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LEE AND CARTER GALLOPED out of Silver Creek, their jaws set firm. Despite having been recently deputized, neither man fancied their chances of raising a posse, so they had no choice but to find Marshal Brown first.
They’d agreed that Brown’s skepticism in Abe’s resurrection would force him to seek proof that Abe’s body was at the mine. Worse, the arrival of Rufus suggested that Abe had wanted him to take Brown there to face him.
The sun was high in the sky, beating down with relentless heat as they rode along the dusty trail to the trading post. Instead of taking the route to the Wayne ranch, they veered toward the mine and headed into the winding pass that ultimately led to Silver Gulch.
From a mile away, they received the first sign that they approached the mine as the noise grew. A clamoring of metal hammering against metal, and metal hammering against ground as hard as metal, filled the hot dry morning.
Underpinning the industrial sound was the babble of workers giving orders, arguing, or discussing, but the conversations merged into a solid wave of sound. Once they’d turned the last corner in the approach to the mine, the first sight was as hideous as Lee remembered from when he’d first arrived two years ago.
The mine was a vast gash in the side of what was once probably an elegantly rounded hill, now a quarter demolished as the surface prospectors converted it into large rubble, and then smaller rubble and then dust. All day long, these desperate men searched for the seams of silver and occasional pockets of gold.
Like an iceberg, this industry was just the tip of the horrors here. Carter had the same open-mouthed expression that Lee had, when he first came across this mixture of the worst place on Earth and the most wondrous.
Too much happened for the eye to understand and newcomers always darted their vision back and forth, trying to take everything in at once. Sadly, Lee knew that before long you’d discover the mine lacked any wonder.
All you found was grime, pain, sweat and more grime. Riches existed, but you’d see those only in other people’s hands.
“What are all the people doing?” Carter said.
Enough men dashed about to mean that you could never work out what they all did, but Lee pointed at the top of the gash in the hill.
“At the top, they chip or blast the rock,” Lee said. “Then they roll the pieces to the bottom. There, they grind it down and wash the spoil to find silver, but those men don’t work officially for the mine. They’re scavenging, hoping to find nuggets in the spoil that the real miners have discarded. If they find something, they eat. If they don’t, life gets tough.”
Sadly, many of these people only scurried from boulder to boulder, searching rocks that other people had already searched a hundred times, deluded in their belief that they possessed an observational skill nobody else had. That was just a small part of the mining operation.
“Which part of this did you work on?” Carter said, waving his arm in a wide arc, signifying the dirty, over-populated hill.
Lee also waved his arm in a swathe across the hill. “Do you see any Chinese people here?”
Carter shook his head. “I can’t tell. These people could have bright green skin and you wouldn’t know. Everyone’s so filthy.”
“Well, they aren’t here. What you can see is only a fraction of the mine – the nice part. I worked underground. Beneath our feet are miles of tunnels and hundreds of men, hammering at the walls, all day, every day. If you want to know what real filth is, you need to go down there.”
When Carter kneaded his brow, his lip curled in disgust, Lee dismounted and headed toward a man wearing a peaked cap, who stood outside a tent. The cap signified his status as a supervisor, an essential requirement since he was encrusted in the blanket of grime that everyone gained within hours of arriving here. Lee talked to him using gestures as much as words to counteract the noise that concentrated into an almost physical force at the foot of the hill.
“Did Marshal Brown come here? We need to find him. His life is in danger.”
The supervisor smirked. “Being a marshal in a town like Silver Creek, his life is always in danger.”
“We have to find him,” Lee said as Carter dismounted and joined him.
The supervisor snorted. “You and your grinning friend can stop wasting my time and return down the mine. We have schedules to meet.”
“I’m not from the mine,” Lee said. “I’m Brown’s deputy.”
“Yeah, sure, and I’m Brown’s horse. Now return to work or you’re fired.”
