Silver Rock

by Luke Short

  A quick anger came to Sarah and then died. “That’s a low blow, chum.”

  “Not the first one this morning though.”

  A knock on the door interrupted them, and Sarah left the kitchen to answer it. Tully felt a momentary irritation at this intrusion. He had satisfied her curiosity about him, and had been on the verge of satisfying his own about her relationship with Hodes. Now, it would have to wait, he supposed.

  He heard the deep rumble of a man’s voice and Sarah’s easy answering laughter. Rising, he went down the passageway into the living room. Sarah was helping a balding, middle-aged man a couple of inches shorter than herself out of his dripping raincoat. It was the man Beth Hodes had been talking to in the bar last night.

  Sarah said, “Tully, this is Sam Horne. He runs the newspaper. Tully Gibbs, Sam.”

  Behind his horn-rimmed glasses Horne’s dark eyes were shrewd and impersonal. For a reason Tully could not have explained, he guessed immediately that Sam Horne was city bred and trained, one of the legion of those newspaper men who worked for the big dailies or press services only so long as it took them to make a stake and buy a rural newspaper of their own. His gray suit was neatly pressed, but his dark tie was askew under his button-down collar, as if proclaiming that a crease in his trousers were concession enough to the Sunday’s amenities.

  He held out a stubby hand and said in a surprisingly bass voice, “You must be the fellow who put Hodes through the wringer last night.”

  “That’s supposed to be a secret, Sam,” Sarah said.

  Horne looked at her with a detached amusement. “I watched it myself from the club rooms upstairs, along with ten other guys.” He glanced briefly at Tully. “That was strictly a once-over-lightly. Why didn’t you boot him in the head when you had him down?”

  Tully grinned, beginning to like Sam Horne. “That wouldn’t have been proper.”

  Horne shook his head. “No, but it would have been simple justice.”

  Tully glanced at Sarah to see how she was taking this. She was laughing silently at Horne. Now she said, “Want a martini, Sam?”

  Sam grimaced, “Good God, what a barbaric custom! Yes, of course I do.”

  Sarah disappeared into the kitchen and Horne walked into the middle of the living room, rubbing his hands and looking about him with obvious pleasure. “You know, this is what I need for my crib—a touch of the female,” he said approvingly. “I’ve got twice the space they have and I spend twice the dough on it. Still, it always looks as if they just shot a cowboy movie in it an hour ago.”

  “I know what you mean,” Tully said.

  Horne sank into the nearest easy chair and said, “You were Jimmy’s pilot, weren’t you?”

  Tully nodded.

  “Nasty little bastard, wasn’t he?” Horne observed. Tully shrugged noncommittally, as Sarah came in with the tray of martinis.

  “I was just observing to your friend that Jimmy Russel, in spite of his hero’s death, was a scab on the face of the body politic,” Horne said pleasantly. “I can’t imagine why Gibbs is back here, except to see what type of manure nourished that maggot.”

  “Now, Sam,” Sarah said.

  “Okay,” Horne said. He accepted his martini and studied it critically. “For these good things we thank thee, oh Lord,” he intoned, and then lifted his glass and nodded to both Tully and Sarah. “Cheers.”

  The talk soon turned to the war and Tully felt the dry, probing curiosity of the man. Tully was defensively trying to answer Horne’s questions as to why the Navy was reluctant to put up its jets against the MIG 15’s, when they heard quick footsteps ascending the stairs outside.

  “That’s Ma,” Sarah said.

  The door opened and Mrs. Moffit stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind her.

  “Hi, lady,” Sam said rising. “We’re gassing up without you.” Mrs. Moffit came across the room and Tully saw that she was a handsome woman. Her transparent raincoat did not hide her trim figure, and there was a high color in her cheeks put there, Tully supposed, by the chill of this rainy day.

  “This is Tully Gibbs, Ma,” Sarah said. “My mother, Tully.”

  Mrs. Moffit looked politely puzzled as she extended her hand.

  “I’ll catch you up on him later, Ma. Want a martini?”

  “Heavens, no,” Mrs. Moffit said. “Why are you drinking them at this hour?”

  “What’s the matter with the hour?” Sam Horne demanded. “In Hollywood this would be called a late start.”

