Power in the Blood (78 page)

He dreamed often of the universal wall, always approaching it in the same way, feeling himself compelled to touch it, passing through the hole that always appeared, in answer to taunting from the invisible demons populating the other side. He would awaken with their fingers and teeth upon him, and when he was able to calm himself, Slade used his own fingers and teeth to keep himself alive. He ate only as much as his stomach required to appease the serpents. Much of the flesh had been stripped from the legs and back of McCaulay. Slade drank from his flasks and replaced them beneath the water seep, finding his way easily in the darkness by sheer habit, the repetition of his simple routine. The drills came nearer, their chattering punctuated now and then by single-stick explosions of dynamite as the more massive chunks of rock were broken down.

He reminded himself often, knowing his memory was plagued by holes, to be sure and cover the remains of his larder before the final breakthrough came. Slade was less confident now of convincing anyone of anything. He could not concentrate on any particular thought for more than a moment before it flew away into the dark and left him wondering what it was that had lately been on his mind. He could not recall with any accuracy his bunk in the unmarried miners’ dormitory, or the face of the woman who sold him his meals. Shoupe and McCaulay were the same bearded, grimy face partially hidden by a hatbrim. He had never heard them talk often enough to retain an impression of their voices, or anyone else’s voice. Sometimes he spoke with himself to be reminded of his own voice, but these one-sided conversations were forgotten immediately. Slade was aware that other miners tacked small photographs or tintypes to the wall beside their bunk, pictures of wives or sweethearts far away, or else they ripped from magazines portraits of plump actresses and illustrations of young women advertising girdles and corsets. Slade’s wall had always been empty, as empty as the wall he visited now in dreams. If he had ever had a picture to gaze at in former times, he could not remember. It was an injustice that the simple passage of time—sometimes mere minutes were enough—should rob him of another tiny piece of himself.

He was fast becoming a stranger inside his own skin, and he knew it was the darkness that accelerated his condition. In darkness a man might turn inward to review his life, summon images from the past and relive moments of happiness, but if a man had little or no memory of himself, the darkness mocked him, reflecting with its boundless emptiness the hollow space inside the man. Slade cried a great deal as the drills and dynamite ate their way toward him. There was almost nothing left of him to be found. As the body of McCaulay was stripped of flesh, so the mind of Slade was flayed of recollection, layer by layer, until there remained only his name, and the instruction to himself concerning the man he ate.

Then the drills were accompanied by voices, and Slade was more scared by the muffled words seeping through to him than he was by the shapeless creatures tormenting him in dreams. Soon they would be there, where he huddled in filth and stench and darkness, with their lights and faces and words. He was terrified over the coming confrontation. He must not let them see his fear, and he must not let them see the dead man. With the last of his matches, Slade coaxed a feeble glow from the carbide lamps and scuttled hastily about, collecting rocks suitable for stacking atop a corpse. He buried his clasp knife also, and used the last of his strength to tip over a large rock, shielding the makeshift grave from view. The lamps gave off their last light and expired, and he waited then in the darkness that now was less friendly, shattered and shaken as it was by the din of sledgehammers and shouting.

He began to quake, as if the air suddenly had turned cold, and he could not stop. His flesh vibrated on his bones, his teeth clattered uncontrollably, and he voided his bowels of a hot slime. He could not keep from moaning low and long; every breath he took into himself he let escape as a moan or sigh, and his hands clasped at each other with a grip so weak with fear his fingers slid constantly from their fellows in an unconscious washing motion he was unable to stop.

At last rubble began cascading nearby, and he saw a beam of light brighter than the sun come lancing through into his chamber. Slade vomited and turned his eyes from the carbide flame, and dared not look into the furthest corner, at the stones piled there, for fear they did not hide his secret as well as he hoped.

“I see him!” yelled a voice, but Slade could no more understand it than he could have a foreign tongue. The voice called more words back into the tunnel, and more rubble was loosened. Slade faced the streaming light through latticed fingers, and rose clumsily to meet the figure that came sliding down into his hole.

