And the Hills Opened Up

by Oppegaard, David

  But Tol was nowhere to be seen now, of course, Hans Berg noticed as he shoveled stone into an ore car, one of six strung behind a patient mule and his drowsing skinner. The old man always seemed to be absent when the time came to put rock in the box—Tol Gregerson liked to make the hills go boom but wasn’t as eager to pick up his mess after.

  Two other swampers, Jake Keller and Bear Tollackson, worked alongside Berg at the foot of the freshly opened chamber, filling the cars with sediment and raw ore as they slowly opened the room. Their shared excitement from earlier in the day, when they’d gotten to break and watch the big thump from outside the mine, had worn off four or five ore trains back. Conversation, which had started loud and rowdy as they started in on the freshly loosened rock, had fallen off to the occasional observation as the hours passed and the rubble showed no signs of letting up. It always made you feel low when you realized how much mountain you had left, no matter how much you’d dug out already or how badly your back ached.

  “We’ll have work for a month or more at this end,” Jake Keller announced, dumping another shovelful into the cars. “No need to worry about getting paid.”

  “It’s not pay that worries me,” Bear Tollackson said. “Did you boys see how Chambers sweated before the blasting? Reminded me of the yellow fever.”

  Hans Berg dumped out a shovelful and paused.

  “You’ve seen the Yellow Jack, Bear?”

  “Aye. I worked a silver mine in Argentina, some ten years back. A hellish place, that was. Men dropping on both sides of you while shifts went day and night, sometimes running sixteen, eighteen hours a man.”

  Hans Berg imagined a mine buried deep beneath layers of teeming jungle and snakes. The only mine he’d known beside the Red Earth had been back in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He’d worked the Quincy Mine in Copper Country for five long years before getting soaked one night and showing up for work too drunk and accidently crushing another miner’s knee with a misplaced strike.

  And now here he was, a year later and fourteen hundred miles distant, still trying to forget the man’s screams.

  “Mr. Chambers is a hard one,” Jake Keller said. “Fever won’t keep a stubborn fella like that down for long.”

  The other men grunted in agreement. The foreman could be ornery at times but he was easily the finest man any of them had ever worked for. Hank Chambers begrudged no man his lunch break, his drink, or his pay, long as he worked hard and steady and caused no foolish accident. With him there were no unnecessary words, no skull knocking, no blustering to show how rough he could make it for the rest of them. He expected you to work as hard as he did and even the orneriest miners couldn’t bellyache about that.

  They topped off the line of ore cars and woke the skinner, a kindly old coot who must have been seventy if he was a day. The skinner cracked his whip over his mule’s head, passing on the message, and soon the entire train was rolling into the tunnel and out of sight. Hans imagined the ore train rolling out of their tunnel and switching onto the main track, which would lead to the third level’s adit entrance, where the ore would be sifted out from the dirt and rock and dumped into a haul wagon. When the wagon was filled, it’d be sent on its way up the mountain road toward Rawlins, where it’d be processed into proper copper at a smelting plant, a foul inferno also owned and operated by Mr. Dennison.

  “Must be near six,” Bear Tollackson said, leaning his ample frame against his shovel’s handle. They all rested upon their shovels now, breathing heavily as they sweated in the cool air. By the waxy yellow glow of candlelight, they looked like dirty ghosts exhausted by their ghostly labors.

  “I hope so,” Jake said, wiping his brow with a piece of burlap. “I could use a few pints at the Runoff, sooner rather than later. And some beef stew over at the Copper, as well. Three bowls, I’ll handle.”

  A light appeared down the tunnel running from the room, appearing in the same spot where the mule-drawn ore train had disappeared. The light hovered in the darkness like a moth, swinging slowly back and fourth and illuminating the tunnel’s azurite-spotted walls as it approached.

  A face appeared beside the light—Andrew Klieg, shift boss and second-in-command. He stepped out of the tunnel’s mouth and entered the high-ceilinged chamber.

