West of Washoe (5 page)

The men came out into the welcome light of storefronts as they neared the livery.

“Next time I come through here after dark, I’ll be in a buggy or on a horse with my gun in hand,” Ross vowed.

“You know…that man’s voice sounded somehow
familiar,” Ross said, scratching his chin. But the name and face kept sliding off the edge of his consciousness and would not come into focus. “Maybe it’ll come to me later.”

Next morning Ross stood at the Ophir Mine and watched Scrivener’s buggy roll away.

“Here, put this on to keep your clothes clean,” said Michael Flannery, the foreman, handing him a pair of well-used canvas coveralls coated with smears of clay and dirt, stiffened with the drippings of candle wax and whitewash.

Flannery was a wiry, black-haired son of Erin with sharp eyes that seemed to take in everything. The foreman led him up a small hill to the mouth of a narrow shaft, handed him a thick candle, and lit it. “Hold this so the light reflects from the palm of your hand,” he said. “I’ll go down first.”

They backed into the opening and began descending a slightly canted ladder. The small opening and the sight of sky receded above them. The smoky wicks of their candles cast wavering light on the rough walls of the shaft. At the end of the ladder was a small spot of ground to stand on, similar to a landing. Then they started down another ladder. At the end of that one came another, and yet another, until Ross lost track of how many they’d descended. A large pipe descended parallel to the shaft. A ponderous pump somewhere was hoisting water from the depths of the mine.

Ross stepped down carefully, looking around him. It wasn’t light enough to see if silver ore lay in the loose dirt or rock of the narrow shaft.

Every few steps, Flannery paused and held his
candle near the dripping rocks and banks of earth. “There…you see it? Horblendic, feldspathic…graniferous! There…and there! See? Look at that forty-five degree dip. Very rich.”

“Yes, I see.” Ross ducked under a wooden beam and an overhanging spur of rock. He twisted himself around corners and stubbed his toe on piles of ore heaped on landings as they moved down from one level to the next.

Finally they reached the bottom. The square-set timbering was an ingenious invention of a German immigrant; it allowed men to burrow more than a thousand feet into the earth. Timbers eighteen inches square interlocked with one another to form hollow cubes of any desired size, like small rooms.

“Make way, gents. Stand aside!” came a call from ahead in the tunnel. Miners were pushing ore-filled handcars along the tracks. The whole tunnel wasn’t over five feet wide. The tracks and cars took up three feet of that, the square-set timbers the rest. Ross and the foreman hugged a dark, wet wall as the ore cars rumbled past.

With Flannery leading the way, they explored the fifth level, and the sixth level. The foreman seemed in a hurry to rush him through for a cursory tour.

“Slow down,” Ross said, crouching by a ledge of rock. “I want to take a closer look.” He pulled the small, prospector’s hammer from his belt and chipped off a sample.

At one point, miners were pitching down loose earth and rocks to the next level to be hauled out by ore cars. Ross and the foreman climbed up a long ladder.

When they’d reached the relative safety of the upper level, Flannery turned to Ross. “Recently two miners were killed by a dog in the main shaft.”

“A dog?” He had visions of a wild, rabid dog loose in the tunnels.

“They were on their way up in a bucket. A dog tripped trying to run across the mouth of the shaft up top. Fell into the shaft and hit the men a hundred feet below, and down they all went another hundred and seventy-five feet to the bottom. Wasn’t much left of them.”

Flannery was apparently trying to throw a scare into an outsider. He didn’t know Ross had crawled through many mines more dangerous than this one.

“That’s about it,” the foreman said, “unless there’s something else you want to see. All these tunnels and shafts look about the same.”

“I’m ready to go. Maybe I can jot down a few figures on your production, number of miners employed, how many miles of tunnels you have, capital outlay on equipment…that sort of thing.”

“Sure.” Flannery pointed the way they’d come down. “We can climb back up the ladders, or be dragged up the incline by a steam engine, or be hoisted up a shaft in a wooden bucket by means of a hand winch. Your choice.”

Ross didn’t relish the long, weary climb up a series of steep ladders. “I’ll take the hand windlass,” he said, choosing the least strenuous way.

He dispensed with the bucket and put a foot into a loop of the dangling rope. At a bell signal from the foreman, someone at the top began to hoist Ross. He bobbed around, swinging freely and scraped against the walls of the shaft. Eventually he arrived at the top and stepped off onto the landing platform.

