Past All Dishonor

7

After I woke up a few nights, hearing those feet come at me from behind, I got out the .36 I took from the fellow in Sacramento. But I wouldn’t have kept it if it hadn’t been for the fellow in Scholl & Roberts where I went to exchange it for a .44, and get me some caps and paper cartridges. He listened, then asked me what I expected to shoot. “Nobody, if I can help it. Otherwise, anybody looking for trouble.”

“But not no elephants?”

“They got elephants here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“Mister, my job is to sell guns, and if you want a .44 I’ve got a .44. But short of a elephant, I’d like you to tell me something a .44 will kill that a .36 won’t, and do it better.”

“Dead is dead. What’s better?”

“Better is quicker.”

“You take this awful serious.”

“Don’t you?”

I kind of shut up then and let him talk: “There’s four main points to shooting, and only four: the draw, the aim, the fire, and the recoil. But they’re all important, equally important.”

“I begin to get the idea there’s no unimportant points.”

“That is correct, but you’d be surprised how many unimportant things men get their minds on, like how pretty they look, how much noise they make, how loud their artillery entitles them to talk — all good points on Sunday morning in church, where they got the Ten Commandments. But on Sunday night in the saloon, where all they got is the Golden Rule, do unto others as they would do to you, only do it first, only important things are going to do you any good. First now, consider the draw. A .44, you’ve got to carry it on a belt holster, no matter whether you sling it on your right hip, your left hip, or across your belly. You’ve got to strap that holster end to one leg, and its uncomfortable, and there’s always the chance that when you draw, that was when you had the thing hitched around a bit, to ease it, and the gun jams with unfortunate, not to say fatal, consequences. The .36 fits comfortable into an armpit holster, the only way to carry arms, and specially this .36 does. That’s a navy gun, my friend, made in the Colt London factory; if you look at the engraving on that cylinder, you’ll see it’s a battle at sea. And it’s one of the few models that were made with a short barrel, so it really does tuck under your arm there nice and snug and inconspicuous. Try it there. See how natural it is for your hand to go to it? Just like going to your heart. Your arm coddles the holster, so there’s no sticking, fouling, or jamming. And when it comes out, it’s about two feet closer to the line of vision than a gun coming out of a belt holster and that’s a fraction of a second saved, but it could be the difference between yes and no or, as we say, perpendicular or planted.”

“Did you learn all this by heart?”

“And I hope you will.”

“The aim comes next.”

“On that point there’s also a great deal of unreliable stuff told. You’ll hear about hip and fan shooting, and undoubtedly there’s been some, with monuments commemorating the results. But I’m telling you there wasn’t any proper cause and effect. It was simply accident, or you could say luck. There’s only one way to aim a gun. Bring the sights in line with the target and your eye. Do it as quick as you can, but do it, or you’re liable to wish you had. Noting once more that you can level a nice handy gun like this one quicker than a big one, I pass to the subject of fire. Here the same principle is still guiding us. A .44 is simply too big. Even if you aim it, by the time the heavy trigger pull is taken into consideration, you’ve twitched your weapon out of line, and accurate shooting is impossible. Naturally any gun, no matter what caliber, needs some work to bring the trigger pull to where it’s exactly right for you. I don’t mean hair trigger, you understand. A hair trigger is nothing but a fool’s way to get his thumb shot off, or whatever shot off that happened to be in the way, and with a belt holster it might not be his thumb. But get a whetstone and stone your notch, so the gun is as much a part of you as your hand is. And even on that point the lighter gun is better. And now I come to the point so seldom thought of, the lack of whose proper appreciation has had so many, many sad but final consequences. A .44, I don’t care if you’ve got the arm of a grizzly bear, is simply going to yank your hand up three feet in the air, and you’re not going to shoot it again, to hit anything, until you’ve pulled it down, aimed it, and fired it. But a .36—”

“Is this holster for sale?”

“It is, but I’ve got a better one.”

“It sounds expensive.”

“It is, but you’ll thank me.”

