Skye was discovering a new way to be a prisoner. He was helpless to resist Childress’s follies simply because Childress could speak fluent Spanish while Skye could barely speak a dozen words. Wherever they went Skye was utterly dependent on Childress to deal with the Mexicans. He didn’t even know what Childress was saying to them.
So Skye sat in the front seat of the calash, minding the horses, wondering what Childress would say to the people there in Dolores or to the mine owners, and it was not hard to imagine a dozen ways of getting into trouble.
One American had already been murdered here for poking around too much. Gold did that. Gold aroused passions and turned men into animals. And here was Childress, fluent in their tongue, floating one preposterous story after another, poking around wealth that Mexico guarded zealously. And there was Skye and the women, inevitable victims of any blunders Childress might make.
Skye halted the coach at the mercado, which seemed to be the only store in this rude settlement.
“I’ll inquire,” Childress said, lowering his bulky body to earth.
“I’ll go with you,” Skye said sourly. Maybe someone
spoke English, and if so, he wanted to know it.
“Yes, see what’s in the place whilst I jabber with these people,” Childress said, flapping toward the store like a penguin.
Shine landed beside his master and swiftly aroused the interest of half a dozen barefoot men, who eyed the monkey with amazement.
“Don’t let that monkey steal one damned thing,” Skye snapped.
“Tut, tut, Skye. You owe him your life and your liberty.”
Childress plunged through a doorless doorway along with the little primate, and Skye followed. The dark interior revealed the simplest sort of store, with rough burlap sacks of beans and rice and sugar on the earthen floor, some crockery and tinware, sewing items, and little else. All lit by a late-afternoon sun.
Childress scarcely looked at the foodstuffs. He pulled one of his fat black Havanas from his breast pocket, lit it with a brand plucked from the beehive fireplace within, sucked and exhaled until the tip of the cigar glowed bright orange, and then approached a stocky woman with vast bosoms who seemed to be overseeing this rural emporium. Childress was soon talking and gesticulating and patting the stolid woman on the shoulder, while Shine cased the joint, looking for plunder.
Skye couldn’t grasp a word of it. For all he knew, the Texas pirate was describing them all as buccaneers, bandits, crooks, abusers of women, escaped prisoners, heretics, murderers, and desperados. From time to time the woman glanced at Skye and at the monkey, and sometimes out the door toward the fancy carriage where the women sat expectantly.
But the Mexican woman didn’t seem to grow excited. Plainly, she was giving Childress directions, pointing southward, lifting her thick arms up and down as she talked.
Childress nodded, patted her, and at the last, gave her a
fat cigar. She sniffed it, smiled, bit off the end, and stuffed it between her stained teeth.
Skye studied her and the other Mexicans lounging about. Plainly they were rural laborers, mestizos mostly. Nothing about them suggesting mining, and he doubted that any were miners. These were the weathered ones who hoed and scraped those fields they had passed, the ones who fed the miners if the rains came.
Childress bowed, lifted his silk top hat to the woman, settled it again on his sweaty brow, and retreated into slanting sunlight, beckoning Skye. The monkey followed, barehanded.
“There now, I’ve got what we need. There were seven holdings originally; now it’s two after some consolidating. They employ Indian labor exclusively. She says the Indians make good workers and don’t need the whip. All we have to do is keep on going. The first, the Blessed Saint Ignatius of Loyola Mine, is up ahead, and employs maybe a hundred, she thought, but counting that high taxes her mind. The other is smaller, Santa Rosita, and she couldn’t say for sure what it employs. Ah, we’ll find the bugger yet, eh?”
“Maybe. What did you tell her about us?”
“Is something wrong with you?”
“What did you tell her?”
“What does it matter? We’re Finland royalty. I eat caviar. We have the queens of Van Dieman’s Land and Iceland to amuse us, and are looking for gaudy investments.”
“That’s trouble.”
“Ah, pah! Mister Skye, you’re a worrywart. Leave it to Childress. Leave it to Shine, the phenomenal burglar.”
Childress clambered into the calash, rocking it under his vast bulk. Skye settled himself wearily in the van, and urged the trotters forward. A thick coating of dust covered their sleek black hair.
