He was well into his overcooked steak when a young man with green eyes and a shock of red hair ran into the hotel, breathing hard and waving his arms. “Three men,” the boy shouted, looking wildly about the room with an oddly triumphant shine to his eyes. “Three men dead at the Dennison Mine!”
Chairs scraped on the wood floor as the diners got to their feet and began shouting questions. The boy smiled at the attention and began babbling away about three miners with their throats ripped out and blood everywhere. Pushing his unfinished steak away, Father Lynch felt a coldness settle upon his shoulders and perch there like a pink-eyed vulture, flapping its broad wings as it prepared to fly.
10
The top level of the mine was empty, the miners having abandoned their stations to run off and seek a sight of greater interest. The foreman could easily picture how the news of three men killed would have spread swiftly throughout the mine, drawing the men like ants to honey and suspending operations in every dark corner of the hillside. The sort of delay Hank Chambers would not have allowed had he been on hand and not lying abed with fever like a wilting pansy.
But done was done and they had a new situation on their hands. Chambers hooked the strap of his rifle across his shoulder and started climbing down a vertical access shaft, one hand free to grasp the metal ladder sunk into the rock wall and the other minding the oil wick lamp. At the second level, he stepped off the ladder and looked around, calling out to anyone within shouting distance. No sound of metal ringing against rock, or the grind of ore carts rolling along the tunnels. Levels Two and Three each had adits cut into the south side of the mountain, with their own set of haul wagons waiting outside to remove the ore. The tunnels to each of these exits ran a quarter of a mile long and kept the mules busy rolling out full carts and returning them empty.
Chambers returned to the vertical shaft and paused, listening to the feathery rustle of bats overhead. A wall of loose rock, blasted small enough it could be removed by hand, lay at a slant against the room’s far wall. Chambers studied the stope and wondered if there was something he was missing here. A miner who knew what he was doing could walk up that angled pile of rock easily enough and pick through the rubble for a piece that suited him—but if you made a wrong step and shifted the pile too much, the whole mess could break loose and roll out under you, burying you quick and deep.
“Stop thinking, Hank,” the foreman said aloud. “You’re letting the fever spook you.” The soles of Chambers’ boots, wet from groundwater, slipped against the ladder’s rungs as he climbed downward, sending the oil sloshing inside his lantern and placing an even greater strain on his clinging right arm. None of this was a new sensation—he’d been climbing up and down slick ladders half his life—but the fever had weakened Chambers considerably, dampening his palms and dripping sweat into his eyes.
The ground came up sooner than he’d expected. Chambers leaned his weight back, ignoring the rubbery nature of his arm, and lowered the lantern to get a better look at what he’d touched foot upon.
Four men looked back at him. All claw fingered, all staring upward with glassy eyes. Packed together like fish in a barrel and dead as it got.
Chambers swore beneath his breath, his voice strange to his own ears. He hooked the lantern to a rung above his head and gripped the ladder with both hands, wanting to fall less than ever. He recognized all four miners, though not by name. They’d all come recent to Red Earth, arriving after the spring thaw and looking for work.
And they’d died trying to escape it, so panicked they made migrating lemmings seem downright rational.
“Hey there,” Chambers shouted in the direction of the dead men, hoping his voice would carry through into the third level. “Anybody hear me?”
The dead men gaped back at him, silent. Chambers looked closer, searching for the mark of a bullet or a knife. He wondered if they’d suffocated somehow, but the air smelled clean enough to him.
“Sorry, fellas, but I need to get through.”
The foreman brought his boot down on the chest of the nearest miner, pushing on him with nearly all his weight. A rib snapped but the body hardly budged.
“Goddamn. Y’all got wedged in there.”
Chambers recalculated his aim and brought his boot down on the forehead of the man farthest back. This time, something gave way and the body slid backward. He kicked the miner again and kept his full weight on the body until it fell away. The other bodies held their spots in the shaft for a moment, waiting for gravity to catch up, then they dropped as well, landing with a thud not six feet down.
Chambers unhooked the lamp and continued downward, the rifle banging uncomfortably against his shoulder. He felt a powerful urge to change direction—to climb right the hell back up to the surface, have Bonnie pack her things, and head straight to Rawlins, where they could catch any train heading east or west. He owed the Dennison Mining Company his living, not his death.
He resisted the urge and dropped to the ground. The four men he’d kicked loose had landed facedown, exposing their backs to the yellow light of his lantern. One had a nasty wound beneath his shoulder blades, as if he’d been punctured by something sharp as he climbed. The others had no such wound, yet their necks were broken. Either the short fall down the shaft ladder had done that or something with an awfully strong grip. Chambers peered up the exit shaft once again, considering the ladder rungs. He heard his wife in his mind, telling him to git. But he also heard his father’s tobacco coarsened voice, telling him it’d be a worse hell yet if he didn’t see to the fate of his men, whatever that may be.