Flannery gave him the statistics he asked for. Ross returned the coveralls and candle, then hiked back into town.

The usual crowds milled around the streets, sidewalks, saloons, and shops. The place hummed like a hornet’s nest. Ross gazed in wonder at the handbills plastered and nailed to every square foot of space on store fronts, porch posts, fences, and walls.
Cheaper than running ads in the paper
, he thought. The bills were pushing everything—brandy, cigars, stomach bitters, cheap suits, the variety show at Maguire’s Opera House. Under a boardwalk awning, an organ grinder was cranking out a melody on a well-used, one-legged music box, while a red monkey, less than two feet tall, scampered around at the end of a ten-foot tether, importuning all passers-by with his tin cup. Snatching out the coins that
clunked
into the cup, he handed them to his master.

Ross paused for a moment to watch.

“Now, where, outside of the Mediterranean, could a man see a sight like that?” a voice at his shoulder said.

Ross turned. “Sam Clemens.”

“Actually you wouldn’t see that sight in the Mediterranean at all,” Clemens went on, “because that’s a Red Uakari monkey. It’s found in Peru and Brazil.”

“Now, how in hell would you know that?”

Clemens shrugged. “I asked him.”

“The man or the monkey?”

Clemens chuckled.

“I saw you at the
Enterprise
fire the other night, but we haven’t been officially introduced. I’m Gilbert Ross, mine inspector and student of human nature.”

“Now, there’s a course you’ll never graduate from,” Clemens said, gripping his hand.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Ross asked.

“Sun’s not quite over the yardarm yet,” the curly-haired newsman replied. “Besides, I probably had more than my share last night. I’m just getting up and around, and was thinking of breakfast…or lunch.”

“So was I. Fancy some company?”

“Sure. This looks as good as any.”

They ducked into the nearby Howling Wilderness Saloon. A sign on the outside wall advertised a good square meal for 50¢.

Ross noticed the young reporter was looking a little rumpled—unshaven around the heavy reddish mustache that hid his mouth, white shirt wrinkled, thick, curly hair appearing to have been combed with his fingers.

“Lunch is on me,” Ross said. “I’m sixty dollars richer than I should be after a run-in with one of your hold-up men last night between here and Gold Hill.” He related the incident of holding up his hands, clutching the gold coins.

“By God, I’d write up a short piece about that, but I’m afraid it’d just alert the next robber to the trick.”

“Where you from, Sam?”

“Missouri. Been at the paper sixteen months. Couldn’t seem to make a living mining.”

“What made you come West?”

To Ross, the young man appeared to be on the underside of thirty.

“The war shut down commercial river traffic on the Mississippi, and ended my job piloting. Then my brother Orion was given a political appointment as secretary of the territorial government, and I came along as his unpaid assistant.” He paused and proffered a cigar. Ross declined with a shake of his head. Clemens lighted one himself, his head disappearing behind a cloud of white smoke.

“
Whew!
” Ross fanned the air. “What
is
that?”

“A Wheeling long nine,” Clemens replied, holding the cigar between thumb and forefinger and looking fondly at it. “Got acquainted with them when I was
a cub pilot on the river. They have one virtue which recommends them above all other cigars.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re cheap.”

“I see,” Ross said, sliding his chair back into clearer air.

“They’re also deadly up to thirty paces.”

“That’s for sure. Probably kept away all the mosquitoes on the river, too.”

“You bet.” He took another puff and squinted at Ross through swirling smoke. “What’s your story?”

Ross shrugged. “Been around the world, and wrote a few travel books. Studied geology. Served a spell as a correspondent for
Harper’s Weekly.
Widower now. Grown kids. Presently working for the government as a mine inspector.”

“Ever take a flyer in mining stock yourself?”

Ross shook his head. “Too much of a gamble for me, even if the stock is good when you buy it. Mother Nature is inconsistent with her gifts. I do keep my eyes open for certain friends and give them tips on good-looking mines.”

“When I first came out here, I tried staking a claim and digging up the silver and gold myself. Found out that’s more work than working, and damned little to show for it. Sold out for a tuppence and went to trading stock. Easier than working a shovel, but a lot riskier. Got fleeced. Finally took a job with the paper for wages, and went back to eating regular,” he finished in a barely discernible drawl. His eyes twinkled with good humor as he puffed on his cigar. “Why, just last night I was offered a hundred running feet of the Scandalous Wretch at a dollar a foot. Not an hour later another friend tried to unload his two thousand shares of Bobtail Horse and Root Hog or Die for only ten cents a share.”

