No Less Than the Journey by E.V. Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

by a hubbub of talk, laughter and discordant piano music.
    Wes pushed all such sounds into the background as he mulled over the happenings of what had been an extremely traumatic day.
    He was surprised that the fact he had taken the lives of fellow men did not trouble his conscience at all. In fact, it affected him less than the occasion when, as a boy, he had accompanied his gamekeeper father on an expedition to kill a fox that had slaughtered chickens on one of the estate farms.
    On the contrary, he admitted to feeling a certain satisfaction at seeing the bodies of the river pirates laid out in a double row on the deck of the riverboat – and this did trouble him.
    Wes had been brought up to believe that human life was sacred, yet here he was gloating over the killing of so many men – albeit men to whom human life was cheap.
    No doubt his father would have understood his feelings,having spent fifteen years in the army before being invalided from the service at the early age of thirty because of a wound sustained during service in Africa.
    The wound had prevented Curnow senior from taking underground work when he returned to the Bodmin moor mining area, where he had been born and had worked as a boy. However, because of his skill as an army sharpshooter he was offered work as a gamekeeper at Trebartha, a large estate bordering the moor and had soon married and settled down happily.
    Wes grew up to share his father’s prowess with long-barrelled weapons, but there was mining in his blood from both sides of the family and he chose to work on one of the moor’s copper mines.
    He soon considered himself to be a highly skilled ‘hard-rock’ miner and looked forward to a career which would ultimately lead to him becoming a respected mine captain.
    Unfortunately, mining was a fickle business, copper mining in particular being at the mercy of a great many pressures originating outside the industry. When, in the early 1870’s a nationwide financial collapse coincided with a slump in the price of copper, many mines were forced out of business. Before long, the mine where Wes worked became one of them.
    He might have hoped to be able to emulate his father and become an assistant gamekeeper on the estate where he had worked, but the estate owner had been a heavy investor in the mines on Bodmin moor. Although unlikely to be bankrupted, he was feeling the pinch and there was a surfeit of unemployed men seeking work. The wages he offered to Wes proved unacceptable, so Wes looked elsewhere.
    A great many out-of-work miners were leaving Cornwall – leaving England – and seeking new lives in far off places that were no more than a name to most of them: Australia, SouthAfrica, Chile, Peru, Mexico – and the United States of America.
    There had been a growing exodus of miners from Cornwall to all these places over the years and it was a letter from Wes’s uncle which fired his imagination. It told of the good life to be had in the lead mine communities of South East Missouri where new machinery meant mines were able to go deeper underground, creating work for experienced hard-rock miners.
    The letter writer painted a glowing picture of the wages that could be earned and the standard of life that was enjoyed, declaring there to be unlimited prospects for a man who possessed a sound knowledge of mining and a willingness to work hard.
    After thinking the matter over for some time, Wes decided he would leave Cornwall and begin a new life in far off Missouri.
    He set off on his great adventure with a considerable advantage over most of his fellow emigrating miners. They were for the most part married men who had left behind any money they possessed to provide a meagre existence for their families until such time as they could send them more, or until they felt secure enough to call for their loved ones to come and join them in the new land.
    Wes had no such commitments and during the good years of copper mining had managed to save money.