West of Washoe (17 page)

The ladders were in surprisingly good condition for having been neglected for several months. The first one stretched to a rock landing, fifty feet below where the three met and huddled.

A lantern flashed its light down the shaft. “Keep going!” Holladay’s voice said. In the hollow silence, they heard the double
click
of his cocking revolver.

They descended another ladder that took them down forty more feet, Ross estimated. Again they stopped, hoping this was as far as they’d be forced to go.

The lighted square at the top of the shaft was blocked as a man began to descend the ladder after them. It was the rotund figure of Avery Tuttle. He stopped at the first landing and yelled down: “All the way to the bottom of the shaft!”

“Are you gong to shoot us if we don’t?” Ross yelled back.

“Just drop a few rocks on your heads,” he answered.

They started downward. Four more ladders brought them to the bottom of the hoisting shaft nearly three hundred feet below the surface. A point of light flared far above, like someone lighting a match for a smoke.

“What’s he doing?” Scrivener asked, looking up.

Before either of them could guess, the pinpoint of light came spiraling down toward them.

“Look out!” Ross cried, pushing them toward the mouth of an intersecting tunnel.

A tight bundle a foot square landed with a thump where they’d been standing.

“Maybe they decided to leave us some food,” Angeline said.

Ross cautiously moved to pick it up. A hissing stopped him. He saw the sputtering fuse smoking only two inches from the package—too late to dive and snuff it out.

“Back! It’s going to blow!” He only had time to shove them several yards into the tunnel beyond a bracing timber before the tightly bound pack of black powder exploded. The concussion knocked them into a pile atop each other. It was a deep-throated
boom
, louder because it was not imbedded in rock. Smoke and dust boiled into the tunnel; chips of rock sprayed the walls like buckshot. The protective timber leaned drunkenly away from the wall and toppled over.

Ross lay, face to the floor, in total blackness, breathing what air was left.

“Angeline…you hurt?” he managed to gasp.

“Don’t think so,” came her choking voice from under him.

He rolled over, eyes burning. “Martin?”

“I’m all right. Go back and see if the shaft is blocked,” the editor said. “Where’s the candle?” The darkness was total.

“Here…” Angeline said. “In my hand.”

Ross heard a match rake against the wall, and Scrivener took the candle from her hand and lighted it. The air was filled with dust and smoke. Angeline’s eyes were wide with fear.

Ross took the candle and went back to the shaft. Broken rock was piled to within a foot of the top of the tunnel they occupied. He plowed up the loose pile and
held the candle closer to the hole. Most of the rocks were the size of his head or smaller. With the tunnel not completely blocked, they could probably dig their way out. It wouldn’t take much to enlarge the opening so they could squeeze through.

He reported his findings to the others.

“We’d best be quiet until they leave,” Scrivener whispered, “or they’re liable to drop another pack of Giant Powder down to finish the job.”

They sat down to wait, leaning against the rough wall with the candle on the floor between them. The dust gradually settled, and the sweat began to dry on Ross. None of them spoke, as if afraid voices could be heard through the small opening in the rocks and all the way up the hollow shaft. But mostly a depressive atmosphere had settled on them. Ross realized this and determined to do something about lifting their spirits.

Finally Ross took the candle and climbed the pile again. He carefully moved a few rocks from the top so he could thrust his head and shoulders through. Twisting onto his back, he tried to see up the hoisting shaft, but everything was black. Either it was still night and their captors gone, or they’d covered the opening at the top.

He came back and reported his finding. “While we wait for daylight, let’s explore this tunnel,” he said, more to distract their brooding than for any hope of finding a way out. “If we don’t go into any cross-cuts or branches, we can find our way back.”

Scrivener stood and helped Angeline to her feet. Ross led the way with the lighted candle. The air was fetid, and getting warmer as the tunnel sloped downward. But there was enough oxygen for the candle to burn brightly.

Ross counted his paces. At three hundred he slowed. They’d passed two cross-cut tunnels, and paused to peer into them a few feet with the light, but didn’t enter. “Unless we had some way of finding our way back, we’d better not chance getting lost. That main shaft we came down is still our best hope of getting out,” Ross said.