“Oh?”

“They swore these were all producing mines over near Devil’s Gate.”

“Did you bite?”

“If I’d been a newcomer, I might’ve been tempted. As it was, I knew all three of those mines. They don’t produce enough to pay the assessment. Pick and shovel operations, in spite of the fancy printing on the stock certificates. If they ever squeeze out as much as fifty cents’ worth of silver to the acre, then I’m the next governor.” He chuckled and signaled the waiter across the crowded room, then turned back to Ross. “Mind if I ask whether you’re a single-ledge man or a multiple-ledge man?” He looked at Ross with narrowed eyes through the curling cigar smoke like a Pharisee about to trap Jesus with a loaded question.

But Ross was ahead of him. “I’m not quite the tenderfoot you take me for, Sam. If I say all the mines around here are but individual parts of a single ledge of rich ore, you’ll report it in the paper and I’ll be run out of town. The livelihood of every storekeeper, lawyer, and small mine owner depends on there being many ledges that underlie each other, criss-cross and go here, there, and yon in multiple directions.”

Clemens laughed aloud. “You’re not a geologist, then?”

“Closest thing to it. But even professors of geology or mining engineers have no way of knowing. Not even a man with a degree in geology could have the expertise to know whether it’s one ledge or many, since the whole thing is buried hundreds of feet in the earth and protrudes through the surface only here and there. When I was here in Eighteen Sixty, when this place had just started to boom, I drew a map of what I thought the ledges looked like and where they ran. It resembled a
handful of straw somebody’d thrown down on a board and varnished in place. But some fools took it for gospel, instead of my educated guess. Regardless of what I may think, personally I’m a multiple-ledges man in public.” He pushed back his chair and crossed his legs, as the waiter arrived to take their order. They settled on the special—pork and beans, onions, cabbage, bacon, and sourdough bread.

“The multiple-ledges theory is what keeps legions of lawyers in business,” Clemens continued. “Nearly everybody on the Comstock is at dagger points in some kind of litigation over intersecting claims, and which ones have the right to follow which veins, and so on and on.”

Ross nodded. “The lawyers are apparently the ones making all the real money in this town.”

“The lawyers and the outlaws,” Clemens added. “Or did I just repeat myself?”

“Are the legal judgments fair?”

“When a learned decision is handed down against a claimant, that’s usually not the end of it. The case is then settled out of court as often as not. The loser shoots the winner.”

“Then why don’t they eliminate the middle man and go to gun play right off?”

“The territory would never become a state if its citizens ignored the law.”

“So the judges’ rulings are basically fair, but not respected?”

“We’ve got the most upright judges in the country down at Carson City. They’re only considered corrupt if they take bribes from both sides at the same time.”

“Couldn’t ask for anything fairer than that,” Ross said, suppressing a grin. “Are you working on a story today?”

“Sure am. Nothing big, but at least I don’t have to invent something. A widow woman who lives a half mile from our cabin knocked the bottom out of her well.”

“Sounds like the beginning of a tall tale.”

“For once it’s not. I walked over there to check it myself. Her well’s about thirty feet deep. She went out and dropped a wooden bucket down to get some water. Bucket hit the water, and it was like somebody pulled a plug. The next minute, she had a bucket dangling on a rope with nothing below it. Turns out the Mexican Hat Mine workers, without knowing it, had tunneled right under her well. The water had gradually soaked through the thin layer of soil separating them. When she dropped the bucket, the concussion of it hitting the water broke right through into the tunnel.”

“Only on the Comstock…”

“I expect the whole town to collapse and slide down into the mines in the next few years.”

“The robbers will have the place cleaned out by then,” Ross said. “Does Virginia City have a police force?”

“The territorial government provides for one. But, as you can see, a handful of policemen have all the chance of chipmunks in a forest fire. Reckon that’s why every man in town carries a gun to settle his own disputes.” He frowned. “In my case, that may not be such a good idea.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m the one mainly responsible for Martin Scrivener’s getting into it with Frank Fossett, editor of
The Gold Hill Clarion.
”