Twin of Ice (27 page)

Kane had never had much experience with disasters; his battles had usually been on a one-to-one basis, so he was unprepared for what met him at the site of the Little Pamela mine. He heard the screams of the women from far away and he thought that, as long as he lived, he’d never get the sound out of his head.

The gate to the camp was open and unguarded, only a woman sitting there rocking her baby and crooning to it. Kane and the four men with him slowed as they entered the camp, and as more women, some of them running, some of them just standing and crying, came into view, the men dismounted.

As Kane walked past one woman, she grabbed his arm in an iron grip.

“Kill me!” she screeched in his face. “He’s gone and we have nothing! Nothing!”

Kane was unable to stop her from pulling him inside the shack. Rafe’s cabin was a mansion compared to this place. Five filthy children, wearing little more than rags, stood in a corner clutching at one another. Their gaunt faces and big, sad eyes told of their constant hunger. He hadn’t seen these children when he’d come yesterday, but then, he didn’t remember being in this part of the camp where the houses were hovels of tarpaper and flattened tin cans.

“Kill us all,” the woman screamed. “We’ll be better off. We’ll starve now.”

On the board that seemed to serve as a table was a half loaf of old bread, and Kane could see no more food in the house.

“Sir,” the footman who’d entered behind Kane said. “They’ll need help with the bodies.”

“Yes,” Kane said softly and left the hut, the woman crying loudly behind him. “Who are these people?” he asked, once they were outside.

“They can’t afford to pay the rent for the company houses at two dollars a room, so the company rents them land at a dollar a month and they build their own houses out of whatever they can find.” He nodded toward the slum area of shacks of corrugated tin, powder cans, and Kane thought he saw pieces of the crates that yesterday had contained the baseball equipment.

“What will happen to the woman if her husband is dead?”

The man’s mouth turned grim. “If she’s lucky, the company will pay her six months’ wages, but then she and the kids are on their own. Whatever happens, the company will say that the explosion was caused by the miners.”

Kane straightened. “At least we can help now. Let’s go get this woman some food.”

“Where?” the man asked. “Four years ago, there was a riot and the miners attacked the company store, so now there’s always only a bare minimum of goods, including food, in any one camp.” His mouth twisted. “And the town won’t help, either. We tried to get City Hall to help us when the last mine went up, but they said we had to go through ‘channels’.”

Kane started walking toward the center of the camp where the mine was. Before the mouth of the mine lay three sheet-draped bodies; two men carried another body to the open doors of the machine shop, where he could see Blair and two men at work. Kane walked to the stand beside Leander. “How bad is it?”

“The worst,” Leander said. “There’s so much gas in the mine that the rescuers are passing out before they reach the men. We can’t tell exactly what happened yet, or how many are dead, because the explosion went inward instead of outward. There could be tunnels of men still trapped in there alive. Somebody get her, will you?” Lee called as he jumped on the elevator that would take him down into the mine.

Kane caught the woman in question as she ran toward a burned body that was being hauled from the mine. She was a frail little thing, and he picked her up in his arms. “Let me take you home,” he said, but she only shook her head.

Another woman came up to them. “I’ll take care of her.”

“Do you have any brandy?” Kane asked.

“Brandy?” the woman spat at him. “We ain’t even got any fresh water.” She helped the woman Kane was holding to stand.

Two minutes later, Kane was on his horse and tearing down the side of the mountain toward Chandler. He passed Houston on the way up and she called to him, but he didn’t slow his pace.

Once in town, he kept going at full speed, nearly running over a half-dozen pedestrians who all shouted questions at him. Most of the citizens of Chandler were standing outside looking up toward the mountain that held the Little Pamela mine and speculating on what had happened.

Kane thundered through town and up Archer Avenue until he came to Edan’s house. Across the street, the new Westfield Infirmary was alive with activity. He hadn’t seen Edan since the night they’d parted so bitterly.

Edan was walking across the front porch, a saddled horse waiting for him, when Kane skidded to a stop, reining his horse so hard the animal’s front feet came off the ground.

