Walter would know. But Walter was outside facing a Glock and counting on me to return with something shiny and pretty to satisfy Henry. A nice nugget. Sure thing.
All I need do was go all the way, wherever that way led me.
I was breathing more rapidly, leg muscles working a little harder, and I realized that the tunnel was angling upward. I assumed the tunnel-builders had done that on purpose so that any water that seeped in through the rock would drain out.
Good idea.
My body settled into a rhythm, releasing my mind to dwell on the question at hand.
How did Henry know where all the way led? He didn’t like enclosed spaces. And how would he know how far I went?
And, further, what did he expect me to find?
Quite clearly this tunnel was working its way into the hillside toward the buried river channel whose upper gravel reaches I had glimpsed on the ridge top. Clever, those miners. If you can’t hose out a mountain to get to the gold, tunnel your way. One way or another they’d found the way. One way or another those ancient Eocene river channels had condemned this countryside to an extreme makeover.
And that bugged me, because it should have bugged Henry.
Presumably he wasn’t looking for hosed-out mine pits or well-tunneled hills. Presumably he was looking for a site lost since his grandfather’s time, a site that nobody but nobody had since seen. Was he not disappointed to find that Notch Valley had already been mined? Walter sure was. And Henry, I thought, should have been beyond disappointed. Should have been devastated.
Another failure for Quicksilver.
So why was he so anxious to have me go into this well-tunneled hill? If there was something legend-worthy in here, it would already have been found.
Poor Henry.
Henry with his peeling pink palms gripping the black and silver Glock.
My sympathy evaporated.
Several hundred feet into the tunnel, the walls abruptly changed.
The bedrock was now overlain by gravel. I played my light upon the stuff. It was mostly quartz and slate, cemented in clay and sand. I ran my fingers along the rough face.
I had entered the lost river channel.
There were pebbles and cobbles and even a few boulders—the well-rounded rocks of milky quartz that were legend in and of themselves, the defining characteristic of the blue lead, carried by long-ago rivers, carried to this place. Here right now.
I lost my bearings.
For a moment I forgot that I’d been sent in here. For a moment it seemed I’d chosen this hunt.
The tunnel drifted into a bend.
I halted and stared at the wall. Gravel sitting upon bedrock. Gravel the basal layer of the ancient channel. The basal layer being the deep blue lead.
Only, it wasn’t blue.
It was reddish, the iron pyrite in the clay oxidized.
I set my field kit on the floor, fumbled it open, and grabbed the hammer and chisel. Aiming my headlamp at the wall, I went to work on the cemented gravel, gouging my way through to the virgin blue.
And then I had to stop and stare.
It was blue as the wings of a jay.
Something like a fever took hold of me. Right here in front of my nose was the deep blue lead. I’d listened to Walter and Robert Shelburne rhapsodize about it, I’d read up on it myself, I’d contemplated the geology of it, but right now what made my pulse pound was the sheer reality of it, and I had to admit that I felt a thrill. If I had to name the feeling perhaps I’d call it romance.
Walter should see this.
And then I regained my senses. Legend-worthy to Walter, yes, but to Henry Shelburne? I recalled what Robert had told us, back at the lab, back when he was spinning the legend of the deep blue lead. He’d said Henry was hunting not only gold but something more fundamental. And since Henry had been hunting his entire adult life, could he not have encountered the blue somewhere, sometime? Hacked into some forgotten gravel outcrop? Maybe. As long as it wasn’t buried in a mining tunnel. In any case, this patch of the blue lead was not the patch he sought.
To be certain, I took my hand lens and had a twenty-power look. Nope, no visible gold. There was no visible treasure here. Perhaps there was microscopic gold somewhere within this seam but surely what was economically recoverable had already been recovered. There was certainly no diorite dike, no cross-studded hornfels sheath, no intrusion acting as a giant riffle, entrapping a secret pocket of gold.
The bedrock here was unviolated.
Nevertheless, I picked up the chunk of gravel ore I’d gouged out and put it in my field kit. Better to return with something than nothing at all.
And perhaps there was something worth seeing around the tunnel bend.
Go all the way.
I wondered, again, if Henry knew where all the way led.
The tunnel was bending like a U, and there now appeared on the bedrock floor the broken remains of iron tracks. I understood. The miners had not hauled the gravel out in backpacks. They’d used rail cars.
The tunnel now straightened into the second leg of the U. The tracks continued as far as my light could penetrate.
I continued, as well, following that deep blue lead.
Even oxidized, even rusty reddish brown, it held my attention.
Within a few dozen yards, the gravel receded. Within a couple dozen more yards, the walls were pure bedrock. And then up ahead I saw the faint glow of daylight.
Another exit.
Now what?
I thought it over. I found that I knew two things.
First, Henry had been camped in Notch Valley, perhaps for a couple of days. Henry would have had time to crawl all over this place and would have found this second tunnel mouth. Which meant he already knew what was out there.
Second, what was out there could not be what he sought. What he sought must be in here, or so he must believe. Otherwise, why send his brother into the tunnel searching? Why send me? At gunpoint, no less.
I took in a deep tunnel breath. It tasted like stone.
Okay. I knew one more thing.
Third, I knew that Henry Shelburne was not going to shoot Walter, while they waited. There was no possible need. Walter was not hot-headed enough to go for the gun. Walter was Henry’s insurance, guaranteeing my cooperation.
I exhaled, in a hiss.
I had not yet gone all the way.
It could not be more than a couple dozen yards to the exit.
~ ~ ~
I stepped out of the tunnel into silvery light. While I’d been underground the sun had begun to burn through the fog. The sky was now a thin pearl shell, ready to crack. Aching for warmth, waiting for the pearly light to penetrate my skin, I took in the lay of the land.
The tunnel opened onto another slim canyon, thickly vegetated. I stood on one side of the canyon and opposite me the wall rose to a high ridge. This canyon’s slim floor angled downhill in a steep incline and put me in mind of an unrolling carpet.