The old man won out one more time. Chambers turned right and started down the tunnel, heading toward the new room where Bear Tollackson would have been working with his crew. He saw a candle burning in the distance, still far off, and it distracted him from the next body till he nearly tripped over it, chasing the breath from his lungs and placing another curse upon his tongue.
In 1863, Hank Chambers’ father, Robert Chambers, returned home from the War Between the States with one less arm, wild eyes, and a love of gruesome tales. In the evenings he’d drink rotgut whiskey as he sat before the fire, waiting for Mother to go to bed, and when she did he’d call Hank over and start talking, speaking more freely than he ever had before the war, and out would pour story after story of severed limbs, festering wounds, and men cut down by cannon fire. So many men killed they heaped upon each other in great waves, a sea of dead covering entire fields and littering the earth like grains of sand upon a beach. Men screaming for their wives, mothers, cornfield loves. Men laughing crazily as surgeons removed their limbs right before their eyes. Men crawling over each other, begging to die in the mud while frightened horses ran in every direction, trampling the fallen beneath their panicked hooves. Men dying in a deep silence worse than any scream.
What the foreman encountered on the lowest level of the Dennison Mine resembled his father’s war stories, only compacted and pressed into one long tunnel with a few open rooms along the way. Dead men strewn about like forgotten toys: their eyes wide with horror, their blood pooling on the ground, and the chilled air reeking of a slaughter house’s coppery tang. Some had tried to run, some had tried to fight. Many had their throats torn, as if they’d been gotten at by a bear or a wolf. Their eyes bulged, frog-like, and he could not help but wonder what ugly thing they’d seen in their final earthly moments.
Chambers tied his handkerchief over his mouth and picked his way through the crowded tunnel. He entered the first open room and found more of the same—several men had climbed the stope here, risking burial by rock in their terror. The foreman ticked off names as he identified the fallen, counting the dead into the high thirties before losing heart and giving up the reckoning. The oil lamp burned richly in his hand, hissing softly, and he wondered briefly if all this was another dream, a terrible, lucid fever dream, but the sweat d
ripping down his brow said otherwise, how it stung his eyes and caused him to squint as if he were looking into the sun.
The next tunnel was the worst yet, as if the tunnel had caved in except the rubble was the bodies of dead men, not rock. There were so many bodies their collective bulk would have stuffed the tunnel shut except something powerfully strong had torn through them, boring through their mass like a drill bit cutting through limestone. The resulting mess caused Chambers to pull up outside the tunnel and turn his head away—he would have retched had he’d eaten anything in the last two days.
“Jesus,” he whispered, a shudder sweeping through him. “Jesus Almighty.”
He could hear the tunnel’s ceiling drip.
Drip, drip, drip.
The opened gore, falling from up to down. The split intestines and ruptured veins. The human body spilling forth with all its stored wonders.
Chambers set his lantern at his feet and adjusted his rifle by its strap. His shoulder, unused to the strain, ached from wearing the gun. He focused on the minor pain, closing his eyes and hissing through his teeth. He would not be going through that tunnel. That was too much to ask any man. This would be as far he got—let the sheriff come down here and finish the investigation. Let him sort—
A scream pierced the silence, as sudden and electrifying as a bolt of lightning landing at his feet. A man’s scream.
A living man.
Chambers’ chin dropped against his chest. He’d heard a scream like that only once before, when a coal tunnel had partially collapsed and buried a man up to his waist in several tons of rock, pulverizing everything below his belt.
The screamer repeated himself and Chambers turned back to the dripping tunnel. He picked his lamp off the floor and climbed inside, setting his knees on a man’s shoulders and scrambling forward. He’d gotten about three yards into the tunnel when he felt the wetness dripping onto his back and the bodies shifting beneath him. He tried not to imagine what fragile strings held the dead above him in place, what it would feel like if they came loose and buried him among them.
11
Six o’clock came and went without the town’s miners filling the saloon as Owen had said they would. Elwood Hayes was about to ask his younger brother about this when an orange-haired boy ran into the bar, hollered three men dead in the mine, with their throats torn, and then bolted out the front door again, leaving the saloon’s customers to gape at each other in surprise.
“What in hell’s name?” Roach Clayton grumbled, the first at their table to speak. “Next the whole town’s going to sink into the earth.”
“Yes, sir,” Clem Stubbs said. “And those fools will laugh the whole while.”
The stagecoach guards, whom Stubbs was referring to, had returned to their table at the front of the saloon, none of them talking much as they resumed their drinking, the whores leaving them be after a few harsh words. Every so often, one of the four guards would grow a little braver and glare toward the Hayes Gang. They wanted more blood than Johnny Miller’s but didn’t know how to go about stepping first. Hayes supposed that after riding for the bank so long, the guards were too used to living on the defensive and protecting the treasures of men greater and richer than themselves.
But give them a poke and they’d stir like hornets.
“Wonder what killed those men,” Owen said, holding his tumbler up to the light. “Mountain lion? Could a mountain lion get into a mine like that?”
“A knife,” Stubbs said. “A knife could get into a mine like that. Probably some drunk Chough who owed too much money from gambling.”
