flatbeds, and the entire work force left, all believing they would return as soon as the Boston owners arranged to have the cut blasted out and the track relaid. In fact, save for some bits and pieces that have been taken by trophy-hunters, the tools and machinery remain there to this day, looking as though work came mysteriously to a stop in mid-pick-swing. Those treacherous, crumbling mine shafts are still relatively rich in silver ore, and over the years dozens of enterprises for getting it have been proposed, but no one has found a way to bring the ore down without incurring expenses greater than the value of the silver.
The gathering of so many hungry miners, was a boon to Bjorkvist's boardinghouse, which put them up two to a bed. Meals were the usual 'steaks,' biscuits (until the flour ran out), and tinned peaches (until they too ran out). Because there was no other place where they could eat and bed down, Mrs. Bjorkvist felt obliged to charge the miners three dollars for half a bed and an additional dollar for each meal.
Surprisingly-perhaps not all that surprisingly, considering the aphrodisiac effect of death as manifest in soaring birthrates during times of war and disaster- Frenchy's girls did land-office business that first night and all of Sunday, working right up to the morning, when the miners had to start their descent. The clients chose among Queeny, Chinky, and Goldy, this last being the most popular. Perhaps it was the novelty.
Less surprisingly, the Mercantile quickly sold out of blankets, warm clothes, tinned food, and anything else that might be of use during the arduous descent.* Throughout the day-and-night press of eager, sometimes belligerent buyers, Matthew helped out behind the counter, fetching goods, making change, tying up bundles, always smiling, his eyes gentle and distant.
* Remarkably, during the two-day mass descent through drifting snow and unstable footing, only one miner was lost; and he was literally lost. According to the account in the Destiny Sentinel, after taunting the men he was descending with for dawdling, one young miner pushed on ahead. But he never showed up in Destiny and was never heard of again.
It is characteristic of Mr. Kane that he gave credit to those who didn't have the cash to pay for what they needed, and it is characteristic of the now-vanished Yankee ethos that a fair percentage of the miners paid Ruth Lillian what they owed when they got to their savings down in Destiny.
Doc took upon himself the melancholy duty of shooting the pair of ailing donkeys that Coots had brought down for rest and attention, and by noon on Monday the last miners had passed through the donkey meadow and disappeared down the steep trail, the falling snow patiently filling their footprints. The girls, under Frenchy's direction, were the first of the townsfolk to undertake the descent, waddling across the meadow in bizarre accretions of blankets, cloaks, and makeshift hoods, beneath which they wore layers of fancy dresses, because Frenchy wouldn't let them carry anything but food. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise that Lieder had burned all their shoes in Murphy's boiler, for the hardy (and not a bit too roomy) boots that Queeny borrowed from a miner served her better on the trail than her own flimsy ones would have done. Frenchy wore the boots B. J. had given her, and Chinky, whose little feet would have been lost in miner's boots, had a stout pair of Ruth Lillian's shoes to see her through.
It was afternoon before the band consisting of the Bjorkvists, Jeff Calder, and Professor Murphy was ready to start down. The night before, they had gathered in the kitchen of the boardinghouse, where Murphy proposed that they take as much as they could carry of the silver ore that the train had been unable to deliver to Destiny. This crushed and dressed ore was almost 20 percent silver. Five pounds of ore was a pound of silver! When you subtracted the cost of smelting and refining, it would be worth maybe half of that. That would work out to a pound of silver for every ten pounds of ore! They scrounged up every sack they could find and waited until the miners had gone (why let everybody in on it?) before filling them with double handfuls of ore. Painful choices had to be made between extra clothes and ore, between food and ore. In the end they brought only the absolute minimum to see them through the two-day descent.
The snow-laden sky was thickening ominously by the time the four men and the woman crossed the donkey meadow, their feet dragging furrows through the snow, their bodies bent beneath the weight of their ore.
Their greed was to make them endure famine, fatigue, falls, and frostbite-and that's just the F's, as Coots would have said. By the middle of the second day, Jeff Calder's wooden stump made him fall behind, and when he realized that the others had no intention of risking their lives and silver by slowing down for him, he abandoned his sacks of loot. When he caught up, Mrs. Bjorkvist could not believe that he had left his ore! Profligacy is a sin! She browbeat her son and husband into going back to get it. While she and Professor Murphy awaited their return, huddled together for warmth, Jeff Calder continued on ahead, unencumbered. And that's how it came to pass that, despite having only one leg, he was the first of them to get to Destiny, where he basked in the attention of a young reporter of the Destiny Tribune, as we shall see in a moment.