It was a beauty all right, all hand-stitched in limp, tanned buckskin, with straps to hold it in place and a set to it that fitted the gun under your coat so most people would hardly notice it. I took it, and some ammunition, and thanked him for his lesson, and next night, around sundown, sneaked down Six-Mile Canyon to a gully where there was nobody around, stuck a playing card up on the timbers of an old drift, and went to work. Every thing he told me, I found out, was true, and specially what a fine gun I was using. I bought a stone and took it down, and worked on spring and hammer and pins and everything else in there, and wiped everything with machine oil and dried it, so every night it was better and then one night it was right. And then came the night when I could shoot. At ten feet I’d put up a six spot of hearts and knock holes in the spots as fast as I could pull the trigger. At fifteen feet I could hit three but stay on the card, and at twenty I could hit the card. I taught myself to keep shooting whether I hit the target or not. Because another important thing, I figured, was to get the habit of doing it a certain way, because when the time came, if your hand didn’t do it before your head woke up, why probably it wouldn’t wake up.

My real practice came by accident, one night when I was ready to go home. I heard something behind me, and before I knew it I had wheeled and fired and a jack rabbit went straight up in the air and when he lit he was dead. Then I noticed the moon coming up, and all around rabbits were coming out and starting to play. I stayed there and practiced what I needed most, which was to wheel and shoot at anything coming from behind. I brought so many rabbits home to Mrs. Finn, who ran the boarding house I lived in, that the other boarders began to complain. A jackass rabbit is not like a cottontail. He’s long, lean, and tough.

All that time I saw a lot of Paddy, because even if he wished I hadn’t cut the union, we were friends and took walks and talked. Then one Sunday he said: “Is wrong, Rodrigo, how they mine, in a Dakota.”

“In what way?”

“They follow a lode, yes?”

“You can’t blame them for that.”

“Follow a lode, and all a time, a tunnel, a crosscut, estope, all slide down a mountain — must one time come out in air, yes?”

“Looks like it.”

“Real lode is dip.”

“How you figure that out?”

“No figure, fill. Dees goddam owner, especially Hale, too chip to buy estoff he need to go dip. Try near top, follow liddle pocket, have a bonanza one day, bad borrasca next, all because no dig a mine in big way, in rill way, only liddle way, chip way.”

“So?”

“Is old shaft up there, uphill, no?”

“The little one they abandoned?”

“We go down, try for big bonanza, dip under hill, yes?”

“I’ll have a hell of a time with Williams.”

“You tell, soon ’e have borrasca.”

“How do you know?”

“You see. Soon no ore, only rock.”

It came the next week, as a matter of fact. The vein began to narrow, and instead of a deep blue-black, the ore began to run a slaty gray, a blue-gray, a dull gray, and Hale was down there every half hour, breaking off specimens with his hammer and putting them in a box for the assayer. Then all of a sudden we were getting nothing but rock, and had to lay men off. That night I stopped by the office to talk with the super and lay it out what Paddy had said, and I thought he’d be sore when he found out I was handing him stuff I had got from a Mexican working in my gang. He wasn’t.

“They’re fine miners, the Mexican lads. They have a real skill with timber, and an instinct for metal. An instinct for a process and an instinct for a vein.”

“He says the real ore’s under the mountain.”

“He’s probably right.”

“Then how about letting me dig?”

“Duval, I’m employed by Hale and I can tell you without hearing any more what he’ll say. He’ll agree with everything I tell him, roll his big black eyes, thank me for the suggestion, weep on me collar, open a bottle of rum — and do nothing. He thinks of costs, and the deep stuff is expensive.”

“The borrasca is worst of all.”

“So I’ve told him.”

“And he’ll wind up with no mine. You know what happens. They run bonanza a little while, then they run borrasca as long as they can, which means till they’ve spent the stake the bonanza piled up, and then some bank takes over.”

“Stop talking about banks!”

We had it again that night, with Hale, at the International Hotel, and he did just like Williams said he would. He wept, and told us how his mother was killed over in Hungary in 1848, and how much he loved America, because it stood for liberty. He said he didn’t ask anything of anybody except justice. He said was it fair he had to pay four dollars a day for his help when that very minute, for roustabouts in St. Louis, they were paying twenty cents an hour. It seemed to mean we couldn’t do what I wanted, so I said: “Will you let me prospect just one entry? Off that small shaft that you abandoned last year? The one up the mountainside from the big one we’re using now?”

“It would cost too much.”

“For what?”

“For hoist machinery. For gallows frames. For cable. For men, for pumps, for everything.”

“Suppose I do it for fifty dollars.”

“For — how much?”

