The students purchased vegetables, jam, fruit; they talked their mothers into cooking the food and boiling hundreds of eggs. They collected clothes, dishes, firewood, and carried everything to receiving stations.
And all day, the news came down from the mountain: twenty-two bodies found so far, so burned, bloated, and mutilated as to make identification almost impossible. Twenty-five more bodies were expected to be found by the rescuers who were working in two shifts. So far, one rescuer had died.
At midday, Kane drove a heavily laden wagon to the mine and, as he unloaded bundles of blankets and hundreds of diapers, he saw the rescuers coming to the surface and more than one of them vomited on the ground.
“It’s the smell,” said a man beside Kane. “The bodies down there smell so bad the men can’t stand it.”
For a moment, Kane stood there staring, then he grabbed someone’s saddled horse and tore down the mountainside—heading for Jacob Fenton’s house with all the speed he could muster.
He hadn’t been up the drive to that house since he’d left years before, but the familiarity was so strong that he felt that he’d never been away. He didn’t wait to knock on the door but rammed his foot through the leaded-glass panel and walked through the door that barely stayed on its hinges.
“Fenton!” he bellowed as servants came running from every part of the house, two footmen grabbing his shoulders to restrain him, but he shrugged them off as if they weighed nothing. He knew the arrangement of the downstairs of the house well enough and soon found the dining room, where Jacob sat eating alone, at the head of the table.
They looked at each other for a moment, Kane’s face red with his rage, his body heaving.
Jacob waved his hand to dismiss the servants. “I don’t imagine you came here for dinner,” he said, calmly buttering a roll.
“How can you sit there when the people you’ve killed are on that mountain?” Kane managed to get out.
“There I beg to differ with you. I have not killed them. The truth is, I have done everything in my power to keep them alive, but they seem to have a suicidal bent. Could I offer you some wine? This is a very good year.”
Kane’s mind was full of the sights and sounds of the last few days. His ears seemed to ring with the sound of women’s crying, and he wasn’t aware of it, but he hadn’t eaten in nearly two days. Now, the smell of the food, the cleanliness of the room, the quiet, all went together to make him sway on his feet.
Jacob stood, poured a glass of wine and, as he pulled out a chair for Kane, he set the glass before him. Kane didn’t notice that Jacob’s hand was trembling as he held the wine.
“Is it very bad?” Jacob asked, as he walked to a sideboard and removed a plate, which he began filling.
Kane didn’t answer as he sat in the chair, looking at the wine. “Why?” he whispered after a moment. “How could you kill them? What is worth the death of those people? Why couldn’t you have been satisfied with taking all the money that was left to me? Why do you have to have more? There are other ways of making it.”
Jacob put a full plate of food in front of Kane, but the younger man didn’t touch it. “I was twenty-four when you were born, and all my life I had thought that I was the owner of what I’d grown up with. I loved the man I thought was my father . . . and I thought that he cared for me.”
Jacob straightened his shoulders. “At that age, one tends to be idealistic. The night Horace killed himself, I found out that I was nothing to him. His will stated that I could remain your guardian until you were twenty-one years old, and then I was to turn everything over to you. I was to walk out with the clothes on my back and nothing more. I don’t think you can imagine the depth of the hatred I felt that night for the squalling infant that had ruined my entire life. I don’t think I had a rational thought as I sent you away to a farm woman to wet-nurse and then bribed the lawyers. That hatred kept me going for years. It was all I could think of. If I signed a paper, I knew that somewhere there was a four-year-old child who actually owned what I was buying or selling. I sent for you once when you were young, so I could see for myself that you weren’t worthy of what my father had left you.”
Jacob sat down, across the table from Kane. “The doctor says that at most I have only a month or two to live. I haven’t told anyone, but somehow I wanted to tell you the truth before I died.”
He picked up his full glass of wine and sipped it. “Hatred hurts the one who hates more than it does the hated. All those years that you lived here, I’d see you and I was sure that you were trying to take everything that I owned. I lived in fear that you’d find out the truth and take what was mine and my children’s. And when you wanted Pam for your wife, it seemed that all my fears had come true. Later, I thought that I should have seen your marriage to my daughter as a solution, but at the time . . . I don’t think that I had any rational thoughts then.”
He drank deeply of the wine. “There you are, Taggert, a dying man’s last confession. It’s all yours; you can take it if you want. This morning, I told my son the truth about who owns my property because I don’t have the strength or the inclination to fight you any longer.”
Kane sat back in the chair and, as he looked at Fenton and saw the gray tinge under his skin, he realized that he no longer hated the man. Houston had said that his hatred of Jacob Fenton had spurred him on to achieve what he had, and perhaps she was right. In fact, she had pointed out the injustice of Horace cutting Jacob out of his will.
Kane took a drink of the wine that was in front of him and looked at the food. “Why did you have to starve the miners to make your money?”
“Starve the miners?” Jacob gasped, his eyes bulging. “Doesn’t anyone in the world understand that I barely break even with the miners? The only money I make is in Denver at the steel mills, but everyone looks at the poor mistreated miner and accuses me of being Satan.”
