West of Washoe by Tim Champlin Read Free Book Online

He snorted in disgust, dumped their billfolds, combs, and other items on the ground, and faded away into the darkness.
    Ross let out a deep breath and put the three $20 gold pieces back into his pocket. “Glad it was too dark for him to notice I had my fists balled up.”
    “The divide between here and Virginia City is a favorite place for robberies of men afoot at night.” Scrivener was on his hands and knees to retrieve his spear point. “So many hold-ups, I don’t even hear about them all, so I just have to generalize in the paper. Boring and repetitive.”
    “Probably not to the victims.”
    The men came out into the welcome light of storefronts as they neared the livery.
    “Next time I come through here after dark, I’ll be in a buggy or on a horse with my gun in hand,” Ross vowed.
    “You know…that man’s voice sounded somehowfamiliar,” Ross said, scratching his chin. But the name and face kept sliding off the edge of his consciousness and would not come into focus. “Maybe it’ll come to me later.”

Chapter Five
    Next morning Ross stood at the Ophir Mine and watched Scrivener’s buggy roll away.
    “Here, put this on to keep your clothes clean,” said Michael Flannery, the foreman, handing him a pair of well-used canvas coveralls coated with smears of clay and dirt, stiffened with the drippings of candle wax and whitewash.
    Flannery was a wiry, black-haired son of Erin with sharp eyes that seemed to take in everything. The foreman led him up a small hill to the mouth of a narrow shaft, handed him a thick candle, and lit it. “Hold this so the light reflects from the palm of your hand,” he said. “I’ll go down first.”
    They backed into the opening and began descending a slightly canted ladder. The small opening and the sight of sky receded above them. The smoky wicks of their candles cast wavering light on the rough walls of the shaft. At the end of the ladder was a small spot of ground to stand on, similar to a landing. Then they started down another ladder. At the end of that one came another, and yet another, until Ross lost track of how many they’d descended. A large pipe descended parallel to the shaft. A ponderous pump somewhere was hoisting water from the depths of the mine.
    Ross stepped down carefully, looking around him. It wasn’t light enough to see if silver ore lay in the loose dirt or rock of the narrow shaft.
    Every few steps, Flannery paused and held hiscandle near the dripping rocks and banks of earth. “There…you see it? Horblendic, feldspathic…graniferous! There…and there! See? Look at that forty-five degree dip. Very rich.”
    “Yes, I see.” Ross ducked under a wooden beam and an overhanging spur of rock. He twisted himself around corners and stubbed his toe on piles of ore heaped on landings as they moved down from one level to the next.
    Finally they reached the bottom. The square-set timbering was an ingenious invention of a German immigrant; it allowed men to burrow more than a thousand feet into the earth. Timbers eighteen inches square interlocked with one another to form hollow cubes of any desired size, like small rooms.
    “Make way, gents. Stand aside!” came a call from ahead in the tunnel. Miners were pushing ore-filled handcars along the tracks. The whole tunnel wasn’t over five feet wide. The tracks and cars took up three feet of that, the square-set timbers the rest. Ross and the foreman hugged a dark, wet wall as the ore cars rumbled past.
    With Flannery leading the way, they explored the fifth level, and the sixth level. The foreman seemed in a hurry to rush him through for a cursory tour.
    “Slow down,” Ross said, crouching by a ledge of rock. “I want to take a closer look.” He pulled the small, prospector’s hammer from his belt and chipped off a sample.
    At one point, miners were pitching down loose earth and rocks to the next level to be hauled out by ore cars. Ross and the foreman climbed up a long ladder.
    When they’d