The supervisor turned away from Lee and headed back to his tent. With a clawed hand, Lee reached out to grab the man and shake an answer from him, but Carter took his arm and pulled him back a pace. He cupped his mouth over Lee’s ear.
“We’re wasting our time,” Carter said. “The supervisor knows everything that goes on here, and nobody has told him they’ve seen Abe.”
“How can you know that?”
“If someone saw Abe, they couldn’t fail to recognize him and they’d tell the supervisor. As he’s calm, that hasn’t happened.”
“Where do you reckon we search, then?”
As above them hundreds of dirt-encrusted workers milled around the dozen or so mine entrances, Carter frowned.
“The way I see it, if Brown tried to bury Abe in a tunnel, that’s where they’ll be. Which tunnels were closed four months ago?”
Lee pointed. “They’re on the other side of the pass.”
They mounted their horses and backed a hundred yards down the pass. Then they picked a route up the side of it, over a rocky ridge, down into another pass and around the base of the hill on the other side.
Away from the main mining activity, several smaller entrances were dotted about the hills, but they were all half-blocked in and clearly had not been used for some time. Lee put a hand to his brow and examined the surrounding hills.
He pointed at movement on a rocky crag and, with Carter, they edged up the side of the crag. When they’d ascended around fifty yards, they swung around to climb the steepest part of the crag and a horse came into view.
It was tethered to a boulder, and from the size, it was unmistakably Abe’s horse. Better still, Marshal Brown’s mount stood ten feet away from this horse. With these two horses filling most of the outcrop, they dismounted thirty yards back.
Lee trapped his horse’s reins beneath a rock. Carter matched his action, and they scrambled up the rocks to the mine entrance. The entrance wasn’t as blocked as the other ones were, but from the spindly vegetation clogging the rocks, it hadn’t been used for a while.
They edged past a pile of boulders and shuffled into the darkness beyond. Lee was about to ask Carter if he had anything with which they could produce light, but then a faint glow appeared ahead.
The tunnel veered to the left, and at the corner, light and shadows reflected along the tunnel wall. Although they were faint, the shadows were of people. They edged down the tunnel, Lee leading, placing their feet on the pebble-strewn ground as quietly as possible.
Halfway to the corner, low voices reached them. Another ten yards on, Lee recognized Brown’s voice.
“This’ll do you no good,” Brown said, his voice clipped and on edge. “So just get this over with. Do your worst.”
A chuckle sounded, and from the deep tones, it clearly came from Abe.
“You don’t want to know what the worst I can do is,” he said.
In the sudden silence, Lee moved to the tunnel corner with his face pressed close to the wall. Brown was standing against the wall of the closed-in tunnel. Facing him stood Abe, his outline edged in light from a flickering oil-lamp, his vast shadow cutting back across the tunnel. With a wide hand, Abe withdrew a sheet of paper from his jacket.
“What’s that?” Brown said.
“This is a copy of the contract that worm of a lawyer in Bear Rock created when you received my share of the mine.”
Abe hurled the contract at Brown, who caught and scanned it.
“I’m not signing this.”
“That’s no problem.” Abe ran a hand over his shock of hair, the hand brushing against the tunnel roof. “I’ve already signed it for you, and as you’ll be dead, you won’t be able to tell anyone that it isn’t your signature.”
“I didn’t want to own any part of this dirt-filled hill.” Brown threw the contract back at Abe and folded his arms. “I was just glad to rid the town of trash like you.”
Abe pocketed the contract and chuckled. “You’re not pleading for your life like Alistair Marriott did. You’ve still got the chance.”
“I’m not, because I don’t reckon you want me to trap you a second time.” Brown smirked. “I chose this tunnel carefully last time. It’s the least stable one around. Now it’s even less stable. One gunshot and the rest of the tunnel will collapse.”
Abe slapped a hand to the tunnel roof, as if he might hold it up. He broke off a stalactite and threw it to the ground.
“You wouldn’t bring down the tunnel on yourself.”
