Heart of the West (67 page)

She took a step toward him and then another. She held the teacup out to him, waiting for him to take it, and when she remembered that he couldn't see what she had done, she almost sobbed aloud.

She lifted the clenched hand off his lap, the one that wasn't wrapped around the whiskey bottle. She pressed the cup against his knuckles.

"Get out!" he snarled, and knocked the cup out of her hand. It shattered against the wall, splashing the tea in a dark stain over the white washed boards. "Get out of here, you Chink bitch, and leave me the bloody hell alone!"

Drew Scully cradled his left arm against his chest as he slogged down the snow-choked road. In weather like this the bone ached like a rotten tooth. The break hadn't healed straight the first time so his arm had been re-broken and set again. He didn't want to think about what would happen if it still didn't come out right. At least it was his left arm.

Yellow light spilled from the windows of the Gandy Dancer saloon, along with the giddy strains of banjo music. He was no more than a flea's leap away from going in there and buying himself a drink, and then another and another. Joining his brother in the sweet, dulling comfort of the bottle.

When he passed by the butcher shop, he had to turn his head away from the sight of the bloody slabs of meat hanging off iron hooks in the window. One of the other miners had told him the drift where the sleeper had blown had had to be dusted with quicklime before work could be resumed down there.

No power on earth would get Drew back down the shafts. The fear was so strong in him that he could taste it all the time now. It was the taste of dynamite and blood, and a black hole in the ground.

Drew Scully took a deep breath and tried to get ahold of himself. His self-respect, his pride, was breaking to bitter pieces inside him.

He trudged up the butte through the falling snow. As he turned down the path to the office of the superintendent of mines, he passed the men on the rustling line applying for work. The line was long. The Four Jacks had been doing more laying off than hiring lately. Rumor had it the silver was playing out.

The mine office occupied a small shack next to the changing house. Drew asked the secretary, who was sitting behind a desk made out of empty dynamite boxes, if he could see the superintendent. He was told to take a load off and wait.

He sat down and looked around a room cluttered with rock samples, canvas bags, map cases, a broken time clock, and a gold nugget press. The walls were covered with drawings of the works below, geological charts, and risque
Police Gazette
calendars. The room was cold but he could feel a runnel of sweat run down his side.

After about a half an hour the secretary got up and left through the front door. Drew got up and went through the back door, which he assumed led to the super's office. He didn't bother to knock.

The superintendent sat in a hooded leather chair behind a mahogany desk. A six-point rack of antlers hung on the wall at his back. A long case clock, its painted face orbited by moons and stars and comets, filled the room with a steady, sonorous ticking.

It was said the super owned the bulk share of the mine he was now running for the consortium. It was said he'd won it in a poker game. It was also said the man had once been a traveling parson. The black eye patch gave him the air of a pirate, but he'd always put Drew in mind of those slick drummers who wandered the countryside selling consumption-killer.

He was a sleek-looking man with a sharp face and long, oily boot-black hair that hung straight to his shoulders. His belly swelled against an expensive sealskin waistcoat, worn hairy side out.

The long case clock struck two o'clock. The super drew a dollar-sized stem-winder from his vest pocket and checked the time. He looked up and saw Drew. "Who the devil are you?"

"Drew Scully." He thought about adding "sir," then didn't.

"Scully?" The super puckered his mouth, as if thinking required some effort. But Drew saw a gambler's wits behind that single pale, flat eye: assessing, analyzing, calculating. It was as if life to him was one big poker game involving strategy, bluffing, risk, and reward.

He flashed a sudden charming smile. "You're the tough Cousin Jack who had the balls to demand a full day's pay after breaking an arm and putting in less than an hour on shift." On the desk sat a miniature gallus frame made of silver. He stroked it almost lovingly with his finger while he stared at Drew. "If you're worried about having a job once that sling comes off, you can tap her light. So long as you can still swing a sledge, you can do it at the Four Jacks."

Drew helped himself to a chair and produced a be-damned-to-you smile of his own. "We'll talk about what you'll be giving me later. After you take a look at this." And he tossed the ore sample at the super so fast the man had either to snatch it out of the air or allow it to smash his face.

