Fourteen
R.P. Grover said, ‘He’s crazy. I said that right from the very start, now didn’t I?’
Henry peered down the shaft. ‘Do you think he’s serious?’
‘I didn’t at first, sir. But then he dropped that stick of dynamite down the shaft; and then I believed him; he’s crazy. He could do anything. Set us back six months’ production. Maybe worse, depending on how much damage he does.’
Henry listened for a moment to the strange hollow singing that comes out of every mine-shaft, as underground draughts blow, and men whisper and hundreds of rats rush, and water drips like grandfather clocks. It was an extraordinary chorus, eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth, and often deeper. Echoing, deceptive, the voices of the voluntary tomb. But from George Hook there was no sound at all.
‘Where is he?’ Henry asked. ‘I mean, not exactly. But approximately.’
‘About two hundred feet down, sir. Just below gallery fifteen, as far as we can judge it. He’s sitting in that bucket, and he’s jammed the pulley-wheels with something; screwdrivers, probably, so that we can’t wind him up and we can’t lower him down. And from what he’s been shouting out, he’s got himself sixty or seventy sticks of giant powder sitting right in that bucket alongside of him, and he isn’t afraid to let the whole lot off, himself, too.’
Henry dusted his hands and stood up straight. It was dark inside the winding-house, but thin knives of bright grey daylight shone through the cracks in the hastily constructed shake roof. One of the men offered him a flask of whiskey, and said, ‘Take a pull, sir? Breakfast.’
Henry shook his head. ‘What did Mr Hook say before he went down? Did anybody hear?’
‘Just me, sir,’ put in the winding-engineer, already white-faced with tiredness. ‘Lower me down to sixteen, that’s what he said, and that’s what I did; and then the bucket jammed. That’s when I called out to ask him what was wrong, and that’s when he said he’d stuck himself fast on purpose, and that he was going to blow the whole mine up, sir, kit and boodle, if you and Mr Grover wasn’t brung.’
R.P. Grover added, ‘I was the first one here, sir and shouted down at him to hear what it was he wanted.’
‘And?’ asked Henry. ‘What does he want?’
‘Confession, sir,’ R.P. Grover muttered, out of the corner of his mouth.
‘What?’
‘Confession, sir; to Mr Rische. That’s what he wants.’ Henry took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. It was cold up here this morning, up at the top of California Gulch, and their breath blew from their lips like dirty rags. A heavy mass of grey cloud was rolling in from the northwest, over the jagged pines; and some of the older men were talking about a blizzard. The mine was at a standstill, because George Hook had jammed up the winding-gear, and the men stood around in shivering clusters, kicking their heels and clapping their hands as if they were applauding their misfortune.
Henry was offered a cup of hot black coffee, which he drank all at once, blistering the roof of his mouth. Then he went back to the top of the mineshaft, and knelt down, and at length called out, ‘George! Is that you, George? This is Henry Roberts!’
There was a long, distorted, echoing yowl. Then a voice came back, surprisingly clear, as if George Hook were standing only a few yards away, and it said, ‘Murderer.’
‘Come on up,’ yelled Henry.
‘No,’ came the reply. ‘Not until you say it was you that killed August.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t kill him. It was an accident. Now, take out those screwdrivers, or whatever it is you’re using to jam those wires, and let us wind you up. Come on, George, this isn’t doing anybody any good.
‘Confess first,’ George Hook demanded.
Henry looked over at R.P. Grover, but R.P. Grover tersely shook his head. ‘Don’t say a word, sir. Any confession, and they’ll be bound to send for the sheriff, just to investigate; they’ll have to; and who knows what clues he might turf up? Come on, sir, better safe.’
Henry asked, ‘He’s set off one stick of dynamite already?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said R.P. Grover. ‘As far as I can tell, it didn’t do too much damage; but he’s sitting on two hundred times more. If he lets that off, sir, he won’t only be blowing himself to kingdom come; he’ll be blowing the heart from this mine. The square-sets will be bound to give in; and then the lode will collapse in on top of them. And—’
‘Yes?’ asked Henry, lifting his head from a diagram of the mine.
