mountain. Hammersmith knew that it stretched for more than a mile under the earth. Several crosscut tunnels intersected it; the crosscuts provided ventilation and access to smaller drifts that paralleled the main tunnel. There were also some vertical shafts leading to lower levels.
“You mean the mine goes even lower?” Jessica asked when he pointed out the vertical shafts to her.
“That’s right. Some mines where I’ve worked go down several thousand feet.”
She looked up at the ceiling, no doubt thinking of the tons of rock and dirt perched there over her head, and Hammersmith felt a shiver go through her. “I can’t imagine such a thing,” she murmured. “We’re already so deep that it’s frightening.”
“Nothing to be scared of,” he assured her. “As long as you take the right precautions, mines like this are perfectly safe.”
“But things sometimes go wrong, don’t they? There are cave-ins and things like that?”
Hammersmith shrugged. “Most problems are caused by carelessness. I don’t allow my men to get careless. They know they’ll be in for trouble if they do.”
“From a cave-in, you mean?”
Hammersmith laughed. “From me. I reckon most of them would rather have to deal with a cave-in than face me when I’m mad at them.”
“You
“You can call me Gunther if you want,” he ventured.
“All right…Gunther.”
She didn’t invite him to call her Jessica, and while he noticed that, he didn’t really care. As long as he got to walk along beside her and touch her now and then, it didn’t matter to him what he called her.
There was quite a bit of noise underground. Picks rang against the walls; steam-powered drills known as widow-makers chattered as they gouged holes in the rock so that dynamite could be planted in them; men shouted back and forth to each other. In some mines, the rock was balanced so precariously that a loud noise could set off a cave-in, meaning that the hard, dangerous work of shoring up had to be completed before the real job of taking the ore out could begin. In the Alhambra, that had already been done. An earthquake or a badly placed blast might bring the place down, but short of those things, it was safe down here, as Hammersmith had explained to Mrs. Munro.
He didn’t try to take Jessica all through the place. That would have taken too long and exhausted her. He settled for showing her the general layout and letting her watch some of the men at work for a few minutes. At this level, they still wore their grimy, dust-covered shirts. Lower down in the earth, where the temperature rose, the miners often stripped their shirts off and worked bare-chested. Hammersmith recalled doing that himself, when he was a young man and too stupid to do anything except swing a pick all day long. He had learned a great deal since then.
Even here, it was warmer than on the surface, and Jessica’s face shone in the lantern light as a fine layer of perspiration appeared on her skin. “My goodness,” she said as she fanned herself with a hand, “if you dig down far enough, do you reach Hades itself?”
Hammersmith laughed and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s probably how folks got the idea that Hell’s somewhere under the earth. Once you get past the upper level, where it’s cooler, the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Smells a little like brimstone too.”
“I think I’m ready to go back out and get some fresh air.”
“Sure. You’ve seen all there really is to see anyway.”
They started back up, the light from the mouth of the shaft growing brighter as they climbed. Before they reached it and stepped back out into the sunshine, Jessica stopped and said, “Gunther, thank you for showing me around.”
“Oh, it was my pleasure,” he said without hesitation, meaning every word of it.
“You’re just being polite. I’m sure you couldn’t have enjoyed getting stuck with your boss’s wife like this.”
He shook his head. “You’ve got that all wrong, ma’am. I didn’t mind a bit, truly. Fact is, I, uh, really enjoyed spending the time with you.”
“Really?” She smiled up at him. “Why, that’s such a nice thing to say, Mr. Hammersmith…I mean, Gunther.”
He had never liked his name all that much. It sounded coarse and harsh to him. But when she spoke it, in that honeyed voice of hers…well, that was different. He looked down at her, realizing just how close she was standing to him. Nobody was around; all the men were down at the bottom of the shaft. And she had this look on her lovely face, like she expected him to do something….
What the hell.
He pulled her into his arms and brought his mouth down on hers in a hard, urgent kiss.
Chapter 21
The same sort of racket came from the Alhambra that had come from the Crown Royal until the explosion a couple of nights earlier. The donkey engines, the compressor that powered the steam drills down in the mine, the shuddering thumps of the stamp mill in action…
A mine was a noisy place, and one that stunk a mite too, Frank thought as he rode up. The frontier had been a lot more peaceful before all this newfangled machinery came along, starting with the railroad. Frank was old enough to remember what it had been like before. He could only imagine the changes that some of the real old-timers, like Catamount Jack, had seen in their lifetimes.
Frank brought Stormy to a halt and dismounted in front of the building where the office was located. The place had been cleaned up and repaired a lot since that day he and Garrett Claiborne had stopped by here and almost
