Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You won’t listen, will you?’ said Augusta. She unfastened his hands from around her waist as if she were releasing a belt.

  ‘Listen to what?’ he said, irritably. ‘Listen to your feather-brained fears that money will ruin us, and drive us apart? Why do you suppose that we’ve been quarrelling so much? Eighteen years together and nothing to show for it but a general store, that’s why! Eighteen years of working and arguing and no more pleasure in our lives than poker for me and Sunday-morning church for you! Let me tell you, Augusta, I’m going to excavate that mine as quickly as I can and on the grandest scale that I can afford.’

  Augusta stood silent; and on the table in front of her lay her broken pies.

  ‘Very well,’ she said at last, ‘it seems that I cannot persuade you. I am beginning to wonder what use I am to you at all; except as a servant to run your store for you. And what use will I be now, without even that menial task to perform? You never want me as a lover; I cannot bear you any children. We scarcely ever eat together any more. I love you, Henry, with all of my heart, and I would never willingly leave you. But you have made me the most wretched soul in all the world; and if I am fighting now for you to close that mine and turn your back on whatever riches it may contain, it is only for the sake of my own happiness. Henry, all I have to ask you is this: is my happiness worth that price?’

  Henry said, ‘You’re tired, that’s all. You’ve been working too hard.’

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘Not tired. Just wretched.’

  He said nothing for a moment, but then leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, a grazing kiss with no affection in it. She turned her head away as if she were frightened that he was going to brand her. He went out into the corridor and took down his hat. ‘I’ll see you later this afternoon,’ he said, as matter-of-factly as if none of this conversation had taken place. But after he had left the store, and the door had jangled behind him, and he had crossed the street into the triangle of midday sunshine outside the T.G. Underhill clothing company, on the corner, he stopped and pressed the palm of his hand against his forehead, as if he had been stung by a bee. It was a gesture of fiercely-controlled despair; of anger that he had no capacity to express. He no longer wondered why respectable men could sometimes be moved to murder their wives; although he knew that if it ever came to it, he could never think of murdering Augusta. She was too defenceless, too large and too pale and too self-pitying. He said, ‘Damn,’ to himself, and then, ‘damn,’ and a small boy walking past turned and stared at him as if he were mad.

  *

  For the first few weeks after the discovery of silver in the Little Pittsburgh mine, Augusta’s fears that their marriage would immediately be sundered and that their business at the store would be torn apart were considerably quieted by Henry’s new dependence on her for ordering supplies, for keeping books, for taking messages, and for regular evening meals at which he would expect nothing more than hot food and silence. He spent all day every day up on the hill, wrapped in a large black bearskin coat as the weather grew sharper, supervising with unusually stern energy the building of a hoisting-house over the shaft, and the installation of steam-powered winding-gear and buckets to bring up the ore. Nat Starkey from the Tasteful Saloon introduced him to an experienced mining engineer called R.P. Grover who had once worked for the Chollar mine at Virginia City, excavating the Comstock Lode; and R.P. Grover in turn brought in ‘Bully’ Brett, a hard-rock miner whose talents with dynamite, which was colloquially called ‘giant powder’, were legendary. By the time the pines up on the mountains around Leadville were touched by the first silver-thaw of the winter, the Little Pittsburgh was producing nearly 15,500 ounces of silver a week, and bringing in over $20,000. Henry went up there at eight o’clock every morning, just after the sun had come up, and stood watching the smoke rising from the chimney of the amalgamating plant, his head now crowned by a huge black bearskin hat, his breath fuming from his nose and mouth.

  The Little Pittsburgh was not as impressive a mine as any of the big excavations around the Comstock Lode in Nevada. There was only a shingle-roofed hoisting-house, and a rickety track for the trucks to carry the ore across to the building which housed the stamping-machines, and the amalgamating-pans; and a sorry collection of unpainted miners’ houses close to the side of the butte. But there were twenty miners working in it now, including R.P. Grover, and every hour of every day, ton after ton of heavy black ore was being blasted out of the ground, and stamped, and processed, and every hour of every day Henry was growing richer.

