Bandana nodded. "Cain't fault yer logic, Augie, but the way I hear it, Chance McAllister's been on yer side in this thing agin' the other owners. Ain't that so?"
Augie Jakes never got a chance to reply. Explosion thundered through the shaft. Sudden darkness engulfed the men; bodies crashed in all directions under a hail of rock and splintered timber. The explosion doused their oil lamps and candles, but they didn't need light to know the mine had caved in around them.
Hart strained his massive body against the entombment of fragmented rock, and found, with intense relief, that he could pull himself free. Dust and rock particles sucked up into his lungs, and he fought to speak above the painful pounding in his ears.
"McBain!" he shouted, shocked by the unaccustomed reverberation of his voice in the filthy space. "Johnson! McNamara! Jakes!" Grunts or hoarse responses, or ominous silences, greeted Hart's roll call. "Kittery, O'Brien, Schmidt, Kowalski!" Coughs and gasping breaths or cries of pain punctuated the names as Hart ticked off what men he could recall were on this shift. All but O'Brien responded. Kittery moaned and those who could walk, moved toward the sound to help him.
The dark and musty smell of rock that had lain undisturbed in nature's bosom for a million years filled the space with a sickening density. What was left of the air was barely breathable. Water seeped and dripped. Hot water.
Someone struck a match and a tiny candle flame cast flickering illumination on the garish tableau. Seven or eight fear-sick faces materialized; Hart could read in each that this was a moment every man had prepared himself for from the first time he'd ever gone hard-rock—a contained terror that was always in the gut, eating at it like a tenacious maggot—fear of being buried alive.
"You're hurt, Bandana," Hart said sharply. A patch of dark blood fouled the shoulder of McBain's shirt in the candle's quivering light. "There's filth all over that cut—you'd better let me try to clean it up a little so it doesn't get infected."
"Infected!" Bandana snorted back. "Hell, meat don't never spoil up here in these mountains. What water we got we'll need for drinkin', not cleanin'."
"If we're all buried alive, infection won't matter much," McNamara volunteered.
"Let's inventory what we got that's useful," Schmidt called out. The men groped in the ruins for the lunch pails they'd been holding before the explosion; most had been spilled or buried; three remained intact.
"Count the candles," someone said—fear of dying in the dark was even worse than starvation:
The men checked their injuries and their small group of supplies in an orderly fashion. One was hurt besides Bandana, but not gravely. O'Brien was dead and Kittery was nowhere to be found. Two half-spilled oil lamps and eighteen candles—thank God the next shift's candles had been stored beneath the lunchroom's bench; it was enough to keep one light going for three to four days, lighting the new from the last of the old, if the air held out. Each miner understood that the candles used oxygen too precious to waste, but the alternative darkness could drive a man mad. They'd all heard stories....
"We've got bits and drills and picks," Hart said. "Maybe we can dig our way out."
"We're six hundred feet down," Bandana answered quietly. "And this seepage don't look good to me. Out there, they know where the water's comin' in from, down here, we don't. If we weaken the wrong wall we could get parboiled."
Hart weighed the danger of digging against sitting and waiting to die. "We could sound out the walls, and get a sense of where the water's coming from. I've a hunch it's the direction of the Little Nell—but you can't dig with that bad arm."
"What beef I got is in the shoulder," Bandana said shortly. "I kin dig like the next man."
Hart didn't argue.
Both owners eyed the walls warily in the flickering shadows. It was damned hard to hold back the primal fear of burial.
"If that water breaks through, we'll be drowned, boiled, or steamed long before starvation, thirst, or madness kills us," Bandana whispered to Hart.
"Always good to have choices," Hart replied grimly, his eyes meeting Bandana's in the darkness.
Each of the trapped men tried to clear a patch big enough to sit or lie—their cramped ruin was jagged with crushed rock and only the splintered square-sets gave them space to stay alive.