Elwood took in the room, watching for anything strange. The girls had all gone out to sit on porch and wait for the miners, leaving the barroom quiet. The bartender, Caleb, was running a rag up and down the bar and chatting with a stout, older woman who must have been the saloon’s madam. Two old men, both caked with dirt, sat at the far end of the bar, gesturing with their hands as they swapped tales.
A pretty blond emerged from a room on the second floor and leaned over the railing, looking down into the bar. She seemed sad and sunk into herself, even for a whore.
Stubbs followed Elwood’s gaze and whistled. “My, would you look at that. A blooming mountain flower.”
The girl turned her head toward the table full of stagecoach guards, her nose crinkling. Suddenly Elwood could smell rank beer, pine sap, smoke, unwashed men, and the faint smell of horses, all at once.
“Not too long bloomed, either,” Roach added, reseating the looping wire of his spectacles upon his ears. “A man could do worse around here than that.”
Beside him, Owen laughed in the dumb, awkward way he had when he was nervous.
“That’s Ingrid, fellas. You going to steal from Revis Cooke, you might as well steal her along with his gold. She sees nobody else but him. Up in her chambers, I mean. Ugly bastard must have gold pouring out his pecker.”
“Ingrid,” Elwood said, trying out the name. “Finnish?”
“Norwegian. The other girls say she’s from Minnesota.”
The longer she stood at the second floor railing, the more you could feel the eyes of the other men in the room lift in her direction and remain there.
Ingrid.
Ingrid from Minnesota.
Elwood Hayes pushed back his chair and got to his feet. He wavered a bit on his heels, drunker than expected. He ran a hand through his hair, frowned at the hopeless snarls he found there, and cleared his throat.
“Boys, I’m gonna jaw with Miss Ingrid for a minute.”
“You think that’s a good idea?” Stubbs asked, smiling behind his fiery beard. “Talking with a woman like that is bound to draw attention.”
“I know,” Elwood said, smiling back.
She pretended not to watch him climb the stairs and Elwood pretended he was fully sober while the whole bar followed his progress to the second floor. He made to remove his hat, but recalled he’d already left it on the table below so as not to be encumbered by it. So, instead of holding, he could only keep his hands at his sides, fully aware of them in a way that usually happened only when he was firing a gun.
The whore had ponderous blue eyes and hair like corn silk. When she glanced at Elwood, finally acknowledging his presence beside her, his legs weakened more than the whiskey he’d drunk would allow.
“Evening, Miss.”
“Evening.”
Elwood turned his gaze down to the saloon below and saw a dozen folks watching, like he and Ingrid were about to give them all a song and dance. He felt an urge to wave to the room and say something smart but he let it pass. Letting stupid urges pass you by was what separated a smart man from a fool like Johnny Miller.
“I’m spoken for, if that’s what you were about to ask.”
Elwood turned back to the young woman.
“Ma’am, my name is Elwood Hayes.”
He waited for a response, but Ingrid’s face remained blank. Maybe news didn’t travel across the Colorado border anymore.
“I’ve been told that you’re in a partnership with Mr. Revis Cooke, accountant for the Dennison Mining Company?”
“That’s right. Can’t say I enjoy it much, but I am.”
Elwood nodded and hooked his thumbs into his pants.
“Well, how would you like to leave his employ, permanently?”
The young woman looked him up and down.
“You don’t have that kind of money, Mr. Hayes.”
Elwood laughed and unhooked his thumbs. “You’re right about that, Miss. But, you see, my friends and I are about to change that. We’re about to have a lot of money, in fact.”
Ingrid smoothed the pleats in her skirt. She wore white lace gloves, like any fine lady in San Francisco.
“We’re robbing Cooke. Those men down
there have recently delivered a full month’s payroll to his address that we intend to acquire.”
“The miners need that money. They don’t save a nickel around here.”
“That money’s insured by the bank. Next month a new delivery, twice as big, will roll into town. The miners will just have to live on credit until then, like most do anyway.”
Ingrid’s chest was starting to rise and fall with enhanced grandeur—she was excited by the idea, despite herself. The way her nostrils flared.
“That house is more like a bank than you think, Mr. Hayes, and Cooke is as shrewd as an old mother hen.”
“Yes, Miss Blomvik, I agree with you there,” Elwood said, nodding again. “That is why I am speaking to you now. If you can help us get inside that little fort, you’ll get a full share of whatever we collect.”
Ingrid laughed, a harsh, barking sound that surprised him.
“A full share,” she said, turning to look Elwood square in the eye. “And how can I trust a road agent’s word? How do I know you won’t toss me aside as soon as you get your money?”
Elwood glanced up at the ceiling, wishing he’d brought his hat with him after all. It would have helped him look more like a beggar if he were holding it now, wringing it with nervousness. Worse, he could not think of single reason for this woman to trust him, nor any man in Wyoming—everybody was always after a beautiful woman for something or other.
And the Hills Opened Up Page 7