  “Well, get something ready for Kevin,” Mrs. Moffit said. “I passed him on the stairs.”

  Tully glanced at Sarah and asked, “Couldn’t I help him?”

  Sarah shook her head promptly. “It takes him just seven minutes to climb them and he gets furious if you offer to help him,” she said.

  Mrs. Moffit hung up her coat and went on to the kitchen, calling over her shoulder to Sarah to set the table.

  Sam Horne was watching the opened door, and from it came the sound of slow and labored shuffles. Sam glanced at his watch and then murmured, “Never underestimate the power of a Sunday dinner. Do you suppose she left the door open so the smell of that roast would hurry him up?”

  Presently, old Kevin hove into sight in the doorway. Sarah, at the dining end of the big room, left off the table setting to greet him.

  “Hi, oldtimer,” she said, and extended her hand.

  Old Kevin looked scrubbed and burnished in his blue suit. His sparse white hair was neatly combed over his pink scalp, and his shave was so recent and so close that it was almost painful to behold.

  He came slowly into the room, ceremoniously shook hands with Tully and then with Sam Horne who said, “Mr. Russel, I have in my hand an alcoholic concoction known as a martini. Are you too young to start acquiring a taste for them?”

  Old Kevin said surprisingly, “Not if they’re very very dry, Mr. Horne.”

  After that, Tully was content to listen. He helped Sarah get dinner on the table and by the time they sat down to it, he felt as if he had always known these easygoing and friendly people. Mrs. Moffit was anything but an aging, woolly-headed female. Prodded by Sam Horne’s questions, she and old Kevin started reminiscing about Azurite’s boom days.

  Tully was puzzled that Mrs. Moffit seemed to recall accurately events that must have happened more than sixty years ago, but slowly he began to understand that she was a storehouse of the local folklore and that, as if by osmosis, she had acquired enough of Azurite’s history to gently correct old Kevin who was thirty years her senior. Inevitably, the talk was about mining and miners. Tully, his dinner finished, was listening in pleasant lethargy when Sam Horne addressed him. “What did you think of the Vicksburg Claims?”

  Tully could not quite hide the surprise he felt at Horne’s knowledge of his visit. He looked almost guiltily at Kevin, and then knew immediately that Kevin had probably heard all about it from Alec.

  Tully addressed himself to old Kevin. “It looked to me like a mighty good prospect, Mr. Russel.”

  Old Kevin nodded, and Tully observed that Sarah was watching him closely. Easy does it, he thought, and said no more.

  “Think a big outfit like Anaconda would be interested?” old Kevin asked.

  Tully thought a moment and then shrugged. “That’s hard to say, Mr. Russel, on what I’ve seen, but I doubt it. These big outfits are looking for a mountain of ore that would feed a thousand-ton mill. I can’t be sure, but I don’t think you have that much.”

  “Then it’s a small operation,” Sam Horne said.

  Tully nodded. “Compared to what they do, yes.”

  While he was talking, Tully noticed old Kevin fumbling around on the inside pockets of his coat. Presently, he brought out a couple of letters and laid them on the tablecloth before him, then he reached up to the breast pocket of his coat, brought out a pair of steel-rimmed glasses and carefully put them on. By the time he was finished, he had an audience grown silent with curiosity.

  Deliber
ately he took a letter from its envelope, held it before him and then looked around the group. “I have something to say, but I want to read this first,” old Kevin said. “This is a letter I got from Jimmy a month or so before he died.”

  Tully’s face seemed to turn to stone. Even at this distance he could recognize his own handwriting. He was aware of Sarah covertly watching him, and he knew that if his expression betrayed him now he was lost. He took a drink of water, leaned back in his chair, put his arm over its back and pulled idly at the lobe of his ear, hoping he was a picture of a man well fed and not quite bored.

  Old Kevin said, “Here’s what Jimmy wrote.” And he began to read “ ‘You remember I wrote you my lieutenant is a hard-rock miner. I wish I could bring him home with me and show him Vicksburg. I don’t suppose he’d be interested in it after the war because he’s got a good job waiting for him. But, Dad, we could make him rich and us rich, and making him rich is the least I could do.’ “

  Tully did not need to feign embarrassment; he could feel the hot blush mount in his neck, and for a miserable moment he had to accept the pleased, but unsurprised attention of everyone at the table.