“Wonder why they didn’t just kill us outright and dump our bodies down here?” Scrivener said.

“Slater would have done it in a second if Holladay had given the word,” Ross said, thinking of the blank-eyed killer. “But Holladay likes to be dramatic. Maybe he doesn’t have the stomach for cold-blooded murder.”

“I think he just wants us to suffer before we die,” Scrivener said. “And he can be a great distance away before we finally check out.”

The farther they went, the fouler the air became. There were no blowers above, forcing fresh air down the passageways. The candle flame began to burn lower.

“I feel like I’m suffocating,” Angeline finally said. “Let’s go back. There’s no way out in this direction.”

“She’s right,” the editor said. “We’d feel some kind of draft of fresh air if this led to any opening on the surface.”

They retraced their steps, Ross carrying the candle and trying to estimate how long it would last.

When they came to within fifty yards of the main shaft, they encountered a cross-cut tunnel. Scrivener stopped. “I feel some cooler air here. Let’s explore it.”

Ross consented, but had misgivings. The tunnel was smaller and shored up with heavy timbers. Apparently, it’d been long abandoned. The mountain was reclaiming its empty spaces. Support timbers were splintering and bowing from the incessant pressure of millions of tons of rock and earth settling. Fifty yards inside, the
air became moist. Algae sprouted on the rotting timbers and the atmosphere was dank and smelled of mold. The cooler air Scrivener detected was due to water tricking from the seams of rock and coursing down the rough walls to collect in a stream on the floor, continuing to flow in the direction they were headed. Only then did Ross realize how thirsty he was.

“Oh, my! I can get a drink and wash my face!” Angeline exclaimed, putting her hand under a stream of water dribbling off a ledge.

They took turns drinking their fill and rinsing the dust from their faces and hands. As refreshing as it was, the water had a strange taste, which Ross didn’t remark on. But he thought of the arsenic it probably contained, like much of the drinking water in the town above. It was diluted enough to cause only gastric upsets, rather than death. In any case, they might not live long enough to feel the ill effects of any contamination.

Even though the tunnel trended downward, they were drawn to explore it farther, since the air was cooler. The splintered and sagging overhead timbers were festooned with broad, slimy curtains of fungi, which they ducked under, or brushed aside as they went. Long, squirming ropes of the stuff hung down, twisted into fantastic shapes like the horns of a ram. Monstrous mushrooms of fungi bulged from moisture-filled cracks in the vertical braces.

“Listen!” Scrivener held up his hand for silence and they paused, listening intently. Only the far-off dripping of water and the incongruous ticking of the editor’s watch could be heard in the silence. “Thought I heard something that sounded like voices,” he said.

“Maybe the voices of miners killed down here,” Angeline uttered in a hushed tone. “Like spirits of the
dead that walk abroad in the New Orleans cemetery when the moon is full. Bodies are boxed above ground there because the soil is too wet to bury them.”

Her brown eyes were wide and solemn in the wavering candlelight.

“Thought I heard something,” Scrivener said. “Must’ve been mistaken. If only this were a working mine, we might have a chance of finding some miners. But…”

“We’ll get out of here,” Ross interrupted. “If we’ve seen everything there is to see, let’s go back.”

“Wait,” Scrivener said. “When an ore vein or ledge is located, miners tunnel nearby at an angle to come below it. That way they can blast and cut upward, so the rock will fall down where they can scoop it into ore cars. A lot less lifting that way. They take advantage of gravity when they can. If we keep on this way, we should come to a big cavern where the ore has been blasted out and hauled away.”

“Lead on,” Ross said, handing him the candle.

Ten more minutes brought them to what might have been a large, airy cavern, only to find it caved in nearly to the ceiling.

“Let’s go back,” Angeline said, her voice drooping with discouragement. “This is too scary. I’m feeling faint.”

Without a word, they retraced their steps until they came to the main drift and turned right for fifty paces to where the blast had partially blocked the tunnel.