Kane dismounted and ran up the steps all in one motion. “I know you ain’t got much use for me anymore, but I don’t know who else has got the brains to help me organize what I want to do, so I’m askin’ you to forget your feelin’s at the moment and help me out.”

“Doing what?” Edan asked cautiously. “I’m planning to go help at the mine. Jean’s uncle is up there and—.”

“He happens to be
my
goddamn uncle, too!” Kane exploded in Edan’s face. “I’ve just spent the last hour up there and they got more rescuers than they know what to do with, but they don’t have much food and no water, and the explosion flattened a bunch of the houses—if you can call those shacks that. I want your help in gettin’ together some food and shelter for the people, for the rescuers, and for the women that’re standin’ around screamin’.”

Edan looked at his former employer for a long hard minute. “From what Jean could find out on the telephone, it’s going to take a long time to get all the bodies out. We’ll have to rent wagons to haul everything up to the mine, and we ought to try to get a train for…for the bodies. Today, we’ll need food that doesn’t have to be cooked.”

Kane gave Edan a brilliant smile. “Come on, we got to get to work.”

Jean had just come onto the porch, her face ghostly white.

Edan turned to her. “I want you to call Miss Emily at the teashop and tell her to have all her sisters meet me at Randolph’s Grocery as soon as they can get there. Be sure you talk to Miss Emily herself, and be sure you say ‘sisters’. Jean! This is very important, do you understand me?”

Jean nodded once before Edan gave her a quick kiss and mounted his horse.

Once in town, Kane and Edan separated and went to anyone who they knew owned a freight wagon. Most of the owners volunteered their services and, throughout Chandler, there was a feeling of togetherness as their concern for what had happened in the camp drew them together.

Six young ladies met them in front of Randolph’s and Kane took only seconds telling them what was needed before the women took over, sweet Miss Emily bellowing orders in the voice of a gunnery sergeant.

As the wagons pulled up in front of the store’s big back doors, the women loaded cases of canned beef, beans, condensed milk, crackers and hundreds of loaves of bread. When a crowd of curious people began to gather, Miss Emily put them to work helping to load the cases of food.

Edan saw to the filling of a water wagon.

Pamela Fenton came running down the hill, holding her hat on, Zachary in front of her. “What can we do?” she asked loudly over Miss Emily’s orders.

Kane looked down at his son and a feeling of thankfulness spread through his body. This child of his would never be exposed to the constant danger of the mines. He put his hand on the boy’s head and turned to Pam. “I want you to get as many friends as you can to help you and find every tent in this town. Go up to my house and find out what Houston did with those big tents she had for the weddin’. Then, I want every one of those tents taken up to the mine.”

“I don’t think Zach is old enough yet to see what’s happened up there,” Pam said. “Sometimes those explosions can be—.”

Kane’s temper had played no part in the day’s happenings, but now he let it loose. “It’s
you!
” he yelled into her face. “It’s you Fentons that caused all this. If the mines weren’t so dangerous, and your father would part with his precious money, none of this would have happened. This boy is
my
son and, if the boys up there can die in the mines, he’s not too delicate to see the deaths that your father caused. Now, woman, you get busy and do what I say or I’ll remember who you are and remember that right now my dearest wish is to see your father dead.”

When Kane stopped, he was aware that all the many townspeople around him had stopped to stare at him, pausing, frozen in motion, as they gaped.

Edan stepped down from a wagon, the first one to move. “Are we going to stand here all day? You!” he yelled at a young boy. “Load that case of beans and you, move that wagon before that horse runs into the back of the other one.”

Slowly, the people began to return to their duties, but Kane’s mind was on the deaths that had been caused by Jacob Fenton. In spite of what he’d said to Pam, he wouldn’t allow Zach to travel on any wagon to the site of the mine disaster until he was ready to drive one himself.

It was nearly sundown when Kane climbed into a seat and started the trip up to the Little Pamela mine. Zach was beside him, and the boy didn’t speak until they were well on their way.

“Did my grandfather really kill the people? Was it really his fault?”