“Me …,” he said, as the figure stood and approached him. “There’s only me.… Nobody else, just me …”

The bathhouse was honored to wash him clean. He was given new clothing and boots and a new hat, all finer than he was accustomed to. He ate like a king, but would drink only water, and would say of his ordeal only that he remembered nothing, nothing at all after the timbers broke and the tunnel came crashing in from above. He learned he had been trapped sixteen days and nights. Newspaper reporters asked if faith in God had saved him, and Slade nodded. He was four hours out of the ground, and life was good until a well-dressed man disturbed his meal at Molly’s Eating House by sitting at the table without asking permission. Slade disliked him for that, and took his time answering the question, “Would you care to meet your employer? He certainly would like to meet you.”

Slade was fairly certain he had never been inside so fine a carriage before. It carried him up the eastern slope of Glory Hole and deposited him outside the mahogany doors of Elk House. The well-dressed man escorted him into the presence of Leo Brannan, of whom Slade knew precisely nothing. He certainly was not an impressive fellow to look at, and he appeared even more ill at ease than his guest.

“Please sit down, Mr. Slade. A man in your position must not feel quite able to stand for long. Please, sit.”

Slade listened while Leo Brannan offered his congratulations over the timely rescue and the remarkable fortitude displayed by one of his men. “I have in mind a small ceremony, Mr. Slade, scheduled for tomorrow if you feel able to manage it, that will celebrate, or consolidate if you will, the joy every person in Glory Hole feels at your liberation from darkness and despair. The town square would be an appropriate venue, I think, don’t you, Price?”

“A perfect setting,” agreed the well-dressed man.

“Do you feel yourself capable of attending, so short a time after your ordeal, Mr. Slade?”

Slade nodded. He had noticed at last that the man talking to him had one blue eye and one brown eye, a combination Slade thought fascinating. Leo Brannan reached into his jacket and produced a hundred dollar bill. This was passed to Price, who passed it to Slade. “You are indeed a stout fellow, and it’s my wish that you take this small offering to use as you please. There can of course be no true compensation for your suffering, but this may go some small way toward easing your return to the world.”

Slade fingered the note. He had never seen one before.

“Maybe you’d like to thank Mr. Brannan,” hinted Price.

“Thank you.”

“Good day to you, Mr. Slade, and also good luck, although you probably have no need of that commodity at the moment.”

Slade pocketed the money and stood. He let Price open the door for him. Slade began walking down the wood-paneled hall, retracing his steps toward the front door, keeping Price a step or so behind, just to let him know he didn’t care for him. He wondered, as he walked, what he should do with the one hundred dollars. Turning a corner into the main corridor, he saw an extraordinarily large vase of delicate blue color, almost as tall as a man. Standing beside it was a young girl whose face bore a large stain, her left eye lost in a half-mask of blue much deeper than that of the vase.

Rowland Price did nothing to stop Slade’s descent onto the plush carpeting, but stared at the man as he lay twitching on his back. Price had himself found young Miss Brannan’s face a shock on first arriving at Elk House to act as personal secretary to Leo Brannan and liaison between him and the Praetorians, but he thought a reaction such as Slade’s was excessive.

The fit ended as quickly as it had begun, and Price assisted the man to his feet. “Mr. Slade, are you quite sure you’re ready for Mr. Brannan’s proposal? I know I could persuade him to postpone the celebration a day or two.”

Slade shrugged him off and looked around. Price saw that Omie was gone, as if she never had been there. He had been warned in Denver that the girl was strange, and was under instruction to assess any potential embarrassment to her stepfather once Brannan entered public life as leader of the Praetorians.

Slade began walking again, this time with less swagger. Price assumed the fall was a result of not having slept since being freed from the mine. The man was remarkably tough, but there was something behind his eyes Price disliked, some other entity besides that of a brave miner.

On the drive back down to Glory Hole, Price suggested to Slade that he take himself to bed and recover fully for the next day’s gala occasion. Slade ignored him. Price thought it ironic that such a boorish individual was about to receive public approbation as a hero.

“I’m told they haven’t yet found your other partner, Slade. They found Shoupe on the way through. Where was McCaulay, do you know?”

“With Shoupe.”