  Henry had only just arrived at the mine one morning in mid-October when R.P. Grover came walking slowly across to talk to him, rubbing his hands against the cold. Behind him, in the hoisting-house, the steam-engine which powered the air-compressors was rattling; and behind the hoisting-house the hillside rose steep and frosty and slanted with early sunlight. Two hundred and seventy feet below the hillside, ‘Bully’ Brett was drilling the nine holes in the rockface in which he would set the next charges of giant powder. All day, the mountains around Leadville thumped with the regular explosion of dynamite charges; and they had grown so commonplace that even the timid pine warblers no longer scattered.

  R.P. Grover’s given name was Robustus; a name chosen by his father, who had been a self-taught schoolteacher in Oregon, in the early days of settlement. He looked today as he must have looked as a baby, and Henry could see just what his father had been thinking of when he had christened him. He had a large head, with a broad Slavic face, and red protruding ears whose interior whorls were as complicated as a puzzle. His torso was tremendous: deep-chested and broad-shouldered, like a beef carcass, but underneath it his legs were so short and curved that he walked everywhere with a low, speedy lope. He habitually wore the unmistakable headgear of a Comstock miner—the felt crown of a hat from which the brim had been cut off—and a thick checked jacket of red and blue wool.

  ‘Another bright one, sir,’ he remarked, his hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets, inclining his head towards the newly-risen sun.

  ‘What time will you start blasting?’ Henry asked him.

  ‘No later than ten after, sir. Billy’s just drilling out the last of the edgers.’

  ‘Did he start late?’

  ‘No, sir; but there’s a diagonal layer of sand down there, sir, and he wanted to be careful not to choke up the tunnel when he fired the charge.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Henry. From the beginning, he had taken a detailed, almost obsessive interest in the Little Pittsburgh mine, following each foot of its sinking into the hillside with notes, and inspections, and diagrams; and making sure that every sample was assayed and assayed yet again, so that he could determine whether the ore was richer as they excavated deeper, or poorer. He had even tried to use one of the compressed-air drills himself, although he had given up after ten minutes because of the dust. At the Comstock faces, the miners had already learned to call these drills ‘the widow-makers’, because they blew up a fine dust of sharp silica flakes as they penetrated the rock, eventually killing six out of ten of their operators from silicosis.

  ‘At least we’ve no flooding as yet,’ R.P. Grover said, with stolid optimism. ‘Nor too much heat, neither.’

  Henry nodded. The sun had just risen over the top of the ridge ‘It was a serious matter at the Comstock, water,’ R.P. Grover went on. ‘Some of it was boiling, too. One hundred and sixty degrees, down at the nineteen-hundred-feet level. The air was so steamy we couldn’t see the ore. Well, I left the Comstock after my friend John Exley died. He fell up to his waist into a sump of hot water, and even though we dragged him out quick, all the skin peeled off his legs, all of it, like two soft stockings, and he died before we got him up to the top.’

  ‘You didn’t come over here to tell me that,’ said Henry.

  R.P. hesitated, and looked embarrassed, and coughed. ‘No, sir. Not exactly.’

  ‘Well, then, what is it?’

  ‘I don’t like to be offensive, sir,’ R.P.
told him. ‘But on the other hand, begging your pardon, I don’t see what else I can do, having the interest of the mine at heart.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Henry.

  ‘Well, sir, it’s those partners of yours: Mr Rische and Mr Hook; and in particular Mr Rische.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘With every respect, sir; especially since it was Mr Rische that discovered the lode; he’s nothing more than an old-fashioned sourdough, sir, with very little understanding of mining, the way that it’s done these days, he’s an old hand-jacking man, that doesn’t know nothing of widow-makers or giant powder, or square-set props. And none of this would matter if he didn’t try to impose himself on the men, sir, with such forcibility.’

  Henry looked across to his left, out over the town of Leadville, with its wide rutted streets and its incongruous collection of churches and brothels and fine solid hotels and assorted houses, some mansions and some shacks; and beyond Leadville, to the bleak landscape of mines and stamping-mills and depots. Sometimes, when the wind was blowing in the right direction, it was possible to hear the sound of Leadville’s stamping-mills for miles, champing away at the ore like the factories of Mammon. And then there were the pines, and the snow-streaked mountains, and the low grey clouds of an early winter.