The others continued to stagger down, their legs wobbly beneath their burdens, frequently dropping to their knees and panting, drool melting holes in the snow beneath their chins. Eventually, they were forced to choose between the ore and their lives. With tears of rage and frustration, Mrs. Bjorkvist clenched her fist at the sky and cursed the cruel God who was ripping her just reward from her grasp, after all she had suffered! All right! All right, she would leave the ore behind! But she insisted that it be thrown over the cliff. If they couldn't have it, no one would! When the four of them finally stumbled into Destiny, they were in such bad condition that they had to spend more than a week in bed in a boardinghouse that cruelly overcharged them. It is said that Mrs. Bjorkvist was never the same, and that can only have been a blessing for those who had to deal with her.
B. J. watched the party of five cross his donkey meadow, each bent beneath a pair of sacks tied together behind the neck. He shook his head and gathered up a few possessions-just some clothes and his treasured Lucilius-then he went down to help the Kanes prepare for their descent. As it turned out, they didn't leave until the next morning.
Throughout the day and night that the Mercantile had been besieged by panicked buyers, Mr. Kane had repeatedly brushed off his daughter's pleas not to exert himself. 'Matthew and me can do everything, Pa!' Now they were the last people left in Twenty-Mile, and he was bringing a small pasteboard box of memorabilia down the stairs for B. J. to put into one of the slim blanket rolls that were to be their only burdens on the descent. B. J. reached up to receive the box, but Mr. Kane grasped both his hands, letting the box drop. He sat heavily on the bottom step and looked up, bewildered. 'I think… oh, Mr. Stone, I think…' And he died, holding the hands of the man who, if things had worked out differently, might have been a friend.
Later, when she was going through the box of memorabilia, Ruth Lillian discovered a lock of fine reddish baby hair… hers…, the fine German scissors that her grandfather had brought from the old country, and a yellowed photograph of her grandparents and their young son… her father… standing proudly before a sign announcing: The American High-Class Finishing Materials Company (Reliable Service at Competitive Prices).
Although she had been preparing herself for her father's death for years, she still had difficulty swallowing back her silent tears.
Using the same barrow that had carried Coots, they brought Mr. Kane to the burying ground. Matthew could only manage a shallow grave in the stiffening earth, and the best B. J. could do for a marker was to drive in a fence post onto which he had nailed a board with the scratched-on words: 'David Kane… A good man.'
At the last minute, Matthew returned to the marshal's office to roll up his possessions. He took only his Hudson Bay blanket, his broken-backed dictionary, a scarf and pair of gloves Ruth Lillian had laid aside for him before the miners emptied the Mercantile of stock, and the canvas bag containing his treasures: the little blue glass bottle that had been buried so mysteriously, the marble with a real American flag suspended in the middle, and the rock with gold flakes that someone had said was only fool's gold, but who knows? His other treasure, the ball- pointed marshal's badge, he always wore pinned to his jacket.
The three of them paused for a moment by the fence to look through the sifting snow to where Coots and Mr. Kane lay side by side. Then they started across the donkey meadow.
THIS IS THE PLACE to confess my debt to the Destiny Tribune, and particularly to its reporter-of-all-desks, C. R. Harriman. (I have no idea what the initials stood for.) Writing in the succulent, sesquipedalian journalese of the era, young Harriman chronicled the arrival of the refugees from Twenty-Mile; and it was he who, some thirty years later, wrote the account of his own last days in Destiny that I shall soon have cause to mention.
Combing through the yellowedged, friable pages of the Tribune in the Historical Society's archives, I learned of Reverend Hibbard's arrival in Destiny three days after Coots's lynching, and five days before the first miners came stumbling in. He was found wandering in the street, muddy, bruised, completely worn-out. It was through C. R. Harriman's interview with Hibbard that Destiny found out what had become of those three insane escapees from the state prison who had dropped out of sight after killing that retired schoolteacher in Tie Siding and doing those
