“I’m glad of that,” Ryder muttered. “But I’m sure sorry about Ken.” He put a clenched fist on the desk. “It doesn’t make any difference now. But I put Ken through Tech; I brought him along in Ajax for more than ten years.” He stood up, straightened. “I’ve never known him to do a dishonest or a disloyal thing.” His face clouded. “Surely you won’t expect me to take any action against him.”
Garret said, “I expect you to keep hands off my investigation of this mine, that’s all.”
Ryder spread his hands out, palms up. “You’re the doctor. We’ll take your prescription, even if it’s going to be bitter.”
“That’s the idea. Proctor’s going to take me down where somebody’s swapping rusty iron for copper, according to—”
“It’s the old two-for-one, Mr. Ryder,” the safe blower interrupted. “I guess you know how it works.”
“Two-for-one?” The general manager’s eyes narrowed. “But we’re doing that all the time! There isn’t a chance of anybody’s stealing metal that way. Unless—” He stared blankly at the wall.
There was that ‘unless’ again! “Unless what?” Garret said.
Ryder took a long cigar out of his pocket, bit the end off with a preoccupied air. “Unless our friends at Consolidated Reclaimers are sluicing off our metal by the gallon. And that’s something I can’t believe. If it’s true, I want to see it with my own eyes.”
“You’ll come along with us?” Garret was surprised.
“You bet your life I’m coming. Bill?”
“Yes, Mr. Ryder?”
“Get me a helmet and a suit of coveralls. Snap into it!”
“Yes, sir.” The guard hurried away.
Ryder paced the office restlessly. “It’s possible, just barely possible. They might get away with five or ten tons a week that way, and nobody the wiser. It’s the only way in the world you can mine copper without working for it.”
Narriver came back. Ryder stripped off his coat, climbed into the coveralls, and slapped the helmet on his head. “Ready.”
He didn’t attempt any further explanation of the two-for-one on the way to the hoist house. And in the three-tiered cage which dropped men nearly a mile into the earth and hauled ore out, there were a dozen other miners, so nothing was said by Garret.
The man at the cage controls hailed the chief jocularly.
“Going back to work for a change, Boss?”
Ryder smiled. “Little tour of inspection. Drop us off at the two-thousand-foot level.”
They plummeted down into the darkness. It seemed to Garret as if the cables on the heavy elevator car must have snapped and the cage was bound for the very bottom of the mine. But when the air pressure had built up so his ears felt stuffed with cotton and the air in the car became almost unbearably hot, the platform came to a rest opposite a wide, timbered passage in the rock.
A miner, naked to his sweating waist, sat in an ore car piled with blue-black rock. He had a board in his lap, with a paper clipped to it. He recognized Ryder, but he asked the routine question, “Where you going to work, boys?”
Scat Prodger said, “Fear Street, Mac,” and led the way along the tunnel.
The miner called after them. “Better watch your step in there!”
The only light in the tunnel came from the little electric lamps at the front of their helmets. The air was like that of a boiler room.
For a while, the only sound in the stope was the gritting of gravel under their shoes. Ryder followed Scat; Garret kept close behind them. The ex-convict threaded his way through cross-overs and around blind turns without once hesitating. Garret knew there were twenty-five hundred miles of these subterranean catacombs, wondered how Scat could be so sure of the way.
“Somewhere along here,” Ryder panted, “there’s supposed to be an underground stream. Probably drainage water from the upper levels.”
“That would be full of copper, wouldn’t it?” Scat called back.
“Might be full of copper sulphate,” the general manager corrected, breathing heavily.
“What they call blue vitriol?” Garret shook sweat out of his eyes.
“That’s right, blue vitriol. Leached out of the rock.” Ryder stumbled over a heap of fallen rubble. The passageway sloped sharply upward now.
Scat shouted back a warning. “Keep away from the walls. Might start the rock. This here’s Fear Street.”
“Ore seems to be softer here.” Ryder stopped for breath. “Probably on account of the water seeping along the vein.”
Garret touched the rock overhead. It was dank with moisture.
“Right here—” Scat’s words reverberated from the tunnel sides — “is where Harve Yault got it.” He stopped and pointed. “The clean-up crew took out enough rock to get at his body. But the tunnel’s still blocked.”
Ryder halted. Garret came up behind him. Somewhere ahead, in the blackness, was the splash of running water. Between them and the sound, there was a mound of rubble that reached to the tunnel-top.
“Far as it’s safe to go.” Ryder wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “Ken Brann showed me the report after that accident. We’d have to have double timbering, from here on, to make it safe enough for the muckers to operate.”
A chip of rock fell at Garret’s feet. “That water I hear — is that the stuff full of copper?”
“Can’t tell,” Ryder said. “Might be just a flow from ordinary rock strata.”
Scat Prodger chuckled. He patted his coat pocket. “I can get you through there, if you want to take a chance.”
“How?” Ryder said sharply.
“Dinah.” The peter-man took out an object that looked like a chunk of thick candle, wrapped in a piece of old newspaper. “Always carry Dinah with me, just in case there’s a cave-in and I’ve got to get air quick.”
Dynamite cartridges! Garret knew Scat had been familiar with explosives for a score of years — had used them professionally — in the days before the Sphinx man sent him away for the stretch. But it hadn’t occurred to him the bank robber would be carrying blasting cartridges around in his pockets like so many cheese sandwiches! That was what Scat had meant when he said he was ‘set’ — when he had warned Narriver not to mess around with him, or else!
“Too risky,” Ryder decided. “There’s been one cave-in here already. Be just asking for another to blast again.”
Garret’s eyes strained into the darkness ahead. “What’s beyond that rock heap?”
“More trouble, probably.” Ryder wagged his head in disapproval. “If there’s much water there, a blast might let it right in on us. We’d drown like rats.”
Scat held the explosive to his lips, made a loud smacking noise. “Don’t you worry! Dinah’ll do like I tell her. She’ll clear a way through this pile here and not even jar a drop of sweat off the end of your nose!”
Garret didn’t wait for the caution that was on Ryder’s lips. After all, Harve Yault had been here, and he hadn’t been drowned by drainage water, had he? Jig Darcy’d been here, too, presumably without any fears about the consequence of the rock-fall he’d arranged to cover the driller’s death.
He said, Go head, Scat. “Do your stuff”
“Well—” Ryder protested. “See that you don’t overdo it!”
Scat went to work. He whittled away with a pocket knife at the chunk of nitroglycerine-in-sawdust. He extracted a percussion cap from a phial stuffed with cotton batting. The whole thing had been tucked in his hip pocket all the while Narriver had been shoving him around. He uncoiled wires from a spool wrapped in a black sock, and attached the wires to a switch kept in his tobacco pouch. Then he borrowed Garret’s helmet and hooked the switch by clips to the battery of the miner’s light. It took him no more than three minutes, including packing the charge away under one side of the rubble pile.