  When old Kevin ceased reading, Tully raised his hand in protest. “That’s enough, Mr. Russel. I—” He faltered for lack of anything to say.

  Old Kevin put the letter down, then deliberately took off his glasses, pocketed them and then leaned back in his chair. “There it is, son,” he announced. “That’s what I was going to say. Funny it should happen the way it has.”

  Tully’s heart began to beat faster. To cover his excitement, he scowled and looked at old Kevin in a puzzled fashion, then he glanced at Sam Horne as if wordlessly asking for clarification.

  Horne said, “It looks like you’re tapped, boy.”

  “For what?”

  Old Kevin said, “You think there’s enough ore there to bother with, son?”

  “To bother with?” Tully echoed. “I think there’s a small fortune in it.”

  “Want to mine it share and share alike?”

  Right on a platter, lettuce and all, Tully thought exultantly. How should he act—grateful, bewildered, thunderstruck or just plain happy? he wondered. He settled on bewilderment, looking long at old Kevin, trying to project a convincing incredulity. “Why—I’d think it would be wonderful, Mr. Russel, but I don’t see where I belong in this.”

  Sam Horne put it bluntly, “You belong there because he wants you there. Don’t go coy on us.”

  Tully managed an embarrassed laugh, and only afterwards dared look at Sarah. The expression of deep pleasure in her face told him that his play-acting had been convincing, and for the briefest moment he felt a sharp hang-dog guilt.

  “Maybe I’m not doing you any favor,” old Kevin said slowly. “I don’t have to tell you, I’m broke.”

  Tully thought of many things at once then—of the fifteen hundred dollars combat pay he had in the bank, of the ten-thousand-dollar loan he had fought Ben Hodes for last night, of the gray body of lead, zinc and silver lying up on the Vicksburg Claims and, lastly, of the steady flow of substantial checks from the smelter. He knew this was not the moment to discuss the financing; it was the moment to accept his good fortune and to secure it. He said, “I don’t think that has to worry you, Mr. Russel. I could borrow enough to get a start.” Then he shook his head, as if in puzzlement. “Mr. Russel, are you sure you want to do this? Are you even sure what you are doing?”

  “They’re his claims, aren’t they?” Sam Horne asked.

  Tully only nodded, watching Kevin.

  The old man only said, “I’m sure.”

  It remained for Mrs. Moffit to express what they all seemed to feel. “I wish we had a bottle of champagne to celebrate with, don’t you, Sarah?”

  When Tully looked at Sarah she smiled, then she reached out with her left hand for Kevin’s arm and with her right for Tully’s, observing, “A handshake feels a lot better the next morning, Ma.”

  Smilingly, Tully and old Kevin shook hands across the table.

  For two hours the four of them talked, making plans, spending money they did not have and then laughing at themselves. Old Kevin revealed then that the smelter reports on his tests had shown fourteen percent lead, twenty-eight ounces silver and seventeen per cent zinc, confirming the figures Jimmy had told Tully.

  They all agreed that the greatest expense would be in constructing the road which properly deserved the financial aid of the county. Old Kevin, through the years, had obtained easements for a road through other properties, so there would be no trouble on that score. Horne explained, in his wry way, what Tully had already learned from Alec, that the county commissioners stubbornly refused Kevin any road aid.

  “Still, I’d like to talk to them,” Tully said finally. “When do they meet?”

  Sarah and Horne looked at each other, and then Sam said, “Why, tomorrow, isn’t it, Sarah?” It was agreed then that Tully would appear before them for one more try. And then their conversation returned to the claims. Discounting the windfall of a new road, it was Kevin’s idea, and Tully concurred, that once a road was in, a winter’s mining of high-grade ore would make the purchase of a small mill possible, and once they were able to ship concentrates, the real expansion would come.

  In the late afternoon Sam Horne had to leave and only then did the women, with Tully’s help, stir themselves to clear off the table and clean up.

  When Sarah and Tully returned to the living room, old Kevin was sleeping soundly in the most comfortable chair, a slight wispy little man whose sleep was as deep and dreamless as a child’s.