The canyon widened abruptly ahead, forming a plain compassed by slopes. A dry riverbed ran beside the rutted
road, and even though the summer had not progressed far, a great aridity marked the land.
A gash disturbed the rolling land just ahead, and as Skye drew close he beheld a giant pit swarming with human bodies. A single adobe shack stood on the brow of a hill. Off to one side stood some rude rectangular adobe buildings, probably quarters for the miners. A gulch had been dammed to provide some water.
But it was the pit that riveted Skye as he drove the trotters alongside the gaping hole in the earth. The solidified gravel rose in benches, which supported rude ladders of sorts, each hacked out of a single log. These were notched for the feet of those using them, but they lacked a handrail or any other means by which a person could steady himself. Yet the workers were climbing and descending these rickety devices while carrying huge baskets of ore.
“Look at those poor devils, Mister Skye,” Childress said. “Swarms of them, like ants.”
Skye slowed the horses. The sight horrified him. Those thin workers were bent double, no matter whether their baskets were loaded or empty. Years of brute labor and the weight of tons of ore had bowed their legs and twisted their spines, until not a one of them could stand upright.
Most were naked. A few wore loincloths of some sort. None had shoes or sandals. Nothing protected them from the harsh summer sun. They toiled ceaselessly, some at the bottom level hacking open the gravel, others loading baskets with crude wooden shovels, others parading up one ladder and another, delicately balancing the burdens while inching upward, one notch at a time until they reached the next narrow bench, and the foot of the next rickety log ladder. One misstep meant death. And there would be no pensioning of cripples. Above, somewhere out of sight, the ore was being heaped into a pile that jutted into the brassy blue sky. Skye wondered what sort of labor proceeded up there, and how the gold was extracted from this crumbling gravelly matrix.
He reined the horses to a halt, transfixed at the human anthill before him, where men threw long shadows in the low sun. These workers were small, wiry, bent, and bore terrible wounds across backs and calves and thighs. One labored with a stump of one arm. A few had tied a rag around their forehead to hold their jet hair back from their faces, but that was all the cloth Skye saw on most. He saw very little gray hair; these bent-over mortal males were young. Or were they all male? He studied them closely, his eyes uncertain. Maybe some were girls, but they all were so thin that none had breasts.
They did not notice the black carriage above, or at least pretended not to. Skye wondered where the overseers were, the ones who forced labor from this pitiful gaggle of captive mortals. He had been right; none of these had been at the mercado, and not one ever would enter those cool confines.
“The gambucinos,” Childress said.
“Slaves.”
“Theoretically not slaves. No such thing in Mexico, they insist. Indentured workers on the books.”
“Can they walk away?”
Childress laughed.
Below, a thin bent man stumbled on the second notch of a tall ladder and fell back, spilling his ore. Instantly, a crowd filled the basket again. The bent man shouldered it slowly, and stepped upward on trembling legs, one notch at a time. Skye thought that man was on his last legs, and wouldn’t last another week.
“Skye, get on with it. The manager’s up ahead, there.”
But Skye was in no hurry. He waited to see if the trembling slave would make it. He looked for water barrels to satiate the terrible thirst of these miserable slaves, and found none. He saw none of them resting or recouping. There was only the sight of shining, bent backs of coppery little men, yellow dust caking their bodies, and the big gray baskets made of reed or something similar, all of it lit by a low sun.
“Skye, blast it.”
“I am looking at hell. Nothing in the Royal Navy comes close, and believe me, I’m an expert on that.”
“Well, that’s not important. Are we going to rescue the wretch or not?”
Skye turned to see Standing Alone, who stared unblinking at the sight below her, the lines of her face taut. Victoria was holding her arm, cursing softly. All this was obviously beyond her most terrible imaginings. Skye could scarcely turn his gaze elsewhere, knowing that this awful pit probably claimed two or three lives each day, and what lay before him was an engine of death and pain.
At last he reined the horses the last two hundred yards to the squat, sullen adobe building ahead, where a thin, hawk-faced man in a white suit awaited them, backed by two burly segundos.