Foxfire (20 page)

She had been to the mine office with Dart and had thought the group of dingy frame buildings very ugly, but she was glad to see their lights now, and intent only on finding Dart, she forgot mine etiquette and ran up the steps into the building.

She burst into the general office and was brought up short by the astonished faces of the two men inside. Luther Mablett sat at his desk smoking a cigar, and he had been talking to a sallow middle-aged man with a knobby head who was lounging on the corner of the desk. This was Tiger Burton, the day-shift boss, though Amanda did not know it, and Dart had been the subject of their conversation.

Mablett's bull face flushed vermilion up to his tight yellow-white curls, he rose clumsily to his feet. Burton got off the desk, he had little eyes like dull onyx, and they fixed themselves on Amanda's face, unwinking as a lizard's.

“Oh, I'm terribly sorry!” Amanda cried. “I thought Dart'd be here, I could ride down with him.”

“Oh—sure,” said Mablett breathing hard, but recovering. “He's still underground, far as I know. Er ... Mrs. Dartland, meet Mr. Burton—shift boss.”

“How do you do.” Amanda held out her hand and Burton shook it with alacrity, revealing a few tobacco-stained teeth and many black gaps in an ingratiating smile. “'S a pleasure,” he said.

Amanda like most people received from Tiger Burton an impression of nonentity. She perceived only a meager sweaty little man with nondescript features, a semi-bald head partially concealed by lank wisps of dark hair, and a colorless mouth compressed to an expression of nervous affability. Mablett's toady, she thought, vaguely remembering something Dart had said, and she dismissed him in favor of propitiating the enemy she knew of.

“Mr. Mablett, would I be an awful nuisance....I mean could I wait someplace for Dart? You see, I was at Mrs. Cunningham's going through Dart's trunk for a suit—” she pointed to it apologetically, “and I was so near here, I thought I could get a ride down. I know women don't come to the mine, please forgive me.” She instinctively concealed the basket under the edge of the suit but Burton's hooded eyes had seen it, and at once recognized it for Apache. He effaced himself in the corner of the room and rolled himself a cigarette.

Amanda followed her breathless explanation with a widening of shining blue eyes and her most brilliant smile, to which Mablett was not unreceptive. Dartland was an insubordinate bastard and a hell of a nuisance, but there was no special quarrel with Mrs. Dartland.

His bulging eyes softened. “Sure. Sure. You can wait on the porch. There's a bench. The men won't bother you none. Day shift's all gone home ... By the way did you say you'd seen that crazy old Cunningham dame?”

“Why, yes,” said Amanda, still smiling.

“What's she like?” asked Mablett curiously. “I've never seen her but they say she's batty as a March hare, sees ghosts and stuff. Weren't you scared?”

“No....” Amanda was startled. She thought back to her visit with Calise. It seemed a very long time ago, the impression of it nearly effaced by the far stronger excitement which had followed. “She seemed very pleasant,” Amanda added uncertainly.

“Well, you want to watch out who you mix up with, a beautiful girl like you,” said Mablett with heavy gallantry. “Lots of queer characters in a place like this.” He winked and chuckled.

Amanda laughed. “I guess there are.” She gave him a small coquettish nod and went outside on the porch. He wasn't so bad, she thought, once you got him away from Lydia. If Dart would only use a little tact, jolly him along. Or far better yet, get away from the whole stupid mess. Her fingers closed tight on the edge of the basket. She sat down on the bench, and after a cautious look around, she lit a cigarette. She gazed down the canyon towards the lights of the mill and waited impatiently.

Inside the office, Burton spoke from the corner. “Nice-looking little bit of tail.”

“Yeah,” said Mablett.
“She
ain't so bad.” He frowned down at the chief engineer's report on his desk. The samplings weren't running any better.

“He
seen Tyson again, Lute?” Burton spoke casually, his expressionless eyes fixed on the ceiling.

The superintendent hunched his shoulders in sudden irritation. “Jesus, I don't know. I don't think so. Whatever he wanted on them two visits don't seem to've got him anything. But the old man won't talk.”