He stood and began to pace around the room. “I have to keep the coal mines under lock and key or the unionists will come in and incite the miners to demand more money, fewer hours. You know what they want? They want to elect a check weighman. Look, I know as well as anyone that the scales are fixed, and that the miners dig more coal than they’re credited for, but if I were honest and paid them what they earned, I’d have to charge more per ton for the coal, and then I’d not be competitive, and I’d never get more contracts and then they wouldn’t have any more jobs. So who gets hurt the most if I let them hire honest weighmen? I can hire coal miners by the hundreds, but I don’t think they can get jobs so easily.”
Kane looked at the older man for a moment. He understood about business, and he knew that sometimes compensations had to be made. “What about the mine safety? I hear you use rotten timbers and—.”
“Like hell I do. The miners have their own pride system. You can ask your uncle if I’m not right. They brag about how they can tell just how far they can go before the roof caves in. I have mine inspectors in there all the time, and they find that the men won’t take the time to shore up as they go.”
Kane picked up the fork by the plate of food in front of him and slowly began to eat, but then found that he was ravenous and began to shovel it in. “You don’t pay them for the time they spend shoring, do you? They’re paid by the tonnage they get out, aren’t they?”
Jacob took a chair across from Kane and put another thick slice of beef on his plate. “I hire them as subcontractors and it’s up to each man to fulfill his part of the contract. Did you know that I pay men to inspect the miners’ hats? The idiots open the cap to light cigarettes and send the whole place up. The inspector has to check that the caps are welded shut to prevent them from killing each other.”
Kane, his mouth full, was gesturing with his fork. “One minute, you treat ’em like children and lock ’em up and the next minute, they have to be subcontractors and take the responsibility for their own . . . what’s it called when you have to work and don’t get paid for the work?”
“Dead work,” Jaco
b supplied. “I do the best I can and still keep the miners working. I’d like to buy my coal from someone else and just make steel, but I can’t see putting so many people out of work. Every time something like this happens,” he motioned in the general direction of the Little Pamela, “I say that I’m going to close the mines. There’s a vast amount of competition to supply coal to the mills in Denver, and I could close all seventeen mines around Chandler and they wouldn’t even be missed. But you know what would happen to this town if I closed the mines? It’d be a ghost town in two years.”
“So, according to you, you’re just doin’ the whole town a favor.”
“I am, in a way,” Jacob said righteously.
“I imagine you’re payin’ your stockholders, ain’t you?”
“Not as much as I’d like, but I do the best I can.”
Kane was cleaning the bottom of the second plate of food with a piece of bread. “Then you’d damn well better start doin’ better. I happen to have a little money of my own and I just might decide to use it to bring a few lawsuits against the principals of Fenton Coal and Iron, and I think that all production—steel and coal—might be shut down while this thing was in court.”
“But that would ruin Chandler! You couldn’t—.”
“I somehow think that the owners of FC&I might have enough self-interest to keep that from happening.”
Jacob looked at Kane for a long time. “All right, what do you want?”
“If the men need inspectors to protect them from themselves, I want inspectors, and I want the kids out of the mines.”
“But the children’s small bodies can do things that the adults can’t!” Jacob protested.
Kane merely gave him a look and went on to the next point, trying to remember everything that Houston had told him about the problems in the mines. Jacob protested every aspect of Kane’s complaints; from libraries, “reading just makes them discontented”; to church services, “and pay preachers for every religion? We’d have religious wars if we tried to make them all go to the same service”; to better housing, to which Jacob said that the miners living in the shacks were really healthier because of all the fresh air coming through the cracks in the walls.
They talked and argued through the afternoon, with Jacob constantly refilling Kane’s wineglass. By about four o’clock, Kane’s words began to slur and his head rested against his chest. When he finally nodded off to sleep in the midst of telling Jacob that perhaps unions weren’t as bad as Jacob seemed to think, the older man stood and looked down at Kane’s big body sprawled in the chair.
“If I’d had a son like you, I could have conquered the world,” he murmured before leaving the room and sending a servant for a blanket to cover Kane.
It was full night when Kane woke, stiff and sore from sleeping in the chair, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. The room was dim, but on the table he could make out the outline of a cloth-wrapped package and knew without a doubt that the package contained sandwiches.
With a smile, he stuffed the food into his pocket and left the house. Somehow, he felt lighter than he had in years, and as he rode back to the mine, he felt new hope that from now on his life was going to be different.
At the mine, Reed Westfield, Leander’s attorney father, was just entering the elevator to go back into the tunnel to continue the rescue operation. Kane caught the man with Reed by the collar. “Go get somethin’ to eat. I’ll go on this trip.”
As the machinery started, Kane told Reed a quick story of how all that Jacob Fenton owned was legally Kane’s.
“I don’t want that hangin’ over the man’s head any longer, and I don’t need the money. I want you to draw me up a paper sayin’ that I turn everything over to him and whoever he wants to leave it to, and I want it done soon because the old man is dyin’.”
Reed looked at Kane through weary eyes and nodded. “I have an office full of clerks with nothing much to do. Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”
Kane did no more than nod because, as they reached deeper into the mine, his face contorted at the smell.