“In the first place, the guides have been left in, for the lifting tub, and all we have to do is inspect and repair, if repairs are needed. The old cable was saved, and it’s in good condition. It’s old-time hemp cable, but all I have to do is stretch it and mark it. We got the old lifting tubs for that shaft, in the shed, still right where they were stored. And I won’t need any gallows frame. I can do it with a gin pole.”

“That means riggers, and—”

“Riggers? I’ll rig it myself.”

I told how many boats I’d rigged, and then I knew I had won, because his black rat eyes never left my face, and you could see him adding up figures and seeing where he was coming out. So next morning I was up the slope with Paddy and three helpers, and by night we had made plenty of progress. I didn’t even have to move a winch up there. I used a spare one in the main hoisting works, cut a slot in the side of the building to let the cable through, and a little eye for my signal wire. I guyed the pole over the shaft, dropped a falls from the end of it, and to that attached my pulley. Pulleys are all different sizes, from the big ten-and twelve-footers over the big shafts, to smaller ones for different uses. The one I used was four feet. After it was in place and all safety attachments on the tub inspected, we dropped a man down, generally me or Paddy, to give signals, and when he was down we made a chalk mark on the cable at the drum. Then we pulled him up again, dropped him again, and marked again. At first we kept getting a three-or four-inch stretch, then we didn’t get any. We marked with paint, then, a long red stripe to show the tub was 100 feet from the bottom, at the 600-foot level where we were going to dig. Then we marked a narrow white stripe for the stop.

The men did plenty of laughing, especially at the idea I could rig something, but Williams didn’t and Hale didn’t. They were around all the time, and when we started to work, Williams was signaling for the tub two or three times a day, and coming down, watching us move rock. We weren’t sending any of it to the surface yet. Our tub wasn’t fixed to take cars, and wouldn’t be without considerable rebuilding. But we had room, on the platform where our entry met the shaft, to pile the rock we were taking out, so we could keep going in, first undercutting, then drilling, then shooting, then timbering, and then undercutting again. The big danger, of course, was the hot water, because while we had plenty of shaft for it to run into, we had no pump connected up, and if we hit a real gusher, it would mean everything below us would eventually be flooded, and ruin this part of the mine, whether we found anything or not. Williams kept feeling the face every time we’d shoot, for heat. One time he said to me: “Don’t you find it warm, my lad, in that coat?”

“I don’t like shirtsleeves.”

“Could it be a gun you’ve got there?”

“It might be.”

“I don’t like it.”

“They ganged on me once. They don’t do it twice.”

“One of the things that appealed to me about you, in addition to your education, was your size, and when you stretched Trapp on the rails, I was still more impressed with you. But a man with a gun impresses nobody. They’re talking about it, and you’ve lost ground. They feel like convicts.”

“They should have thought of that when they let me have it from behind. I felt like a sailor on the Shanghai water front. I’m wearing it awhile, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ll regret it.”

He wasn’t the only one feeling the rock, and watching every crack and splinter in it like a hawk. Paddy was, and so were the other two Mexican miners we had with us, that could almost tell silver by inhaling. We shot down a face, and one of them picked up a hunk of red rock and began turning it over under his candle. It was cinnabar, the stuff they get quicksilver out of, and it didn’t mean a thing, except we hadn’t found ore of any kind since we’d been down here, and mercury and silver often go together. We mucked and timbered, and on the next shot Paddy got in there quick with his crowbar. He came out with something, and nothing was said, because it was soft and black, with the blue cast on it, and we all knew what it was. He rammed his bar in, got a boulder to rocking, and all of a sudden prized it out, so we had to jump to keep it from mashing our feet. And then here came the ore, just pouring out like a coke pile, where he kept ramming his bar into it and working it around. One of the Mexicans was the first to yell it: “Bonanza!”

Then the others were grinning and yelling and throwing their hats in the air, and even Paddy was showing his teeth, and Williams had that flinty smile on his face he didn’t often show. “All right, my lads, we’ll blow out for the day, and I’m recommending bonuses for all of you from Mr. Hale. It’s fine, rich blue stuff, and I’ve no doubt in my mind we’re in bonanza now, for quite a time.”

We started for the tub, and Williams motioned me in first. But I hadn’t forgotten whose idea it all was, and I stepped aside. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like Paddy to have the honor. It was his doing, and I can go up with these other two.”

“Padillo, get in.”

“Yes, Senor Williams. Viva la bonanza!”