Hart knew the tunnel charts better than the others; he asked if anyone had paper and pencil, and Kowalski sheepishly proffered a scrap, the reverse side of which held a love note from the man's wife. Hart carefully avoided reading it; with Bandana's help he rendered an approximate map of the interior.
"Here's where I put us—at least two hundred feet from the most logical direction for help to come from." Bandana nodded agreement and glanced once again around the black hole.
The men had settled into two small groups, the owners on one side, the rest of the survivors on the other; one man seemed intent on examining the rock wall, another was fashioning something out of a broken powder case and a piece of fractured pipe. Bandana shook his head at the resiliency of the human spirit, and turned his attention back to Hart—it struck him that if you had to be stuck in a tight spot with somebody, Hart was a good bet. Bandana kept his voice low for privacy.
"How the hell d'ya think that Water got through? Far as I know, there was a million tons of quartz between us and it."
"Who cares how it got in," Hart replied. "The real question is how the bloody hell are we going to get ourselves out of here?"
"Got somethin' for you, McBain," Jeremy Johnson interrupted, handing Bandana the box he'd been busy on for the previous hour. McBain glanced up to see what the boy held in his hand and was startled to see that out of the fractured powder case, he had fashioned a crude musical instrument; four tightly drawn rawhide shoelaces had been stretched into strings. In his other hand he held the pipe length, one end was plugged up and the other had been made into a mouthpiece so that, given the crack in the pipe and its drill holes, a flute of sorts had been fashioned.
Bandana fingered the thudding strings of the unimaginable instrument. "Let me see that, young feller," he said as he and Hart exchanged glances at this attempt to whistle past the graveyard. Anything to help keep spirits up would be worthwhile, their own as well as the men's.
"That's a damned fine invention you got there, son," Bandana said with considerably more enthusiasm than he felt. "I just might be moved to a chorus or two." Johnson pulled a penny whistle from his pocket and the huddled men made as much noise as possible with the improvised orchestra.
Cave-in! Damn it to bloody hell, was there anything else in his life that could come crashing down at this moment? Chance didn't wait to hear the end of what was being said by the mine foreman who'd pounded on his door.
He felt the air shut off from his own lungs at the thought of his brother trapped in the mine shaft. Dead or injured... suffocated by a mountain of rock. Hart, who hated the world beneath the ground.... No! He couldn't let himself think such thoughts —not now, not when he had to think clearly to save them.
A steady gray rain beat down as he made his way toward the mine works; funerals and disasters always happen in the rain, he thought grimly as he neared the entrance. Men, women, and children were already gathered in tight murmuring knots, crying out for information about their men.
Chance shouldered his way gently through the crowd. Inside, Caz and several shift foremen were already gathered over a shaft chart. Lanterns swayed in the gloomy morning light, throwing yellow shadows over the oilcloth.
Caz clapped him hard on the shoulder, a gesture of compassion.
"What the hell happened?" Chance demanded.
The color rose in Caz's already ruddy face, then drained again. "Explosion. Somewhere around Stope 18. The whole front end is caved in. It's flooding, Chance. I can hardly bring myself to say it out loud to you, mate. Underground river. Hot as blazes. We'll have to get them out of there fast, or..." He let the thought trail off.
"Could be six, mebbe eight days dig," a man named Flynn piped up. "Might
not be worth it, considering the odds a' gettin' them out."
The ferocity in Chance's eyes stopped Flynn short.
"Get every man you can lay your hands on and start them digging! Sound the alarm to every mine around for volunteers. Pay them anything they want. Get a survey team in there, now, to find out the extent of the damage. I want to know exactly where those men are and how to get them out."
"We're doing that already, mate," Caz said low and evenly.
"Then do it faster, Caz. I'm going after the other owners to enlist their help. When I come back here, you sure as hell better have more to tell me than that you can't get them out of there in less than eight days!" Caz bit his underlip; he knew, better than most, the love the two McAllister brothers bore each other.