  Tully halted and looked down at Kevin and presently he heard Sarah stir beside him.

  “I’ve got something to tell my kids,” Tully murmured. “It’s not true that Santa Claus has a beard.”

  “Maybe Kevin has just discovered that too,” Sarah said. “You see, he counted on Jimmy for so long, but Jimmy wouldn’t help him. Jimmy couldn’t be bothered as long as there was a crap game floating around. I guess crap games are what decided Jimmy. The sports around town took him. He owed so much he had to leave town for a while. I guess that started him thinking, and he realized that the Vicksburg Claims were his only shortcut to money, real money. But by that time it was too late; the draft was breathing down his neck.” She shrugged. “Then Kevin counted on the government and they turned him down. All he had left was Ben Hodes and his offer of a one and a half per cent interest. So maybe you’re Santa Claus too, Tully.”

  Oddly, Tully felt a relief at her words. They made his letters of self-praise, his scheming and even his greed seem less reprehensible after all. It didn’t matter how he achieved his partnership so long as it was his money and his work that would develop it. Yet, the guilt lingered and he knew he was deceiving himself.

  It was time to go and when Mrs. Moffit returned to the room, Tully rose, thanked them for the dinner and excused himself. He shook hands with Sarah last and, his hand on the doorknob, he paused and looked down at her. “I can’t help but think you had something to do with all this,” he said.

  Sarah nodded. “You don’t think we’d turn old Kevin loose with just anyone, do you? You may not know it, but you were right up on the meat block this afternoon, like the new beau meeting the girl’s family.”

  Tully grinned. “I’m in, then?”

  “Like Flynn,” Sarah said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ben Hodes came in from the back porch and tramped through the dark kitchen into the library and dumped the load of wood he carried with a great crash into the metal wood basket. He hoped the racket would waken his sister, Beth, who was resting upstairs; he was lonely and wanted company.

  His Sunday had been a glum one. He had been unable to get hold of Sarah to explain his leave-taking last night. She would be at old Kevin Russel’s, he supposed, and would resent his coming there. He could, of course, have killed the day at the Elks Club shooting billiards or playing cards, as was the custom on a rainy Sunday evening, but eac
h time he thought of it he remembered his face. His lip was cut and swollen, but it would be down enough by tomorrow so that it would not disfigure him. The scratches on his cheek from the cinders were barely noticeable, yet these marks loomed enormously in his mind as a visible token of his defeat.

  Stoking the fire in the pleasant, tall windowed living room, he stood before the fireplace a moment, big hands on his hips. He wore an oversized sweat shirt that made his upper body huge and almost formless. Almost gently he touched his ribs and winced. He had taken a genuine beating, he knew, and oddly enough there was little resentment in him. He had picked on the wrong man and, what was worse, had pegged him for a coward because of his refusal to fight in the hotel bar. He’d thought Gibbs’ yarn about the broken legs was just crawling, whereas it was true. He’d simply guessed wrong. It was that simple. Yet how was he to know that the man who refused him a fight in the afternoon would lick him at night?

  Restlessly he cruised around the heavy furniture and finally hauled up in front of the cabinet bar. Here he poured himself a shot of whiskey, moved across to the big leather chair by the fire and was slacking into it when the bell pull sounded.

  Swearing softly, he set his drink on the mantelpiece and went out of the room into the corridor, to answer the door. For the thousandth time he cursed the frosted glass pane of the door which did not allow identification of a caller and made every visitor to the house a stranger until the door was opened.

  Palming open the door, he stood silent in disbelief, without giving greeting. His visitor was Tully Gibbs. Ben’s hand started to move to touch his lip and then fell to his side.

  Gibbs said, “I’d like to see you, if you aren’t busy.”

  Ben stood undecided and then, too proud to show unease, he swung the door open and said surlily, “Come inside.”

  He led the way into the library, indicated the other easy chair opposite his own, and said, “Want a drink?”

  Tully said he did. Ben named his stock, Tully made his choice and as Ben mixed the drink, he covertly regarded his visitor. There was a sort of “go-to-hell” look on Gibbs’ lean face even when relaxed, and Ben found himself more curious about the man than resentful.