Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘That’s a genuine deed, by all appearances,’ he said. ‘But as far as I recalls it, the Little Pittsburgh was owned by a fellow called Fritz. Well, that’s what everybody called him. Kind of morose fellow, not the sort that laughed too much.’

  ‘Fritz Briichner,’ put in the red-bearded boy. ‘I remember him. Lucky Fritz, they used to call him, just for a joke, because he couldn’t do nothing right. Couldn’t drink, always fell flat on his face. Couldn’t get it going with women, paid them the money then couldn’t raise it. Tried to play the jew’s-harp once, when we had that dance, and swallered it.’

  ‘Looks like he lost his gold-mine, too,’ said the big fat miner, scratching at his behind.

  ‘Do you know where the Little Pittsburgh is?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Surely do. Follow the gulch upwards, past the houses, till you crest the hill on the left hand side of the trail, and then there’s an overhanging rock, and then you’ll see a shack there, not much of a shack, and that’s the Little Pittsburgh.’

  ‘Anybody mining it now?’ asked Edward, sharply.

  ‘Jumpers, you mean?’ the man shook his head. ‘Nobody would want to jump the Little Pittsburgh, or any of them claims up there, not unless they had a pen-chant for breaking their ass for nothing. They’re all borrascas, up on the hill there. Guess they thought they’d be clever, and hit the mother lode where all of this placer gold comes washing down from; but not a peep.’

  Edward looked across at Henry, and his face was almost laughably miserable. ‘Borrasca, is that what you say?’ he asked.

  ‘Black sand, black rock, and that’s it. Poor old Fritz dug a hole deep enough to bury a horse and cart in, and that was the end of it. He always swore that there was gold there someplace, and he was always digging new holes, but he never found nothing.’

  Henry held up the deed. ‘So what’s this worth?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘It ain’t worth a light,’ said Edward, in the sourest voice he could manage.

  ‘Well, it’s worth a light,’ said the red-bearded boy cheerfully. ‘You could always use it to get your pipe going.’

  Edward ignored him. He coughed. ‘That’s it, then, broke,’ he said.

  ‘You wasn’t counting on this mine, was you?’ asked the big fat miner, rolling his eyes in curiosity from Henry to Edward and back again.

  Henry gave a small, tight shake of his head. But Edward sat down on the boardwalk with his feet in the mud, and said, ‘Ah, shit.’

  ‘Well,’ said the big fat miner. The least I can do is stand you fellows a drink, seeing as how you come out so far fer nothing. My name’s O.T. Bobbs, but mostly they call me Plumb-Bobbs. Come on in, Jack’s got a special bottle for disappointments, good year-old whiskey, Disappointment Dew.’

  They spent an hour or so in the small, smoky saloon, drinking small tumblers of whiskey that tasted as if it had been distilled from mountain-oak acorns and filtered through mule manure, but which was breathtakingly strong. Henry found himself the centre of attention, since he had only recently arrived from the East, and could whistle some of the latest tunes. Edward rather maliciously told the miners, too, that Henry had been stepping out with a tightrope walker; and of course they were clamouring to hear what she was like, pretty is she? and gets up to some fancy tricks, I’ll bet.

  Henry found the miners friendly, eager, and surprisingly gentle: very young men, most of them, who had left their families behind in search of sudden wealth. They all agreed that California Gulch was one of the richest placers they had worked; although one or two of the more experienced sourdoughs said that it didn’t look like it could hold out very long. ‘Make what you can, while you can, and then move on,’ said one, and spat tobacco juice in a perfect accurate arc out of the doorway, and into the street.

  They never talked about the risks and the hardships and the backbreaking work that they had to endure. They never mentioned the would-be prospectors, horrifying hundreds of them, who had died on the plains on their way to Pike’s Peak or Cripple Creek, victims of cold or hunger or cantankerous Indians. They never discussed the tedious hours they had to spend washing placer gold in a wooden sluice, or in a rocker-box; or the frustrations of digging through gumbo; or the hair-raising danger of coyote-mining, which meant sinking one central shaft and then burrowing out in all directions along the bedrock in a wheelspoke array of unsupported tunnels.