Chance turned abruptly and strode from the building; the men behind him shook their heads and murmured among themselves.
"Gonna be some hell of a time gettin' men to go down into boiling water," Santori, the cage man, said to no one in particular.
Caz cut him off; it never paid to let bad news get started. "Somebody hightail it over to Mr. Madigan's office. He's in town from New York this week, and he's got more mine-engineering experience than the rest of us." Someone nodded and headed for the door.
Madigan, having ditched his gear and tethered his roan inside his own stable, was warming himself before the fire with a cup of coffee and the morning paper when the foreman from the Fancy Penny pounded on the door and asked him to come quickly, his help was needed.
Chance left the last mine owner's office, swearing under his breath. Four in a row had said no. His stand on the strike had made him enemies; he hadn't realized how many or how vindictive. It was all done gracefully, of course. "Sorry, McAllister, I can't spare the men." "Too dangerous down there; you can't expect me to risk men's lives on a hopeless cause. Your men are dead already." A half-dozen other excuses, equally lame.
Chance hoisted himself into the saddle and turned the great black in the direction of the mine; if no one else would help, he'd have to get the men out himself. He was startled to see Jason Madigan dismounting from his horse just outside the entrance to the manager's office.
"What are you doing here, Madigan? Gloating like everybody else?" Chance asked, curtly. There was no way to avoid Madigan now that he'd become a fact of life in Leadville, but after Fancy had owned up to her affair with the man, it had been damned hard to be civil to him.
Jason held his temper; his voice gave evidence of the tight control that reined it.
"I can't blame you for holding my former relationship with your wife against me, McAllister, but I understand there are men below ground who need all the expertise you can muster. I'm a damned good mining engineer and I'm here to offer my help. After we get those men out, we'll have ample time to settle any personal grievances there may be between us."
Chance searched Madigan's face for other motives, but there appeared to be only sincerity in the man's sharp slate eyes.
"I accept your offer," he said.
Together they pushed past the crowds and walked into the mine office amid the cries of the townspeople who milled restlessly in the rain.
Madigan, McAllister, and Castlemaine bent over the chart table, oblivious to the escalating pandemonium outside the small wooden structure. Women carrying infants, children waiting for their fathers and older brothers. Friends. Rubberneckers. All creating a hubbub of weeping voices interspersed by curses and shouted demands for information; the only louder sounds were the thunder and lightning that echoed down the mountains and the constant tattoo of the rain on the tin roof.
Madigan made one last calculation on the pad before him and straightened his back.
"According to Mr. Castlemaine's reconnaissance crew, McAllister and McBain—assuming they remained together—are somewhere in the main drift, but probably quite a distance from the central shaft. The other crew, I'm afraid, was working on the seam nearest the Little Nell. It would be almost impossible to assume, judging from the inclination of the tunnels and the rapidity with which the water appears to be rising, that they could have survived. My vote would be to abandon work in the latter area and to concentrate all efforts on the former."
Caz looked up; he sounded hesitant. "If it weren't for that wall of boiling water down there, there might be a closer route."
Heads snapped up, all eyes alert. Caz shifted a little as if unwilling to explain what he meant to say.
"The old shaft, you know the one, Chance... Hart moved the drifts away from there when the square-sets went in. He said the rock was unstable because of the width of the lode. If that shaft's intact, it can't be more than twenty feet east of them."
Recognition dawned in Chance's face. "What are the odds it's flooded?"
Madigan moved the chart toward Caz. "Show me exactly where it is," he said, and the Australian drew a pencil line through the chart.
Jason answered carefully. "It certainly looks like a possibility. Damned close to the fault, though, and possibly blocked by the water."
"It's worth the gamble." Chance spoke decisively. He turned from the table and saw that Jewel and Fancy, trailing rain from their cloaks, had both entered the shed; how long they'd been standing there he couldn't tell.