He caught the rock one-handed without even blinking. He frowned at it. "What am I supposed to do with a piece of gangue—use it to weight papers?"

"That's no piece of worthless quartz. 'Tes the red metal."

The super's face took on a look that was half bored, half patronizing. "Copper? And you expect me to dance a jig and ooze delight from every pore over this? I'm afraid the fact that you found the green blight in my workings is hardly news and it isn't welcome." Copper was considered the bane of any silver-mining operation because it was a mineral that had to be extracted and dumped from the profit-producing ore.

Drew stretched out his legs, crossed his feet, and hooked a thumb in his vest pocket. "Aye, there's copper down there, all right. Big ruddy green veins of it."

Jack McQueen's mouth pulled into a wry smile. "Whoopee."

"Let me tell you about copper, Super." The older man lifted a haughty brow at this effrontery, and Drew smiled again. "Right now it sells for twelve cents a pound. Maybe 'tedn't a big market for it out here yet. But back in your eastern states, they're putting in electric cables and telephone wires all over the place. They're calling this the age of electricity. All those telephones and Edison's electric lights require miles' worth of the red metal. One, two years from now I figure copper'll be going for twenty cents a pound, maybe more."

Jack McQueen lifted the cover off a sandalwood humidor and took out a cigar. He examined it, bit off the end, and spat in the direction of a brass cuspidor. He lit up and sucked greedily on its smoke. Only then did he take a jeweler's loupe out of one of the desk's numerous drawers. He stood up and went to a cracked, dirty window, taking the ore sample with him.

He fitted the glass to his one good eye. "Where did this come from?"

"The west stope of the four-hundred-foot level. I already had it assayed over in Butte, but you can let your own man have a look. It'll prove so pure you could ship it to China and back for smelting and still make a profit. And this hill is full of copper. I'd stake my rep as champion double-jacker on it."

"Would you? But then, you won't be winning any more double-jacking championships, will you? Not with your brother as blind as a mole in a blizzard."

"You bloody bastard—" Drew leaped out of the chair and lunged for the man, only to be brought up short by the pocket derringer aimed at his middle.

"Sit down," the super said.

Drew put a finger under the gun's short barrel and lifted it until it was pointing between his own eyes. He smiled. "You going to shoot me, then? After half the morning shift has just seen me come calling?"

One-Eyed Jack tried to stare him down, and when he couldn't, he laughed. "You do have some sand in your craw, don't you, Drew Scully? Sit down, please. And notice I'm even saying it with a smile."

He slipped the gun back in his coat pocket and studied the ore sample again, turning it over and over in his hand. "Normally I abhor violence, especially when it's aimed at me. But it's unsettling to jump at a man's back like that, Drew Scully. It makes him jumpy, and then accidents are liable to happen."

He resumed his seat behind the mahogany desk and rested his chin on his steepled fingers. He studied Drew with the hot, intense stare of a conjurer. "A few months from now, when copper is discovered here at the Four Jacks, you will act as surprised as a nun with a bellyful of baby. That will be your play."

"And what's yours, then?"

"'Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I
am
thy Lord.' Five dollars a week to your brother—we'll call it a pension, shall we?

This way he will never have to beg for pennies on a street corner. He'll have enough to keep him in whiskey and leave him with just enough pride not to put a gun in his mouth."

Drew pretended he hadn't just been given what he'd wanted most to come of this visit. "That's all well and good for poor Jere," he said. "Now what about me?" He had no intention of being greedy or a fool. If he demanded a percentage of the claim, he'd only wind up getting dry-gulched, shot in the back, and dumped in some brush-tangled coulee. But he was getting himself out of the mines. One way or the other he was getting out of the bloody mines.

One-Eyed Jack got slowly to his feet. "The Lord raises up the virtuous and casts down the wicked," he intoned in a preacher's voice, but his eye was smiling with mischief. "It so happens one of my gaffers—a fellow by the name of O'Brian— was jumped on and beat up by persons unknown a couple of weeks back. He was worked over so badly there isn't much of the man left in him, I'm afraid. Indeed, talk is, he can't even crawl out to the shithouse now without whimpering with fear."