  ‘I thank you for your comments, Mr Grover,’ said Henry. ‘But you’ll have to remember that Mr Rische is a third equal partner in this mine, along with myself and Mr Hook; and that he is entitled to equal respect.’

  R.P. Grover wiped his eye with one crooked finger, where the cold wind had made it water.

  Henry turned away from him, in a manner which made it clear that what he was about to say next was not to be repeated. ‘I have however been watching him; and the manner in which he has been conducting himself, particularly with regard to the men at the face, and I would like to make it clear that you have my support.’

  R.P. Grover said nothing for a long time, but Henry could hear him sniffing intermittently. ‘Do I understand you right, sir?’ he asked.

  Henry turned. ‘You heard what I said.’

  R.P. Grover still hesitated. ‘Yes, sir. But—well, I wanted to have it clear. On account of any trouble, sir; if you follow me.’

  ‘Trouble?’ frowned Henry. ‘Why should there be any trouble?’

  R.P. Grover respectfully whipped off his miner’s hat, and nodded his head two or three times; and then scurried back across the shoulder of rock towards the mine, his bandy legs moving like two curved coathangers. Henry saw the hoisting engineer George Coombs come out of the hoisting-house and wave, and R.P. Grover change direction and go to talk to him. Hoisting engineers after all, were the aristocracy of the toplanders, the men who worked on the surface, and earned four dollars a day, which was a dollar more than the men who worked below ground. The face-workers never complained: it was up to the hoisting engineer to lift them up and down the shaft in safety, and it was in the shafts that most fatal mining accidents occurred. R.P. Grover, who relished stories of terrible disasters, in spite of the grieving way in which he always told them, would explain how men who fell down the mile-deep Comstock shafts would be smashed into pieces by the protruding timbers on all sides, and how the fragments of their bodies would have to be fished out of the hot-water sumps at the bottom of the shafts with special hooks, then packed into old dynamite boxes and sent up to the surface.

  While R.P. Grover talked, Henry had seen Nat Starkey riding in a leisurely way up the hillside on his chestnut mare with the three white socks, the mare he called Trey. Henry had been expecting Nat, but not so early, since Nat hardly ever stirred until eleven o’clock in the morning, and then to do nothing more strenuous than pour himself a large glass of bourbon, and break a raw egg into it.

  It was Nat who had helped Henry more than anyone else in the weeks after the quality of the Little Pittsburgh’s silver had first been proved. Nat had underwritten Henry at Lenont’s Mining Supplies for a steam-powered hoist, as well as building materials, and timber. He had then gone to five of Leadville’s saloon-keepers, and formed a consortium to guarantee the costly heavyweight machinery which was needed for extracting silver out of the lead and other worthless materials with which it was mixed. Nat had asked for nothing in return except a lifetime two percent of the mine: a royalty which had already made him a moderately wealthy man.

  Nat rode up to Henry and dismounted. His mare shook her head, and her breath clouded in the cold mountain air. The two men clasped hands, and then Henry said, ‘Let’s take a walk to the mill. I’ll show you how we’re getting along.’

  ‘I came up early because I couldn’t sleep,’ said Nat. ‘Don’t ask me why, I’ve been having these dreams lately. I keep thinking I can hear my father talking to me.’

  ‘I thought your father was dead.’

  Nat sniffed. ‘He is. That’s what concerns me. I just hope it isn’t an omen. I can tell you something, Henry, there’s one thing I very much don’t want to do, and that’s to die in my sleep. I want to have the chance to say some last words. In fact, I’ve even got my last words ready.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ asked Henry, abstractedly.

  Nat held out his arm in a poetic gesture. ‘I’m going to say, “Everything on the black, my friends!” What do you think of that?’

  ‘Everything on the black? Well, I suppose it’s quite neat, for a gaming-house keeper.’

  ‘You don’t like it? Don’t tell me you’ve heard better!’

  ‘It’s not as bad as the epitaph that one farmer’s widow wanted me to carve on her husband’s tombstone. “Embracing At Last His Beloved Sod.” ‘

  Nat cackled.

  ‘Here,’ said Henry, ‘you’d better tether Trey to this fence-post here. The noise of those crushers is going to spook her if you don’t.’