  “Bear, I need your crew up on Level One to help carry out a heavy fragment. You can leave this heap till tomorrow.”

  “Sure enough, Mr. Klieg. We’ll head up.”

  The shift boss nodded and turned back down the track. They gathered their tools and followed the shift boss at a distance, letting Klieg gain on them. Halfway down the tunnel, Hans noticed he’d left his candle behind in the new room.

  “Forgot my light,” Hans called out, causing the other men to chuckle and glance back at him. “I’ll catch up.”

  Bear waved him down the tunnel, his eyes twinkling. He liked to call Hans “Forgetful Freddy” and this would only add fuel to the fire.

  But heck.

  You needed light to see.

  The rooms of the Red Earth Mine felt cold and unfriendly if you happened to find yourself alone in one, your flickering candle raised before you. The walls of the Quincy Mine, back in Michigan, had seemed only quiet and worn, like an old man wanting nothing more than to be left to his dreamless sleep. Those extensive, productive shaft mines had been worked for nearly forty years before Hans Berg had arrived to add his shoulder to the load—here, the Red Earth Mine was only two years old, still a fresh burrow inside the heart of Flannery Peak. The mountain had not yet had time to fully understand that it had been invaded, that men had appeared in this remote part of the world bent on plundering its core, yet Hans could tell it was unhappy nonetheless, like a lion with a thorn in its paw.

  So, when the newly blasted chamber’s ceiling split apart ten feet ahead of him, Hans Berg fully expected the entire mountain to collapse upon his trespasser’s head and crush him where he stood, exacting a swift and furious revenge. Instead, it merely dumped a fresh pile of rock along the tracks, scaring the water out of him. “Jaspers,” Hans whispered, lifting his candle to better view the pile of rock and scree. A cloud rose above the fallen rock, thick with dirt, and the familiar smell of smoke filled the air.

  Hans blinked from the dust and examined the hole in the tunnel’s roof. The light of his candle only reached so far—he could make out nothing except a patch of black overhead, though he might have felt a faint gust of air, coming from somewhere. He turned his attention back to the pile of newly fallen rock, which looked about the same as all the other turquoise-spotted rubble they’d extracted from the room so far.

  Except….

  Something was buried under this rubble.

  Something big.

  “Sweet Mary,” Hans whispered, setting down his candle to free his hands. He dug off the loose rock and flung the larger stones behind him. The rocks fell away and gave up the shape below—it was a man with skin so badly charred it encased him like a mummy’s wrap, as if he’d been dipped in a volcano and left out to cool. But it was a man, all right—some poor son-of-a-bitch who might have been buried inside the mountain for the past thousand years.

  A burnt man, who still smelled like smoke and had curled, claw-like fingers. Hans Berg wiped his brow, his eyes wide from the sight before him. The smell of roasted flesh filled the chamber, thickening. Hans laughed aloud, imagining the reception he’d get back in town—the many drinks the other men would buy him, the fawning attention of the Runoff’s whores—and leaned over to get a closer look at his prize.

  The burnt man’s eyelids parted, showing eyes with no light to them. Then, quick as that, the burnt man was sitting up and reaching out with his spindly arms, his clawed fingers squeezing Hans’ windpipe with a grip so crushing and fierce it felt like an ache. The miner’s vision filled with floating spots as he thrashed about, trying to free himself.

>   The spots spread into dark and widening pools, then into darkness all around.

  Hans barely had time to wonder about any of it.

  part two

  Death Above, Death Below

  7

  When Elwood Hayes envisioned robbing the Dennison Mining Company, he’d figured something might go wrong, some unexpected devilry that might cost them a bullet or two. Hayes had been on the wrong side of law for three years, ever since he’d struck a man too square in an alley fight and sent the dumb bastard to an early grave. He’d learned to expect nasty surprises when you tried to part a man from his money—some chicken-headed local who appeared out of nowhere to gape and blink, a farmer’s kid who favored himself a hero and yearned to see his picture in the paper. Any time you tried to conduct yourself in some profitable yet illegal business, trouble was bound to show its ugly, bucktoothed head.