Drew stood up as well. "Aye, Rainbow Springs is truly a wicked town," he said with mocking solemnity. "I don't want the gaffer's job."

"I had no intention of offering it to you, Drew Scully." A smile pulled at the super's mouth, and his eye narrowed with a mixture of amusement and guile. "What would you say to being town marshal of Rainbow Springs?"

Drew leaned over the desk. He lifted the top off the humidor and helped himself to a cigar. "Mr. Dobbs's thinking of retiring, is he?"

The super laughed. "I do so like a man who can see where I'm going and who tries to get there ahead of me. It keeps me on my toes. Yes, indeed, Drew Scully. The good marshal wants to buy himself a nice piece of property somewhere and raise chickens. I and some of the other businessmen in this town have been thinking things have gotten a bit too lax around here lately. Too many men have been had for breakfast, and that's apt to make those with money to invest in... in certain projects a bit leery, if you get my drift. We need a town marshal who's not afraid to lay down the law a bit, someone young and tough. A real scrapper."

Someone you can own,
Drew thought, but he still said nothing. If he had to sell himself to get out of the mines and secure a pension for Jere, then he would sell himself.

He smiled at the super as he held a match to the end of the cigar. He sucked in his cheeks, drawing deeply. He thought the expensive smoke would burn the bitter taste out of his mouth, and it did. Somewhat.

She had cleaned up the mess he'd made of the tea, and then she'd left the room. But not the house. He heard the clatter of china and her singsong voice muttering to herself in Chinese, probably cursing him to hell and back, he thought. "To hell with you too!" he shouted.

She answered him by dropping a lid back on the stove with a loud clatter.

If she came in here again, he'd knock over the slop jar. Aye, he thought, that would make her good and sorry. Except that she might not do the cleaning up this time, and he'd have to live with the stink until Drew came home, since he was bloody useless at doing anything for himself. Could barely find his poker to pee with without fumbling. Bloody useless...

He heard the shuffle of her feet moving across the floor, coming toward him, and he stiffened. She stopped in front of him. At least he thought she was in front of him. Maybe if he reached out and grabbed her, she'd scream and run off and leave him alone.

He kept his hands clenched in his lap and stared into the thick, soughing ocean of blackness that was all he could see and all he would ever see again.

He heard the rustle of her clothing and felt a subtle shift in the air, and he thought she might have knelt on the floor next to his chair. Her lilting voice came up at him out of the black ocean, although the words were not sweet.

"You grow fat and petulant like an imperial eunuch, and you are disturbing the virtuous harmony of this house. Instead of tea, I ought to give you a snake potion to cleanse your bowels of their ill humors."

She pressed the hot cup against the backs of his fingers as she had the last time, to let him know it was there. "If you spill it again, there is a whole pot of it on the stove, and I will empty it all onto your head. You need a bath anyway. You stink."

"Get... out."

She took his hands and wrapped them around the steam-wet porcelain. "Empty the cup."

Silence gripped the room like a fist. He could taste the foulness of his bitter rage on the back of his throat. His hands trembled. He wanted to hurl the cup into the bloody black void before his eyes... before where his eyes used to be.

He waited for her to leave. He strained his ears listening for the rustle of her clothes, her shuffling footsteps. For the sigh of her breath, the beat of her heart. He almost jumped when she spoke.

"I know what you are thinking."

"Do you, then?"

"You are wailing at the moon over the unfairness of a fate that would take your eyes. But what foolish god promised you life would be fair? Ask the legless beggar in the market square if life is fair. Ask the barren wife who burns seven ris of incense day after day beseeching the gods for a child, only to be cast aside by her husband instead... ask her if life is fair. Ask the starving peasant's daughter who is sold into slavery for fifty coppers if life is fair."

He curled his mouth into a sneer. "And that's supposed to make me feel better?"

"No. But such is the way of life's treacheries. You must come to accept what has happened, because it cannot be undone."