‘Well, sir, there’s thirty-one men still down there, sir. Finishing off the night-shift; but now they can’t get up.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ Henry demanded. ‘You mean to say there are thirty-one men down there; all at risk from this single ridiculous lunatic?’
R.P. Grover looked embarrassed. ‘Well, sir, I’m sorry; but the truth is that we can’t confess.’
‘Even though thirty-one men will have to be crushed to death?’
‘Sir—’
‘Wait,’ said Henry, and went back to the top of the shaft. He hesitated, drew a huge breath, and then shouted, ‘George! Can you hear me?’
Echoes, pause, and then George shouting, ‘Yes; is that you, Mr Roberts?
‘That’s right, George, it’s me. George, listen, there are some men down there, thirty-one of them. You don’t want to hurt any of them, do you? They’re prospectors, just like you. Good old boys from the times gone by. Most of them you probably know. But if you set off that giant powder, well, you won’t know any of them for very much longer. And you’ll be facing a charge of mass murder, George, when we wind you up.’
‘You killed August, Mr Roberts, and if you want to save those men, and this mine, well then, you’d better confess.’
‘I was nowhere near this mine when August was killed.’
‘Maybe not. But you gived out that instruction, didn’t you? You of all people.’
‘George, you’re making this up. This is all in your mind. Now, for God’s sake take out those screwdrivers and let us haul you up. We can talk, then, I promise; and if you have any grievance, you can air it with the sheriff, and anybody else you want to talk to. George, I didn’t kill August, that’s the truth, and all you have to do now is come on up, and we won’t say anything more about it. Do you hear me?’
There was a second’s silence, and then a shattering boom, and after a moment or two a billowing cloud of blinding grey dust blew out of the top of the winding-shaft and choked into the shed, making everybody cough and wheeze and cover their eyes.
‘He’s serious,’ R.P. Grover said, laconically.
‘You bet your ass,’ spat the winding-engineer. ‘Serious? Jesus!’
Henry took R.P. Grover aside, leading him by the elbow. ‘Didn’t you mention an accident once, at the Comstock Lode; something about drillbits?’
R.P. Grover sniffed, and wiped his nose with the back of his index finger. ‘Are you trying to suggest what I think you’re trying to suggest?’
‘What choice do we have? We can’t wind him up, we can’t get down to him, and he’s threatening the lives of thirty-one of our men. There’s no point in trying to shoot him, either; there’s more risk of hitting the giant powder than him.’
Uncomfortably, R.P. Grover turned around and looked back at the head of the mine-shaft. The dust was just beginning to settle now, although the men standing close to the shaft were still nothing but dim shadows. Then he turned back to Henry, and said, ‘They were winching up a bucket full of drillbits, that’s all, and one of them caught on a timber, so that the bucket tipped and the whole lot of them fell out. They fell for half a mile, and hit eight men in a car coming up. Five was killed instant.’
Henry said, ‘All right, then. Clear the winding-shed, tell the boys that everything’s under control. Then wheel up a barrow-load of steels; and hammers, too, whatever you can find.’
R.P. Grover hesitated for a moment; but then he shrugged, and returned to his men, shrilling his whistle. ‘Let�
��s clear the shed, boys, let’s get ourselves out in the air, now. Let’s give Mr Roberts a chance to talk this man out of the shaft. Look alive now, let’s go.’
Soon the winding-shed was empty except for the engineer, and R.P. Grover, and two of R.P. Grover’s most experienced hands, and Henry. The miners filled up a wooden wheelbarrow with more than twenty worn-down drills, mostly three-foot change drills of three-quarters of an inch diameter, although R.P. Grover added five or six bull steels, about a foot long, with 11/4-inch tips.
‘I think you have to give him one last chance,’ said R.P. Grover. His two assistants stood back, their eyes wide in their grimy faces, quite aware of what Henry was proposing to do, and frightened by it.
Henry approached the shaft again. ‘George!’ he shouted. ‘George, can you hear me?’ The echoes were muffled by the dust; but at last George shouted up at him, ‘I can hear you, you murderer. And all I’ve got to say to you is this: you’ve got five minutes to confess; and if by that time you haven’t, then believe me this mine is going up and your fortune is going to be lost for ever.’