  All they talked about was gold, and what they were going to spend their money on when they were rich. In their beards and their boots and their filthy underwear, they sat in this foggy hovel of a wooden saloon, and talked about fried oysters, and handmade shoes, and going to the opera, and walking out with perfumed women dressed in silk, women with shoulders as white as swans. They shared between them, these men, a collective hallucination; a mirage that to them was more real than California Gulch itself would ever be.

  To Henry, the most poignant moment of the morning was when one of the miners, a thin pale fellow with a wispy beard, started to hum a popular waltz called ‘Enid Gray’; and two of his friends stood up after a while and danced together around the dusty boarded floor, big-bellied and bearded, in filthy work-shirts and britches held up with knotted suspenders, their eyes half-closed as they imagined the speckled sunlight that came in through the saloon’s open door to be the light of chandeliers; and the humming to be an orchestra; and they danced with such grace and sentiment, and nobody thought them anything but elegant.

  Later, Plumb-Bobbs took them up the hill to the Little Pittsburgh; and he was right. The mine was nothing more than a bald shoulder of rock, next to a high overhanging face of crumbling stone, interlaced with tree-roots. There was no sign of the shack; presumably somebody had knocked it down and used it for timber. But there were holes everywhere, some deep, some shallow, one of them nearly thirty feet from floor to lip, dank and barren and deserted. It looked as if a community of giant prairie dogs had been digging all around, and then given up, and moved away.

  Plumb-Bobbs rested his huge bottom on a rock and smoked a cigar while Henry and Edward paced around their claim.

  ‘I guess we’re finished, then,’ said Edward. ‘Best thing we can do is flit out from Mrs Cordley’s and put as much distance between us and Denver as possible.’

  ‘I’m not leaving yet,’ Henry told him.

  ‘Why’s that? On account of that balancer?’

  ‘Edward, there’s money in Denver. There’s gold. And even if Lucky Fritz didn’t find any here...well, maybe we can.’

  ‘Are you loose in the head? Look at this place! That poor fellow must have been excavating here for months, and what did he find? Nothing!’

  Edward knelt down, and broke off a lump of dry, blackish soil. ‘You find gold in quartz, that’s where you find it. Quartz, or mica, or iron pyrites. But take a look at this stuff; there’s not more gold in here than there is in your Aunt Martha’s back yard.’

  ‘I still think that I’ll stay,’ said Henry.

  ‘Well, you can suit yourself. But you owe me those twenty-five dollars for bringing you here.’

  Henry counted out the money without saying a word. At the clinking of coins, Plumb-Bobbs glanced up from his rock; but quickly looked away again. Edward took the money, and said, ‘Just about covers my outlay, that does; for food and mules. Least profitable trip I ever made.’

  ‘Come on, Edward,’ Henry retorted. ‘If this mine had been worth something…’

  ‘If this mine had been worth something, you can bet that I wouldn’t have been given a look-in,’ Edward countered.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re so bitter,’ said Henry. ‘Do we have to part so bitterly? At least let’s say we’re friends.’

  Edward put away his money and lowered his head. ‘The one thing you learn about the West is not to expect nothing,’ he said.

  They walked back down the gulch and the light of the afternoon was like flakes of gold itself. Henry realized as he made his way down the loose slides of rock and soil that Edward had at last
come to face-to-face with the fact that this country would give him nothing; not a bride; not a fortune; not a friend. Only a few tots of whiskey called Disappointment Dew. He was flat-busted himself now. With nothing to his name but a barren patch of hard rock with holes dug in it, but at least he knew that he could work for his money. Edward had somehow expected his destiny to come for nothing, and that made his disillusionment all the more hurtful.

  ‘Any work to be done around here?’ asked Henry, as Edward untied their horses and prepared to turn the rig around.

  Plumb-Bobbs said, ‘Nothing that I can think of. Everybody’s got all the helping hands they need; even the dry goods store.’

  Henry looked around, shading his eyes against the sun. ‘You don’t have a bank here, though, or do you?’

  ‘No, sir. No bank.’

  ‘So what do you do with your gold?’

  ‘Take it for assay; just to prove that we’ve got it; then hide it under the floor.’