Burton shifted his feet and took a drag on his cigarette. “Like we was saying, Lute, when she busted in—you ought to get rid of him. Sneaking around behind your back, making you look like a fool with the men...”

Mablett's chair scraped back, he twisted his thick neck and glowered at his shift boss. “You know God-damn well I can't get rid of him just like that. He ain't done nothing out of the way lately, anyhow. Nothing to put your finger on.”

In Mablett's slow brain, the familiar baffled anger which this subject caused him exploded in a new direction. He rocked his head from side to side—“You keep harping and harping. He don't interfere with
you
none, you act like
you
was superintendent here. What's the matter with you anyway, Tiger? You been drinking?”

Burton came out of his corner, he put his small hairy hand on his chief's arm. “Why, no, Lute,” he said mildly. “I don't mean for to bother you. I just don't like Apaches, they'll get you every time, if you don't get 'em first.”

“Oh, for God's sake.” Mablett shook off the hand. “That again. You're nuts on that subject.”

Mablett's reactions were simple and he had insensibly become accustomed to accepting the opinions and flattery of his shift boss, but he was not an utter fool. Much as he disliked Dart he could not picture him as a treacherous physical menace, moreover Tiger's obsession was getting to be a bore. Dartland was only a quarter-breed after all, and they'd got rid of the other Indian boys.

“You stick to your own job, Tiger—” he said gruffly, “and let me do the worrying.”

“Sure, Lute.... That ventilating pipe on the seven hundred blew loose again, we'll have to patch it ... like you said.”

Tiger knew when he had gone too far. He had plans, but they could wait, wait until everything worked just right. Nor did they need co-operation from this big stupid hulk. An accident, of course. Wipe out the Indian without mercy, like the Indians had wiped his mother out, but no fist fights, no sudden murderous rage like there'd been with that Cleve in the deserted stope. This Indian must be wiped out without anyone knowing how, because besides being an Indian he was mine foreman. And when that job was open, one of the shift bosses would be next in line. There'd be no trouble about which one, if the whole thing was handled just right. He smiled down in answer to a statement of Mablett's.

“Sure, Lute. You got a great idea there. That'll cut costs, all right.”

A
MANDA
sat on the mine office porch until she got restless, then she got up and wandered down to the parking space below the change house and found their car. She put the suit and the basket on the seat, and decided, since as usual it was getting chilly as soon as the sun set, to walk around. They couldn't really mind that, the prohibition for women applied only to underground.

Dart would have to come up on top in the elevator thing they called a cage, she knew that much, and she walked over to -the jumble of little buildings below the head frame which stuck up like an intricate steel gallows thirty feet into the air, above the shaft. There was a whirring of machinery from the adjacent hoist house, and she looked timidly inside the open door. Two large Diesels were running the air compressors and the hoist, and Amanda stared at them with the nervous awe the roaring of huge machinery gives to the uninitiated.

The young hoistman and Amanda saw each other at the same time; he was sitting on a platform by levers and an indicator, and he shouted something at her, and beckoned. She picked her way gingerly over to his platform and said, “I'm Mrs. Dartland. I'm just waiting for my husband to come up.”

He nodded, showing to Amanda's relief no particular surprise. He was an earnest young man named Bill Riley, who was new to the Shamrock though he had grown up in the Ray Mines. He was proud of his job, which entailed considerable responsibility, and he was very conscientious. He kept a thermos full of coffee by his stool to give him extra alertness during the long night hours of watching for signals and timing the hoist.

“That'll likely be Mr. Dartland now—” he said to Amanda, as a light flashed and a horn buzzed. “D'you want to wait at the collar?”

Correctly interpreting this as the mouth of the shaft, Amanda picked her way back amongst the whirring engines, and stood outside. The man-cage clanked up into sight, and Dart stepped off, though for an instant she did not recognize him in the hard black helmet with its single lamp flashing in front like a cyclops eye.

“For the love of Mike—” he said laughing. “Where did you blow from!”

“Oh, Dart—I've got so much to tell you ... ask you, I thought I'd ride home with you. Don't mind, do you?”