‘George, this is insane. There are thirty-one men down there.’
‘You can save them, Mr Roberts. All you have to do is admit that you done it.’
Henry stood back from the shaft. R.P. Grover said, ‘Shall we wait the whole five minutes, Mr Roberts?’
Henry shook his head. ‘He’s not going to change his mind. The longer we wait, the more danger those men are in.’
R.P. Grover beckoned to one of his miners, but the man folded his arms tightly and violently shook his head. ‘I ain’t tipping no steels down that shaft, not with a man down there.’
Henry turned, and looked at the other miner. ‘How about you?’
‘No, sir. Not me. My ma was a Cathlick.’
Henry turned at last to R.P. Grover and R.P. Grover stared back at him with an expression that said, if you order me, I’ll do it; but by God I don’t want to.
‘Can you think of a better way?’ asked Henry. He could feel perspiration prickling his moustache,
‘I don’t know, sir. It’s not for me to say.’
‘You worked out a way before, with Mr Rische.’
‘That was an accident, sir.’
‘Three minutes, Mr Roberts!’ cried the distorted voice from the shaft.
Henry tugged out his handkerchief and wiped his face and his hands. Then, his heart banging, he bent down and grasped the handles of the wheelbarrow, and pushed it slowly towards the very brink of the shaft. George was at level fifteen, deep down in the new vertical shaft they had excavated to penetrate even further into the mountain; a good two hundred feet below the surface. Even so, the steels would take only two seconds to reach him, and by the time they struck him they would be dropping at nearly a hundred feet per second.
‘Mr Roberts!’ came the faint garbled cry.
Henry didn’t wait any longer. With a grunt of effort that hurt his chest, he tipped up the wheelbarrow’s handles; and with a ringing clatter the whole load of drills went cascading down the shaft, banging and tumbling as they struck protruding timbers, setting up a hellish cacophony that seemed to echo on and on and on. Henry set down the barrow, and then remained where he was, listening. There was nothing now, only the sighing of the draught through the ventilators. R.P. Grover came up and stood close behind him, listening too, and holding his pocket-watch open as the five-minute deadline approached.
‘Five minutes,’ he said, in a hoarse voice.
They waited for the great explosion; but as the second hand crept silently around the watch-face yet again, no explosion came. Henry turned to the winding-engineer, and said, ‘See if you can jerk the bucket free.’
The winding-engineer engaged the gears, and the engine sputtered and chugged, but then the cables jerked to a halt again. They might have succeeded in disposing of George Hook, but the gear was still jammed. Until it was freed, thirty-one miners would be trapped below ground, and work at the Little Pittsburgh would have to remain at a standstill.
Henry didn’t hesitate. ‘Give me your gloves,’ he said to R.P. Grover.
‘You’re not climbing down there, Mr Roberts?’
‘It’s my mine, Mr Grover, and I shall do what I wish. Now, give me your gloves.’
Reluctantly, R.P. Grover handed over his heavy leather working-gloves, which he always kept jammed in his belt. Although they were a size too small for him, Henry tugged them on, and then approached the shaft again, standing right on the very brink. He might as well have been balancing on the parapet of a tall building; except that there wasn’t a single building in America, not even in New York, which was eight hundred feet high.
‘Take your time, sir,’ said R.P. Grover. Henry looked down into the darkness, and nodded. ‘I intend to.’
He reached across the open shaft and nervously snatched the hoisting cable in his right hand. The cables had been invented by A.S. Hallidie, the designer of the San Francisco cable-car system, and they were flat, more like tapes than ropes, five inches wide and almost an inch thick, made of braided steel wire. They were strong and durable, and they allowed buckets and cars to be hoisted up and down the shaft at terrific speeds, but they were awkward to grip on to, and greasy, and as Henry reached over and grasped the cable in his left hand, too, he felt a lurch of fear in his stomach that he was going to slip.
‘I’ll help you back, sir, if you change your mind,’ called R.P. Grover.