  But Lord, this was a new one, even to him.

  “Hell, Johnny.”

  “You saw him, Mr. Hayes. You saw him provocate me.”

  “He spilt some beer.”

  “Right on my knee, he spilt it. Right after that smart mouth talk about us being rock moles.”

  The whores on the saloon’s front porch had stuck their heads inside to watch the action. The stagecoach guard was lying on the floor, kicking his feet as he bled out on the barroom floor, surrounded by a large pool of spilled beer and broken glass. His friends had gotten to their feet to remove their hats and watch him die. They hadn’t drawn their pistols yet but Hayes knew it was only a matter of time until they forgot their shock and turned against Johnny. The question of the moment was whether the Hayes Gang should stand with the fool or hand him over. Johnny had killed the man straight out, with no eye to robbery or common sense. They should have left the kid back in Denver, with the other thin-skinned young men who dwelt there, and it was Elwood’s own fault Johnny had traveled with them this far. He’d shown the boy too much kindness in the face of too many obvious faults and now a time of reckoning had come.

  “What you thinking, El?”

  Elwood turned to see his own reflection in Roach Clayton’s spectacles. He looked pale and out of sorts. Almost like one of his men had done something so goddamn stupid it defied the mind’s powers.

  “We go down a man, it’s just going to make it harder to bust into that fortress down the street.”

  Johnny, perhaps stunned himself, had joined the coach guards as they stood above their dying friend. One of the guards was pressing at the wound with a rag from the bar, but the blood kept seeping through. The bartender, Caleb, had stepped outside to see if he could scare up the town sheriff.

  “We’ve got your brother now,” Roach whispered back, his breath smelling like whiskey. “We can make do with four.”

  Elwood looked past Roach and saw that Clem and Owen had spread out down the bar and dropped their hands to their sides. They expected a shootout, but they didn’t see the two guards who’d left their whores to stand along the upstairs balcony and watch the commotion below. They were standing in their dirty skivvies, each holding a rifle as they watched everything play out with a clear and steady gaze. After a hard ride, they hadn’t had time enough to get properly drunk and they’d been interrupted in their attentions—they might as well have been two sleeping rattlesnakes Johnny Miller had poked with a stick for the hell of it.

  “Jesus!” the dying man shouted, then kicked up his feet in one last mighty convulsion before falling still. Johnny Miller laughed and looked back at the bar, his eyes gleaming in an uncanny way.

  “How you like that, fellas? A banker’s errand boy calling out to the Good Lord in his last moment, like he’d never heard of those moneylenders getting driven out of the temple.”

  The stagecoach guards turned in unison to regard young Johnny Miller and a new stillness fell upon the barroom. Hayes felt a tickling on the nape of his neck that signaled the proximity of Death. He paused in uncertainty no longer, striding across the barroom floor and dropping Miller with one punch across the right temple. The surprised young man collapsed to the floor with a thud and Hayes stepped back to shake the heat out of his fist.

  “There, fellas. He’s all yours.”

  After some discussion, two guards went off and fetched one of the cheap pine coffins Leg Jameson kept stocked in his general store. Then the guards lifted the dead man into the coffin and hammered the lid on right there. When the box was sealed, the four living guards sat down around it and began drinking again, using the coffin for a table. When the unconscious Johnny Miller showed signs of stirring, they trussed him up with a rope, also fetched from the store, and gagged him with a handkerchief. They debated the young man’s fate between them, loudly proclaiming they didn’t know if it were best to hang Miller outright or turn him over to the law in Rawlins, where the killing could be done properly in front of a large crowd.

  Elwood Hayes didn’t like any of this, but he made himself stay in the bar and bear witness to what he saw as a breakdown of discretion and leadership. The Hayes Gang had moved to a table on the opposite side of the bar, about as far as they could possibly get from the coach guards within the confines of the building, but they could still hear enough to put them off their drink.