“I'm charmed.” He squeezed her waist, delighted to hear her voice bright and happy as it had not been in a long time. Delighted that she, who had been lying around the house and moping for days, should have found the energy to walk up to the mine.

“Did you see Mrs. Cunningham?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, and she's wonderful, but that isn't what...” She stopped. No use explaining all that yet.

“I thought so,” said Dart with satisfaction. Calise had helped as he had known she would. “Wait'll I change, Andy. I've got to shower but I'll hurry.”

“You sure need one, my gardenia,” said Amanda wrinkling her nose, “but I love you anyway.”

Dart laughed and hurried into the change house. He had had a routine day underground. The usual petty problems to be dealt with, mild vexations and then mild pleasure when the problems had been solved. The new cross-cut on the 700 had hit a vein finally, but already it was pinching out again, and it was evidently not the main lode, though a few weeks of highergrade ore had helped. Tyson was still pursuing a waiting policy. Dart's two interviews with him had been inconclusive. He had listened to Dart's hunch about driving a blind cross-cut in the old Shamrock, listened indulgently and agreed not to mention it to anyone. But he had not consented.

“Maybe later, Dart. If we're really up against it. But you know yourself it's an expensive gamble. One of these days when I feel a bit better, I'll get underground with you and have a look, myself. In the meantime you're doing a fine job.”

So the mine limped along and Dart, temporarily relinquishing his plan, bent all his efforts to giving the present operating policy as firm a footing as possible. Even to the avoidance of clashes with Mablett, whenever there was no danger to the men involved.

He ran out of the change house and jumped into the car beside Amanda. “Nice to see you, kid—” he said and kissed her. She snuggled up against him and they started down the mountain road.

“D'you find the old suit all right?” he asked, as they passed above the mill down in the canyon. The mill lights were off now except for the watchman's. Be nice if we ever could get out enough ore to keep her running steady down there, thought Dart.

“Uhuh—” said Amanda. “And I found something else too. Something I think is frantically exciting.”

“Not pictures of nekkid ladies I hope, I can't remember exactly how much of my past's in that trunk!”

“No nekkid ladies. A—a basket.”

“Basket?”

She reached around to the back seat, and held the basket near his face. “Here it is—can you see what it is?”

He slowed down and peered through the gloom. “Oh, yes,” he said after a moment. “That was Saba's, my mother's—she wove it. I'd forgotten where it was. Is that so exciting?”

“Do you remember what's in it?”

“Not very well. I think Saba put in whatever's there.” He was puzzled by the tension he felt in Amanda, and a trifle uneasy. He knew that his Indian background did not usually give her pleasure.

“I'll show you when we get home—” she said brightly. “By the way—I cooked a stew this morning, out of that cook book Mama sent. I don't think it'll be too awful, and there's some left in that bottle of hootch Hugh gave us last week. We'll have a party.”

“Fine,” said Dart, “but are we celebrating anything special?”

“Indeed we are!” cried Amanda.

After a couple of drinks, the stew and coffee, Amanda cleared the table of dishes, and brought in the basket with a little air of mystery. Her eyes were shining and Dart contemplated her with affection and amusement.

“So Saba made the basket?” she asked putting it on the table between them.

He nodded, smiling. He remembered vividly when it was made, because he had been about seven and very bored with hunting for “Devil's Claw,” the dark pincer-like mountain plant which alone could produce the black design.

“There's lots of queer little things in here,” said Amanda spreading them on the table, but carefully leaving in the basket the copper disk and the notes. “What are they, Dart? Did you play with them?”

“Good Lord, no!” cried Dart staring at the buckskin pouch, and the feathers, and the piece of horn and the beaded thong. “I wasn't even allowed to touch them.”

“Why? What are they?”

“They were Tanosay's. He was a great shaman, a medicine man. These were the instruments of—of his trade.” Dart spoke lightly but his eyes were thoughtful. The awe with which these little objects had once inspired him was inextricably mingled with his reverence for Tanosay who had never doubted their power.

“Tell me about them,” said Amanda.