  Now they were close to the mill, the battering of metal on metal was deafening. One correspondent had said of mine-processing plants that they made ‘Niagara sound like a whisper’. The Little Pittsburgh mill was built on five levels down the hillside, in what looked like an inter-connected series of five small shingle-roof barns, with weather-boarded sides, and rows of windows. On the very lowest level, where the steam-boilers were housed, two chimneys protruded, rolling out thick brown smoke. Large barrels of water were perched in rows along the ridge of every roof on the mill, in case a spark from one of these chimneys set the shingles alight. If a fire started, the nearest barrel would be toppled over by a tug on a rope, and its water would be sluiced across the roof.

  Henry took Nat by the arm, and led him up the muddy, wheel-tracked hillside to the upper level. Here, they crossed the tracks used to bring up the carts of ore from the minehead, and entered the gloomy, thunderous, fuming interior of the mill. Nat had been up here several times before, but not when the mill was working at full capacity, as it was this morning.

  Henry pointed out a waggon of ore being tipped into the Blake jaw-crushers: huge iron plates which ground the rock into pieces about the size of a man’s fist. The crackling and grinding and crunching of stone always made Henry feel as if his skull was breaking; but it was the rhythmical beating of the stamps on the next level below that set up the unholy hammering that could be heard and felt so far away. The Little Pittsburgh had only three of them, because they had cost almost $30,000 each; but each of them was the size of a small house, and contained ten half-ton hammers, driven by eccentric cams, which smashed the ore down into iron batteries full of water and mercury.

  ‘Here!’ shouted Henry, and scooped up a handful of the paste which poured out of the stamps: a fine sloppy mixture of ore and water and mercury. If there was any silver or gold in the ore, it would be dissolved into the mercury. Then it could slip through the fine screens of the amalgamation tables on to the level below, where wide oscillating belts called vanners would shake out the lead and some of the silver.

  ‘I think I’m going deaf!’ screamed Nat, as they descended the wooden staircase which took them down to the fourth level.

  ‘Do
n’t worry!’ Henry screamed back at him. ‘The fumes will poison you first!’

  The fourth level was thick with pungent, metallic steam. Here, there were rows of amalgamating pans, like huge pressurized saucepans, in which the mixture of ore and water and mercury was ‘cooked’ for eight hours with salt and bluestone. It was then piped down a further level, where it was allowed to settle, and where at last the tailings could be flushed out, leaving the pan heaped with pure silver.

  As Nat and Henry reached the last level, their millman came out, wiping his hands on a filthy rag. He saluted Henry, and nodded to Nat, and then shouted in Henry’s ear, ‘I’m trying out a new process tomorrow. I was told that it worked a treat at the Santa Rita. It might work better here. They steep the ore in chlorine gas; to turn the silver into silver chloride; which will dissolve in water. Then they leach it out with a percolator.’

  ‘Sounds interesting!’ Henry shouted back. ‘Talk to me tomorrow!’

  At last they left the mill, and walked across to collect Nat’s mare, and go on down to the mine itself.

  ‘How’s the finance?’ asked Nat. ‘I called in at the store, and Augusta told me you were going to Denver at the end of the week to talk to David Moffat.’

  ‘We’re making up accounts now for the last month’s diggings,’ said Henry. ‘On a rough average, though, we’ve been bringing up $25,000 a week; and when we get that new winding-gear in, it could be very much more. In another two months, counting wages and supplies, we should have paid Lenont’s back for everything—drills, stamp-mills, vanners, you name it. We’ll be clear of debt, and every silver dollar we dig up from then will be pure profit.’

  ‘You know something, Henry, we’re very lucky men,’ said Nat. ‘And you, you’re the luckiest of all of us.’

  ‘God’s will, Nat, no more,’ replied Henry. ‘Do you want to go down the shaft and take another look at the face? They should be blasting in just a while.’

  Almost as soon as he spoke, there was a deep, suppressed thump below the ground, as ‘Bully’ Brett’s charges went off. That would mean the end of the night-shift; for while the dust settled the men who had been down below since yesterday evening would return to the surface, leaving the rubble-strewn face for the next shift to dig clear.