“That whole area has been explored, all the rubble taken out, but no McCaulay. They’re continuing to search. Mr. Brannan has promised both the widows a company funeral for their men, so he’ll be found.”

“I want to walk.”

“Pardon me?”

“Let me out.”

“You prefer to walk?”

“Stop and let me out.”

“You need to stretch your legs, is that it?”

Price hammered on the carriage roof. A small door behind the driver’s box opened. “Yessir?”

“Stop here, please.”

When Slade stepped down, Price closed the door and said, “I know where you live. The carriage will be sent for you a little before noon tomorrow.”

Slade nodded, then watched the carriage continue descending the road to town. When it passed around a curve he began leaping down the mountainside as fast as the slope and his diminished strength would allow, his new boots kicking up dirt and cinders from the denuded earth. At the bottom he waited by the railroad tracks for a short while until one of the three daily coal trains passed by, returning its empty cars to Durango. He hid behind low brush as the locomotive steamed by, then ran alongside the train until he could grab hold and swing himself aboard one of the cars. Knowing he might be seen riding on the platform, Slade climbed inside the open clanking steel box. His new clothing was instantly blackened by coal dust.

He had known from the moment he saw the girl in Brannan’s big house that they would find the body of McCaulay. She was connected somehow with his time buried in the mine, he could not remember why, but her face with its inky blot around the left eye saw through him, Slade could tell. He had to get away while he could, before they dug up McCaulay, or the girl spoke to someone in the big house, and they came to capture him and hang him. He could not allow that to happen. He had done nothing wrong. They could search for him all they wanted, but they wouldn’t find him, now that he was moving again. It had ended that way before, with Slade being carried away to safety from the scene of some tragedy he had not caused, an accident of some kind for which he would be blamed anyway. It was not fair that he was not permitted to remember the details. He could think of no good reason for such punishment. Slade felt the car’s vibration running through his flesh like the aftershock of an underground explosion. “Fire in the hole …,” he whispered.

Slade knew the empty cars were taken to Leadville, but from there he was uncertain of their direction. It made little difference, really, so long as he was able to keep heading away from the Grand Mogul mine and what had happened there. The air was cold but his new coat was warm. He would ride the car as far as circumstance allowed, then disappear with his hundred dollars into another state, another life.

33

During the first month Drew rode with Lodi, no one was killed. The gang successfully robbed two banks and one stage. Shots had been fired, but none found their mark. Wealthier by more than seven thousand dollars, Lodi decided they should rest up in a place he knew, a cabin deep in the mountains, inaccessible to anyone unfamiliar with its hidden approaches.

Drew admired the man who had rescued him from jail, but did not like him. Lodi was not a man who encouraged friendship from his followers so much as he required loyalty, unquestioning and unstinted. Drew managed to act the role of grateful acolyte without undue strain on his pride, but he could not warm to Lodi as he did to Clarence Dustey. Nate Haggin was not without friendliness, when Drew had been accepted as a functioning member of the gang, but Clarence, a compulsive talker once his confidence was won, found in Drew a listener with endless patience and little criticism.

Drew learned from Clarence more than any man had a right to know about another, including intimate descriptions of Clarence’s three marriages to women unaware of each other’s existence. He had a wife in Montana, another in Utah and a third in Grand Junction, Colorado. His fourth wife he did not count, since she had been seventy-eight when he married her in Missouri as a favor to a friend who wanted his mother worn to death in the marital bed so the friend might inherit her reputed wealth, some of which was supposed to come Clarence’s way once he had sent Minnie Rourke to her reward in heaven. He had entered upon matrimony in that instance, he assured Drew, not only for the benefit of himself and his friend, but for the sake of the widow Rourke, a decent old soul who should have been granted surcease from earthly toil by way of cupid’s arrow, but had taken that arrow in her teeth instead, and worn Clarence’s manufactured passion to a nub. Clarence had fled Missouri when his wrinkled wife began demanding more attention after dark than Clarence was accustomed to paying women a third Minnie’s age. “She was a hellion between the sheets, more’n a woman that old had a right to be, you ask me about it. Could be she was a witch even, I don’t know, but I never went back to find out, not this boy. I lost a good friend on account of that woman.”