Williams pulled the signal wire, while the Mexicans screamed bonanza so I think they heard them on the moon, if anybody was up there, and the cable tightened, and the tub began to go up. Then it slammed down again. Both men hit their head on the side, and we jumped forward to help them out. Then Paddy began to yell, and we clawed hard, because something in his voice struck right into your belly. The cable was coming down, like some long strand of spaghetti, wrapping itself around both men, so every time we got them a little pulled over the edge, they were buried in cable again.

From above, in the shaft, there came a bumping, and then at last I understood this horrible thing Paddy was yelling at us. The pulley was coming down. I don’t know how long it takes a four-foot wheel to fall six hundred feet, but it’s an awful long time. And then nothing but the men’s heads was showing above the coils of cable. And then the wheel struck. And then all over me and the other two Mexicans were the remains of what once had been men.

“All right, Mr. Hale, before we lock up for the night, and while we’re still here in the office and nobody’s around, why don’t we get together on it, what we tell the grand jury tomorrow? So we don’t get it all cock-eyed.”

“Get together? The truth is all I know to tell.”

“Which is?”

“Rigging.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“Duval, why do you ask me that? I know, they all know, whose fault it was. I didn’t want to go into that shaft. But you said leave it to you. You said you’d rig it because you’d rigged boats. Now look.”

“The hoist engineer, he’s got his own ideas.”

“He couldn’t see. I could.”

“He don’t like it, that you didn’t holler.”

“Or that you didn’t.”

“I’ll deal with that little remark when I get around to it, but one thing at a time, as we’re in a little bit of a hurry, as it wouldn’t look so good if the two of us sat up here late, talking things over. The truth, you say, is all you know to tell, and that suits me too. Only one thing might keep me from it.”

“...What you mean, Duval?”

“Being made super.”

“Here? In this mine?”

“That’s it. The good old Dakota.”

“First you rig the hoist so badly you kill two men, then you think I’ll make you super? You must be crazy.”

“I’m not so crazy.”

“Then what are you getting at?”

“The stock.”

“...What stock?”

“Of this mine. Of the Dakota. That you bought today. On the Stock Exchange. That you ran down and bid in before you ever made one move to get those bodies to the top or even find out what happened down there, though you say you saw the pulley gear go right down the shaft, and you must have known there were men under it.”

“Is it against the law to buy stock?”

“No, it’s legal.”

“And how do you know about it?”

“I figured something like that might have happened, and went down there checking on it. It was no trouble to find out. The whole exchange was handing it to you, how you’d grabbed up the stock before news of the bonanza got out. It jumped eight points today, didn’t it? Just before closing, when those bodies were being brought up, and the Mexicans told what they knew?”

“...What else do you know, Duval?”

“About the axe.”

“The—?”

“That you chopped at the cable with.”

“The report says nothing about a chopped cable.”

“That’s right, you didn’t chop any cable. You only chopped at it! Nobody was there, the hoist engineer couldn’t see, because he was in the main hoisting works building, and then came this yell up the shaft. And then you thought fast, didn’t you? They were hollering bonanza, and there was that axe still lying there, the one I used to trim up the gin pole. And you let fly with it, didn’t you? Except that instead of chopping the cable you made a mislick and knocked the cable off the pulley. And when Ed shot the steam, it tore the pulley right off the axle and sent it and the cable and the tackle right down the shaft, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know anything about any axe.”

“You think it just turned to steam on the way down? You think I didn’t know what it meant when I saw it buried in Williams’s head? You think I did it just because I liked blood when I put my arms around him and pulled it out and hid it so those Mexicans didn’t see it? Come on, you son of a bitch, talk business or the grand jury’s going to get that axe and the stock deal and everything else it’ll take to send you to the gallows, and it won’t be a gallows with pulley wheels under it, but one over a trap, with you in it, at the end of a rope.”

“Now, Duval, don’t talk like that—”

“I said super.”

“Yes of course, Duval. You know, you’re a young fellow, but we’ve had an eye on you ever since you came in this mine. I meant to make you super all along—”

“Write your notice.”

“...Sure thing. Absolutely.”

“And that remark. About—”

“Is retracted.”

“Then that’s fine.”

I could hear him, out there in the night, and tears ran down my cheeks, for him and all the little people he loved so well, and for myself too, and how far I’d go, even to a blackmail game on his grave, to get something I ought to be ashamed even to want.