‘No,’ said Henry. Then, less breathlessly, ‘No. I’ll be all right.’
He swung his legs out and gripped on to the hoisting cable like a well-dressed monkey. He slid down two or three feet, and the sole of his handmade shoe was torn at the side; but at last he managed to get a satisfactory grip, and began to lower himself down into the shaft, half-climbing, half-sliding, stopping every now and then to re-adjust his handhold, and take a breath.
Gradually, the light of day began to fade, and he found himself descending into darkness. Some of the lower galleries were lit, and when he looked down he could see dim flickering lights shining on to the wall of the shaft; but after a while he began to feel that the whole world was closing in on him, and that he was bound to lose his grip on the cable and fall. Even when he passed the 80-ft mark, he was suffocatingly aware that there were still more than 100 feet to go, deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain; into that hot, oppressive, whispering asylum of pain and hammers and sudden death.
He had known that the descent was going to be difficult; but he hadn’t anticipated for a moment that it was going to be such hell. By the time he had climbed down 100 feet he was whining for breath, and his hands were clenched with cramp. His waistcoat and coat were drenched with sweat, and the abrasive edges of the hoisting cable had already torn through his trousers. He closed his eyes and kept on making his way down, sliding in intermittent jerks, trying to prevent himself from gathering so much momentum that he tore his way through his gloves; because once he did that there would be nothing to save him but the flesh and bone of his bare hands. R.P. Grover had told him plenty of horror stories about men climbing down cables: sliding so fast that they had been faced with the instantaneous choice of letting go and falling two hundred feet, or losing their hands and half of their forearms in a gory attempt to slow themselves down.
Somewhere that must have been nearly three-quarters of the way down, he gripped the cable as tightly as he could, and spun there, his head lowered, sweating and wheezing and coughing, keeping his hands clenched around the wire by bitter willpower, and nothing else.
‘You have to go on,’ he told himself. Then, ‘Henry, why the hell did you do this?’ He could only climb down. There wasn’t even the remotest possibility of climbing back to the surface. He doubted if his muscles had the strength to take him up more than two or three handholds, let alone two hundred feet.
He went on down. His thighs began to bleed, lacerated by the braided wire. His leather gloves were in shreds, and in places he could feel the wire
rubbing against his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to think of something else, of anything else, of mountains and plains and meals at the Grand Hotel; of Baby Doe reaching out to touch him. But all he could hear was the clanking of the jammed-up winding-gear, and the deathly murmuring of the ventilation, and the voices of R.P. Grover and all of the miners who were standing at the top of the shaft, amplified but curiously altered, like the voices of men who had been magically turned into bulls, and bears, and growling dogs.
‘—kill himself, going down there—’
‘—climbed? Is he crazy?—’
‘—do now?—’
Unexpectedly, his foot touched something; a curved metal rim that swayed, and banged against the sides of the shaft. With an extraordinary feeling of terror and relief, Henry realized that he had actually reached the bucket in which George Hook had been suspended, and that his climb down the hoisting wire was over. Carefully, biting his lip, sweating hot sweat over cold sweat, he lifted one leg into the bucket, and then the other; and at last was able to crouch down in the corner, feeling the bucket sway and tilt beneath him, breathing harshly, his legs torn, but his hands intact, and safe.
There was very little light in the shaft, but enough to show Henry what had happened. George Hook was sitting in the opposite corner of the bucket bundled in his black fur coat, his face lifted aloft, as if he were still looking up to see what that clanging noise could be. A three-foot change steel had fallen like a spear, and struck him directly in the right eye, driving directly through his brain, down his neck, into his chest, out through his back just above his right buttock, and embedded itself in the metal floor of the bucket, holding him there, pinioned, in an oddly childish crouch. The fur of his coat was sticky with blood; the bedraggled plumage of a prospector who should have been wealthy, but never was. Henry wiped blood from his hand and thought to himself: this man lived for loyalty, and died for it, too; and not for gold, after all, nor for silver, nor for any kind of riches which could be excavated out of the ground. And the sadness of it was that Henry had liked him, George Hook, and August Rische too, and their fleabitten dog, and now all three of them were gone.
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