“Better the death I choose than the one you’ve planned for me. Either you back off, or I kill us both.”
“You don’t have a death wish,” Abe said.
Carter edged back and judged the distance to the entrance, but Lee drew his gun and stepped around the corner of the tunnel.
“Marshal Brown might not have a death wish, but I have,” he said.
“You again,” Abe said. With his huge legs set wide apart, he filled the tunnel.
Lee gestured to the roof. “I have no qualms about bringing down this tunnel. You killed twenty-seven miners, and you aren’t walking out of here alive.”
Chuckling, Abe paced a large stride toward Lee. Flurries of dust rained down from the roof to coat his hair and beard.
“It takes more than rocks to kill me. Marshal Brown couldn’t do it. Neither can you.”
Lee backed away to the wall and gritted his teeth.
“Brown doesn’t understand mines, but I’ve spent too long down here.” Lee gripped his gun more tightly and aimed it at the roof above Abe’s head. “I know how cave-ins start. When I bring this tunnel down, nobody will walk out of here alive.”
Abe threw his head back and laughed long and hard, causing large flurries of dust to cascade around him. When he stopped laughing, he smiled at Lee.
“Don’t die down here, Yick Lee.” His voice was softer than Lee had ever heard before. “Only this scum of a lawman deserves that fate.”
Lee snorted and firmed his gun hand. “No more talk. Step aside and let Brown leave.”
Brown edged to the side, aiming for the gap in the tunnel beside Abe.
“You’re going nowhere,” Abe said.
“Neither are you.” Brown reached for his gun. “We have you where we want you.”
With a whirl of his arm, Abe ripped his gun from its holster, the weapon coming to hand in an instant. His single shot sliced into Brown’s chest, causing him to stumble back against the tunnel wall.
A deep rumbling sounded in the tunnel as Brown staggered a pace from the wall, clutching his chest. He removed the shaking hand and held up his reddened palm. Then, with a groan of despair, he hammered two bullets into the tunnel roof.
A boulder plummeted from the roof to crash down beside him. In desperation Lee dragged Carter away from the tunnel wall, a burst of dust and rocks cascading around him. They bolted down the tunnel with their hands over their heads, gritting their teeth against the stones bouncing off their shoulders and arms.
Abe shouted, the words unrecognizable, but they receded into the distance as a deep rumbling filled the tunnel. Pace by desperate pace they closed on the tunnel entrance, but Lee slid to a halt, turned and fired another two bullets into the roof.
These final gunshots doubled the rumbling from farther down the tunnel. Wooden beams creaked and exploded around them, and vast plumes of dust and debris peppered their backs as they ran.
With a final burst of speed, they ran and leaped from the tunnel entrance, throwing up their arms as they landed in a rolling pile outside. At their heels, huge gouts of dust and stones hurtled from the tunnel as the entrance collapsed.
On the ground, Lee sat up as a funnel of dust rippled into the air from the tunnel entrance, which within seconds closed to a tangle of debris. He batted dust from his clothes, a grim smile on his lips.
Carter stood up, the dust providing a lighter layer of grime to his clothes, and turned away from the clouds of dust coming from the tunnel entrance.
“Were you serious about bringing down the tunnel with us in it?”
Lee sighed. “I guess we’ll never know now.”
Carter patted Lee’s shoulder and headed from the rock-filled entrance.
“In that case, we’d better get back to the Wayne ranch and finish—” Carter flinched as another vast belch of dust funneled out of the remaining small gap.
“Don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of rumbling until the earth settles to a new level.”
With a hand to his brow, Lee stood on the edge of the outcrop and picked the safest route down the crag to their horses.
“You’re another one who isn’t sneaky enough,” a voice roared. “You won’t kill me when I can see death coming.”
Lee turned around. Abe stood in the tunnel entrance, pushing boulders aside. With dust coating his huge body, he appeared to be a ghost, but this ghost was alive.