Chapter 30
On the third day after the explosion, a total of forty-eight bodies had been taken from inside the mine, and seven were still unaccounted for. In the afternoon of the second day, four bodies had been found on their knees, their hands cupped over their mouths. They’d survived the major explosion, but the afterdamp, the gases, had killed them.
In town, the businesses were draped with black and flags were flown at half-mast. As the hearses drove through the streets in an unending stream, the people walked about with bare, bowed heads.
The fiancé of Sarah Oakley had been killed as he walked home from helping with the rescue of the miners. Too tired to watch where he was going, or to be aware of his surroundings, he didn’t see or hear the train before it overtook him, killing him instantly.
Leander and Kane, with help from Edan, had demanded, and received, the promise of a rescue station to be built on land that had been donated by Jacob Fenton. No one dared say so but everyone was of the opinion that Kane had gone to Fenton’s house and demanded the gift of the land.
Houston spent the day attending funerals and trying to comfort widows and seeing that children had enough to eat.
“I think this is what you want,” Reed Westfield said, handing Kane a piece of paper as they stood before the mine entrance. “After this is settled, we can draw up a longer form, but I believe that should hold up in court.”
Kane scanned the document and quickly saw that it said that he gave all rights to the holdings of the Fentons to the trust of Jacob Fenton, to dispose of however he wished.
“If you’ll sign it, I’ll witness it and file it. I have a copy here that you can give Fenton.”
Kane smiled at Reed. “Thanks,” he said, as he took the fountain pen from Reed and signed the paper. He held the copy up. “I think I’ll take this to him right now. Maybe it’ll make up to him for parting with that land, and I might mention that he ought to start a program to train men in mine rescue.”
Reed returned Kane’s grin. “I think the man might have remained richer before you gave him the rights to his property.”
As Kane rode down the hill toward Chandler, he looked about the camp and thought of the horror of the last few days. There was still much to do, and he had some ideas about how to prevent future explosions and how to act if there were more disasters. He planned to talk to Edan about his ideas, and Leander would be a good one, too, and even Fenton. When Kane thought of Jacob’s approaching death, he felt some sadness. After all, he had grown up seeing the man most of his life until he was eighteen. And now, the owner of the mines would be Zachary, after Marc, that is. Somehow, Kane thought, everyone seemed to forget Marc.
As he rode up the drive to the old Fenton house, he saw that the front door was standing open. The jamb had been repaired from where he’d kicked it in the day before and the glass replaced, but now it was wide open.
He dismounted, and called into the house as he entered, but there was no answer. Jacob’s office was at the back of the house, and Kane clearly remembered that the last time he’d been in this room was when Jacob had thrown him out for wanting to marry Pam. As he put the paper on the desk, he wondered how different his life would have been if he’d married Pam and not had the opportunity to make his own fortune. For one thing, he wouldn’t be married to Houston.
With that thought, he again wondered if Houston would have married him if he hadn’t had a few million in the bank.
He called out again, but there was still no answer so he started to leave the house through the kitchen, a way that was very familiar to him. The kitchen was also empty and the back door was standing open. As he reached the door, he saw the narrow stairs leading to the upper floor.
When he’d been growing up, he’d always wanted to see the upstairs of the house, had even imagined owning the house one day.
He laughed as he thought of the house he’d built because he
was angry at not being able to see the upstairs of the Fenton house.
With his hand on the bannister, curiosity overrode his common sense and he bounded up the stairs two at a time. Hurriedly, like a thief afraid of getting caught, he went down the hall and looked into the bedrooms. They were very ordinary, with heavy, ornate, dark furniture and heavy, depressing curtains and wallpaper. “Houston has much better taste,” he mumbled and then laughed at his snobbery.
He was still smiling when he came to the head of the front staircase, but his smile vanished instantly.
At the foot of the stairs, in a crumpled heap, lay Jacob Fenton—obviously dead.
Kane’s first thought was that he’d come too late and now Jacob would never know that at last he was the legal owner of all he’d worked so hard to have. And, too, Kane felt sadness. All those years that Kane had worked in New York, all he could remember were the times he’d polished Fenton’s boots, but right now what he remembered were the times he’d given Jacob a hard time, embarrassed him in front of guests, argued with him about when he could and could not have his own horses, and all the times Kane’d tickled the cook and talked her into putting onions into the gravy, both of them knowing that onions gave Jacob such indigestion that he didn’t sleep all night.
Slowly, Kane started down the stairs, but he’d only taken one step when Marc Fenton and five of his young friends burst into the hall. By the state of their clothes and their loud voices, they looked as if they were just returning from all night on the town.
“If Taggert thinks that he’s gonna take my inheritance away,” came Marc Fenton’s slurred voice, “he’s gonna have to fight me. Nobody in this town will believe Taggert over me.”
The two women, wearing yellow satin, one with a red feather boa, the other with four peacock feathers in her hair, and the three men, all shouted agreement with Marc.
“Where’s the whiskey, love?” one of the women asked.
As a group, the people stopped to stare at the body of Jacob Fenton lying at the foot of the stairs. It was Marc who looked up and saw Kane standing at the head of the stairs.