  Henry frowned. ‘Do you really think that’s safe?’

  Plumb-Bobbs grinned, and hawked, and spat. ‘Woe betide anybody I catch trying to scratch up my floor.’

  Henry shook hands with Plumb-Bobbs, and the red-bearded boy, and two or three other miners who had come to stare at them as they left. Then Edward said, ‘Hup, girl,’ and they trotted back along the trail, their iron-rimmed wheels clattering and shaking and popping out pebbles.

  ‘Are you going to go straight back to Council Bluffs?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Reckon I will,’ said Edward. ‘Reckon I can leave you to settle up with Mrs Cordley, the best way you can, seeing as how you got me into the goddamned mess in the first place.’

  They drove between tall fragrant pines, between columns of purplish shadows, and the mountain air grew as chilly as ice. When they drove through the highest of all the passes, with the sun still shining brightly behind them, it began to snow, a whirl of flakes that blew between the spokes of their wheels and clung to Edward’s whiskers. He coughed, again and again, a phlegmy, gasping cough that left him breathless; and he had to pound at his chest with his fist.

  ‘Let me drive,’ Henry urged; and at last Edward had to draw the rig to a halt and change over places. He was coughing so badly that he could scarcely speak, and all he could do when Henry asked him if there was anything he wanted was to wave his hand, and shake his head. Henry gave him his handkerchief so that he could wipe his mouth.

  It was a long, difficult trail back to Denver; but Henry determined that they should get back as quickly as they could, provided the horses could stand up to the strain of the journey. He geed them up, and the rig bounced and rattled through the flickering trees, with the snow blowing all around it, as urgently and as clamorously as a waggon from hell. The rig had no suspension, and so by the time they had covered half-a-dozen miles down the stony track, Henry’s back was jarred and his head felt as if it had been clapped between a door and a doorframe. Edward said nothing but coughed in thick, racking spasms; sometimes clutching hold of Henry’s arm as if that were the only way in which he was going to be able to draw breath again.

  Henry drove all afternoon, until it was dark; and then he halted the rig beneath a grove of ash trees, beside a stream, and lit a fire. He wrapped Edward in a blanket, and then set about brewing up some hot coffee. In two hours, the moon would come up, and they would be able to continue their journey. Right now, both of them needed a rest.

  Edward coughed again; and then as Henry was spooning coffee into the enamel pot, he said, ‘Oh, holy Jesus,’ and Henry looked around and saw that the handkerchief which he had been holding to his mouth was dark crimson.

  ‘Edward, you’re sick,’ he said, squatting down beside him and feeling his forehead. ‘You’re burning.’

  ‘I feel cold,’ said Edward. He coughed again, strings of spittle and blood.

  ‘How long have you been coughing like this?’

  Edward shrugged. ‘Two or three years, on and off. It comes and it goes. But I guess that it’s going to finish me off one day soon. It’s been getting worse.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Sure. Old Doc Lansing in Council Bluffs. He gave me a couple of bottles of Prickly Ash bitters and told me I was probably going to die.’

  There was nothing that Henry could do. He sat on a stone and waited for the moon to rise, and listened to Edward coughing over and over, and thought about nothing at all. An owl began to scream like an affronted spinster.

  Once it was light enough, they started off again, and Henry drove Mrs Cordley’s horses hard, so that they foamed, but he managed to reach Denver by two o’clock in the morning, with Edward huddled up beside him, still coughing, shivering, and muttering about luck, and who had it, because it certainly wasn’t him. Henry drove the rig around to the rear of the guest house, and unharnessed the horses, and by the time he had led them noisily into the stables, a light appeared at the back door and Mrs Cordley came out in a long flowery robe and a mob-cap, holding up a lamp.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she demanded. ‘I thought it was tinkers, or desperadoes.’ Henry caught the reflection of lamplight on the barrel of a shotgun.

  ‘It’s Edward,’ he told her; and she must have known already how sick he was, because immediately she said, ‘Hold this,’ and gave him the shotgun, and then turned towards the boarding-house door and called out, ‘Lennie! Run for the doctor!’