Ross and Scrivener busied themselves clawing at the pile, raking rocks backward and enlarging the opening until it was big enough for them to crawl through on hands and knees.

Ross went first and reached back for the candle the editor handed across the pile. His heart sank. The ladder
they’d descended had been torn away by the blast to a height of thirty feet—far out of reach. And the vertical walls, although rough, provided no hand or footholds to climb. Hundreds of feet up, gray daylight illuminated the square opening at the top of the shaft. He usually rejoiced with the coming of every day. But now it was only a fact he noted and passed along to the others. Daylight or dark—neither had any significance to them. The thick candle he held could probably last another twelve hours, he estimated. And then they’d be in blackness for whatever time they had remaining. Would it be days of starvation? Would they go mad first? He felt a sinking sensation in his stomach. He couldn’t bring himself to voice the questions he knew were in the minds of his two companions. Had anyone missed them? Was anyone looking for them? How would they know where to look? The obvious answers were too discouraging even to think about, much less discuss.

One thing he did know, and that was he had to keep his mind busy. The best way to do that was to look for a way out while they were still reasonably fresh and strong. Mining practices on the Comstock were well known to Scrivener, and he would pick the brain of the editor for his knowledge of which of these tunnels, if any, could possibly lead to the outside.

While Ross was ruminating, Angeline and Scrivener crawled through the opening over the pile of rocks and stood beside him at the bottom of the hoisting shaft. They sat on the floor to rest and Ross began by questioning the editor about the probable design and layout of this mine.

“If we’re in the Dead Broke, I can’t say for certain, since I’m not familiar with this particular mine. From
what we’ve already seen, the square set timbering wasn’t used in the upper works where we are now. Needed more in the lower levels because of the weight of the rock above. Also, where we’ve explored so far is the older portion, abandoned before square-set timbering became the norm.”

“Where can we go to try for a way out before our candle is used up?”

Scrivener thought for a long minute or two, turning his head this way and that, as if trying to orient his mental picture. Finally he said: “Several of the mines in the region have shafts dug into the lower levels at an angle of about forty-five degrees or less. Ore is loaded into small ore cars called giraffes on rails that are winched up to a vertical shaft where the ore’s transferred to big buckets for hoisting to the surface.”

“Then an inclined tunnel would terminate right here at the main shaft?”

“Possibly, but I don’t see any here. Could be there’s more than one vertical hoisting shaft.”

“How would finding one of these inclined shafts help us?”

“Depending on how close the outside surface of the mountain was, the inclined tunnel might not connect to the vertical shaft at all, but rather would angle all the way to the outside, usually on the flank of the mountain, and the giraffes hauled out that way. It saves having to transfer the ore once again to the buckets for hoisting straight up.”

“I see…” Ross looked from one to the other. “It’s a long shot, but sounds as if finding one of those inclined tunnels might be our only chance. What do both of you think?”

Angeline shook her head. “I’m totally out of my
element here. It’s up to you two. I know nothing about mines.”

“I might be totally wrong, but I think that’s probably our best hope,” Scrivener said. “But we need to find one that goes to the outside, and doesn’t terminate in a vertical shaft. To do that from where we are, I think we’ll have to descend to a lower level. For ventilation and communication, miners dig winzes which connect one level to another. If we can find one of those, it’ll be a quicker way to go deeper in hopes of finding an inclined tunnel.”

“If both of you are agreeable, let’s get to it. We’re wasting candlelight sitting here.”

This time, instead of crawling back through the hole over the collapsed pile, they decided to try the tunnel leading off the opposite side of the vertical shaft. Scrivener’s sense of direction told them it led toward the east side of the mountain. Tracks for ore cars had been laid in this tunnel and soon curved to the right and began to slope gently downward, apparently following some long-gone vein of ore. They walked more than five hundred paces before Ross lost count, and they stopped to rest.

Using the angle of the grade, Ross calculated they’d now descended more than six hundred feet beneath the surface where they’d first entered the mine. The air grew stagnant, the flame smaller. At a brief rest stop, Ross said: “How many matches do you have?”

Scrivener fished the stick matches from his vest pocket. “Seven.”