Fancy reached for his hand with her own; whatever troubles were between them, a disaster of this proportion surely took precedence.
"Hart and Bandana are down there," he said.
"Oh, Chance, not both of them..." Jewel, standing behind Fancy, said, "Shit!" and gripped her hard enough to steady the younger woman on her feet, as Chance moved toward the door.
"I need volunteers!" he shouted into the crowd. "There's a possibility we can get to some of the men through the original shaft. McAllister and McBain dug that hole themselves—odds are they'll remember it's there and head that way if they can."
"That shaft was abandoned years ago because it was unsafe!" someone shouted. "It ain't even timbered like the rest!"
"There's scalding water down there," another voice shouted. "Those men are dead already."
"You lily-livered sons o' bitches!" Jewel snapped from the doorway. "Ain't any one of you man enough to keep a fellow human from bein' buried alive? I'm ashamed of the lot of you."
No answer greeted her question, and she curled her lip in contempt. "If none of you are man enough to go in after them boys, I sure as hell am!" She moved her sturdy body in beside Chance's. "I got friends down that hole," she said. "You can count me in."
"That won't be necessary, Miss Mack... it's a gallant offer, but I'm afraid ladies aren't fitted for this particular task—except perhaps by courage. I'll go with Mr. McAllister in your place."
Jewel looked up, surprised to find it was Jason Madigan who had spoken.
A boyish miner from the crowd came forward. "I'll go! Me da's down there."
"I'm in," said a huge man with a shaggy red beard and a thick brogue. "The lads down there are me friends."
"Count me in!" said a wiry Scotsman who stood in the big man's shadow. "I'd not sleep nights knowing I left men livin' below ground without trying to get them out."
"I'm in, as well you know," Caz said.
"No." Chance's answer was definitive. "I need someone up top I can trust."
Chance turned toward his wife one last time; he saw the tears! that filled her eyes, and sensed her love for him in her terrified! expression. He touched her cheek gently with his hand; the remembered softness nearly made him wince.
"Don't let them die in the dark," she whispered, barely able tol form the words. He nodded, understanding. Fancy stepped back I beside Jewel and let the men file past them through the doorway that led to the accessway to the old mine.
Hart uncramped his long legs and stretched as well as he could in the suffocating confines of the hole. Never thought I'd die down here, he said to himself as he strained to unkink the crick in his back that had happened when he fell.
"Bandana," he said, coughing in the foul air, "aren't we
somewhere in the neighborhood of the first shaft we ever dug?"
"You thinkin' we're one hell of a lot closer to the first shaft than to the main cage?"
Hart nodded vigorously.
"Been thinkin' the same thing myself."
"How close would you say we are? Ten feet, maybe? Twenty,) tops?"
"If it's still there and not full of rock and water. Odds are Chance or Caz'll remember it, same as us. You, me, and them dug damn near all of it ourselves."
"I think we should get the men digging in that direction," Hart said.
Bandana shook his head. "It's more unstable over there, and we're not sure about the water."
"But if we're right, it's a damned sight more of a possibility than the main shaft."
"Been watchin' the water. It's rising outside us. You can tell by the sweat and trickle."
"True enough. But mostly on the western side of the hole—the old shaft's to the east. I say we chance it." In the dismal darkness the pocket compass he held glinted dully.
"Notice how loud the sounds from your watch get in the dark?" Bandana asked cryptically, and Hart knew he meant the men would be better off working than sitting. Tomorrow there would be no food, the day after that, even the small swallows of water they'd allowed themselves would be gone.
Their sodden clothing already chafed their skin and left it raw or blistered; the men had stripped themselves of all but essentials in the first few hours. Bandana stood up in the dark, ducking to keep from hitting his head on a jutting timber, and lit the new candle from the last flickering spark of the old one.
"Men," he said, his voice bouncing against the imprisoning walls. "There's a chance we can get out of here, but to do it you're each gonna have to know the odds."