Kane started to tell his son just what he thought of Fenton, of how the man wanted money so badly that he had cheated Kane out of what was his, but something inside him made him stop. Whatever else the old man was, he was Zachary’s grandfather, and the boy had every right to love him.

“I think sometimes that people get confused about money. They think that money can give them everything that they want in life, and so they go after it any way that they can. It doesn’t matter whether they have to cheat or steal to get it, or even that they may take the money away from someone else, they think that gettin’ the money is worth all they have to do.”

“My mother said that you’re richer than my grandfather. Does that mean that you stole it, too? Did you cheat people?”

“No,” Kane answered softly. “I guess I was lucky. All I had to do was give up my life to get the money.”

They were quiet as they travelled the rest of the way to the mine, and Kane experienced again the horror of first entering the scene of the explosion.

By the mouth of the mine lay eight bodies, undraped, before they were taken away to the machine shop where Blair, another female doctor, and two male doctors were working.

Houston, her hair straggling about her cheeks, her dress soiled, came to the back of the wagon as Kane let down the board.

“This is wonderful of you,” she began, as she lifted a case of condensed milk and started to hand it to a waiting woman. “You really have no part in this. You—.”

Kane took the heavy case from her. “I live here too, and in a way these mines belong to me. Maybe if I’d collected on Fenton, I could have prevented this from happening. Houston, you look tired. Why don’t you take the wagon back and go home and rest?”

“They need everyone. The rescuers are succumbing to the gas and they’re having difficulty reaching the men.”

“Here! Give me a drink of that,” said a familiar voice behind them, and Kane turned to see his uncle Rafe downing a mug of water.

Houston was sure that she’d never seen Kane’s smile so big or showing so much gladness before. He thumped his uncle on the back so hard that the mug went flying across the ground. Rafe said a few well chosen words about Kane’s exuberance, but Kane just stood and grinned until Rafe stopped cursing and winked at Houston before he went back to the mine mouth.

Kane went to the mine where he saw Leander, blackened from the smoke of the explosion, just coming up from the inside. He handed Lee a dipper of water. “Many more?”

Lee drank the water greedily. “Too many.” He held up his hands and looked at them in the fading light. “The bodies are burned and, when you touch them, the skin comes off on your hands.”

There was nothing Kane could say, but his thoughts went to the man who was responsible for all this.

“Thanks for the food,” Lee was saying. “It’s been more help than you know. Tomorrow, more people will be here, the press, relatives, the mine inspectors, government people, and the curious. Food is something that sometimes gets overlooked. I better get back now,” he said, turning away.

Kane made his way through the growing number of people, found Houston and his son and put them on one of the empty freight wagons. “We’re going to organize the rest of the food,” was all he said as he started down the hill. When Houston’s head nodded against his shoulder, he put his arm around her and held her so she could sleep the rest of the way into Chandler.

Houston and Zach slept for a few hours in the back of the wagon while Edan and Kane wakened townspeople and purchased goods to be taken to the mine. In the morning, they went to the high school and asked that the children be dismissed for the day so they could help gather the needed goods.

The students purchased vegetables, jam, fruit; they talked their mothers into cooking the food and boiling hundreds of eggs. They collected clothes, dishes, firewood, and carried everything to receiving stations.

And all day, the news came down from the mountain: twenty-two bodies found so far, so burned, bloated, and mutilated as to make identification almost impossible. Twenty-five more bodies were expected to be found by the rescuers who were working in two shifts. So far, one rescuer had died.

At midday, Kane drove a heavily laden wagon to the mine and, as he unloaded bundles of blankets and hundreds of diapers, he saw the rescuers coming to the surface and more than one of them vomited on the ground.

“It’s the smell,” said a man beside Kane. “The bodies down there smell so bad the men can’t stand it.”

For a moment, Kane stood there staring, then he grabbed someone’s saddled horse and tore down the mountainside—heading for Jacob Fenton’s house with all the speed he could muster.

He hadn’t been up the drive to that house since he’d left years before, but the familiarity was so strong that he felt that he’d never been away. He didn’t wait to knock on the door but rammed his foot through the leaded-glass panel and walked through the door that barely stayed on its hinges.