  They managed to carry Edward into Mrs Cordley’s back parlour, and lie him down on her red plush chaise-longue. He seemed to have stopped coughing now, but his eyes were closed and he was shuddering, and with every inspiration he made a harsh crowing sound. Mrs Cordley went into her kitchen and raked the fire in the range, which had burned almost down to the grate, and then stacked more wood on to it so that it would heat up enough to boil a kettle of water.

  ‘He’s had this before,’ she said, sitting down next to Edward and holding his hand between hers. ‘What he needs is balsam, and a strong dose of Dover’s Powder.’

  ‘You’re quite a nurse,’ said Henry.

  Mrs Cordley looked up at him; still handsome, even in her mob-cap. ‘When you run a boarding-house in a town like this, Mr Roberts, you have to be. I’ve delivered babies, taken out bullets with kitchen scissors, and once I cut off a poisoned thumb. I’ve sent Lennie for the doctor, but it’s ten to one he won’t come, or else he’s busy somewhere else. Now, you could make yourself useful, please, and get a pudding-bowl out of the kitchen cupboard and fill it with hot water for the balsam.’

  ‘Will he survive?’ asked Henry, nodding down at Edward.

  ‘Survive?’ said Mrs Cordley. ‘Of course he’ll survive. He’s as strong as an ox. It’s his nerves that bring this on.’

  ‘He seemed to be sure that he was going to die.’

  Mrs Cordley laughed, and much to Henry’s consternation, tugged Edward’s hair and slapped his face. ‘This rascal will outlive the both of us, you’ll see.’

  The doctor came briefly, a vague man who kept blinking and smelled of brandy. He commended Mrs Cordley for treating Edward with Dover’s Powder, accepted a cup of coffee, declined a piece of spice cake, and left. Henry sat in the parlour with Mrs Cordley until three, and then climbed the staircase to go to bed. He unlaced his shoes and took them off, so that he wouldn’t wake any of the other guests. Their snores reverberated through the house like a chorus of purring cats. As Henry was halfway up the stairs, the clock in the hallway chimed the quarter-hour, and some of the snores stopped, or changed from snores to whistles, as the chimes penetrated deep into sleeping minds.

  He passed the door of Nina’s room, and hesitated. He didn’t want to wake her if she were asleep; but on the other hand he very much wanted to see her, and tell her that he was back. He waited for almost a minute, holding his breath and listening, and then he lightly tapped against the door-panel.

  There was no response; so after a while he tapped again. A blurry voice said, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Nina?’ Henry whis
pered.

  ‘Who is that? What do you want? It’s the middle of the night.’

  He opened the door, and stepped into the bedroom, and announced in a loud whisper, ‘Nina, it’s me, Henry. I just got back.’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ a hoarse man’s voice blurted out. There was a jouncing of springs, and a tussling of bedclothes, and then two faces appeared in the last of the moonlight. Nina, sparkling-eyed, in her nightgown; and Charley Harrison, podgy, tousle-haired, and naked. Henry stood still at the foot of the bed and stared at them; and they in their turn sat up side by side like a married couple surprised by a burglar, and stared back at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Henry, breathlessly; and then, with a cutting edge to his voice, ‘I seem to have made a mistake.’

  ‘You just get yourself the hell out of here,’ said Charley Harrison. ‘And if I ever see your face around this town again, I’m going to make sure that it never gets recognized again, not by anybody.’

  ‘Nina?’ said Henry; half-questioning, half-angry.

  ‘You’d better go,’ said Nina, very gently. ‘We can talk in the morning, if you want to.’

  ‘Just get the hell out,’ Charley Harrison repeated.

  Henry said, ‘All right. I apologize. I only came in here because I failed to imagine that a lady like Mademoiselle Carolista could subdue her nausea for long enough to be able to spend the night with a fat unmannered hog like you. Obviously, it’s all my fault; and I’m sorry.’

  Charley Harrison pushed back the comforter, and climbed out of bed, and came padding on surprisingly soft little feet over to the door, and stood in front of Henry naked, his bald head gleaming, his shoulders thick whorls of hair, his belly hanging draped around his hips as if it were a bedroll. His tiny penis nested amongst the thick black hair between his thighs as if it were a fledgling cuckoo.