  “I’d like to shut them all up for good.”

  Elwood turned to his younger brother, now sitting at his elbow.

  “That right?”

  “Yeah. Sure, they lost one of theirs, but they don’t have to act so sore about it. They probably didn’t even like the fella.”

  Elwood took a drink of whiskey and rolled it along his tongue. “They’re blowing off steam,” Clem Stubbs said, picking at the table with his pocket knife, his bushy red beard sweeping across the tabletop as he worked. “By the end of the night, they’re likely to open that box up and dance their man across the bar, just to make the whores laugh.”

  Roach Clayton crossed his arms.

  “Who cares? We’ll be gone by then, with their money in our pockets.”

  The saloon door creaked open and Hayes looked up, hoping it was the head guard, the one who’d stayed back with the Dennison accountant after the payroll delivery. Instead, two other men entered the bar, a gray-haired priest and a smooth cheeked lawman who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. They glanced around the room, nodded to the bartender, and went directly toward the stagecoach guards, who got to their feet as a group. The sheriff asked them something and they all looked at Johnny Miller, tied and gagged on the floor.

  The preacher circled round the men and stopped at the foot of the coffin. He lowered his head and clasped his hands, praying over the body. The sheriff and the other men fell silent for a moment and looked at the coffin, too, as if they could all see through its cheap pine lid.

  “Maybe they’ll bury them side to side,” Owen said. “The killer and the killed.”

  “Now, isn’t that a sweet notion,” Stubbs said, digging a deep new furrow into the table and filling the air with the scent of wood shavings.

  Hayes shifted in his seat, the weight of his revolver pressing against the small of his back.

  “Whatever the hell they do, I wish they’d take the whole circus outside.”

  The sheriff looked over at their table, frowning. One of the shotguns jawed in the lawman’s ear. Finally, after he’d been jawed at enough, the sheriff broke away and ordered the others to take the coffin outside along with Johnny Miller. The guards did as they were told, three of them lifting the coffin between them while the fourth grabbed Miller by his ropes and dragged him to his feet. Johnny shouted through his gag, his words unintelligible and distressed. One of the guards punched Johnny in the stomach, knocking the wind from him, and a moment later Miller was dragged quietly from the saloon, his feet as heavy as if they’d been filled with wet clay. The preacher followed behind the prisoner,
head bowed and hands clasped. The sheriff walked toward their table with a pained looked upon his boyish face.

  “Evening, gentlemen.”

  Hayes nodded and removed his hat.

  “Evening, Sheriff.”

  “That was your friend who shot the National man?”

  “Yes, sir. His name is Johnny Miller.”

  The sheriff took a notepad from his pocket and a pencil and scribbled something down. Stubbs and Roach glanced at Elwood, who kept his face blank.

  “They wanted to hang Mr. Miller straight off, but I convinced them to hold up and send him to Rawlins for a proper trial.” The sheriff glanced up from his notepad. “This isn’t the lawless Old West anymore, even out here. Mr. Dennison expects Red Earth to run smoothly and he pays my salary to make sure that happens.”

  Elwood nodded, keeping his eyes focused on the sheriff’s. He expected the kid to flinch and look away, but he looked right back. He’d be one to deal with later.

  “So what brings you gentlemen to Red Earth? You prospecting?”

  Elwood smiled and glanced at Roach. “Prospecting for work is more like it. We were hoping Dennison was hiring still.”

  The sheriff scribbled some more and stuffed the notebook back into his pocket. “You’ll have to talk to Hank Chambers about that. He’s the foreman. The company shift ends at six. You’ll find him at home sometime after.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” Owen said. “We surely appreciate that information.”

  The sheriff glanced at the younger Hayes.

  “Say, I know you, don’t I?”

  “Yes, sir, I’m Owen Hayes, and I’ve been doing some independent prospecting in the area. You probably seen me around town.”