He came back down the tunnel to where Garret and Ryder were squatting in semi-darkness. “Stick your fingers in your ears,” he ordered. “When I say ‘Yell,’ holler your heads off!”
Garret nodded. “Fire when ready.”
“Okay. One, two — yell!”
Garret shouted. It was like bellowing against cannon-fire. He couldn’t hear his own voice against the rumbling thunder of the explosion. The tunnel filled with fumes and dust.
Scat prowled up ahead. The beam of his lamp poked here and there through the cloud of dust.
“Howzat, Mr. Garret?” he exulted. “Clean as a whistle. Don’t let nobody tell you old Scat can’t still part your hair with a spoonful of ‘soup!’”
Garret crept forward over a yard-thick layer of splintered ore. The splashing of water was clearer now, even though his ears were still ringing.
Scat was still moving ahead along the stope. “Here she is!” he cried. “Here’s your two-for-one!”
Garret could make out that they had come to the end of Fear Street. But there was a cross-tunnel, at right angles. This new stope was three times the width of the narrow pasageway along which they had just come. It ran below the level of Fear Street, like the channel of a stream — a fifteen-foot stream of dark and swiftly flowing water whose surface glinted blue-black under Scat Prodger’s helmet-light!
At the detective’s shoulder, Ryder exclaimed: “By heaven, somebody’s turned this stope into a sluice for copper recovery! Look at that scrap iron!”
Scat hopped down onto the bottom of the underground brook. The water came barely to his knees. “She’s got a timber bottom,” he called. “That means the stuff can be scraped off. It’s kinda slipp’ry.”
Garret saw the fender of a junked automobile sticking above the surface like the fin of some subterranean shark. Scat bent down, fished a length of once-heavy iron chain out of the stream. The foot-long lengths had been eaten away until they were no thicker than match sticks.
Garret stepped gingerly down into the water, and was surprised to find it warm as a bath. Soft powder on the bottom made the footing unsteady. He bent down, scooped up a handful. It was fine reddish sludge. Heavier than any mud he’d ever handled.
Was this what Ken Brann had meant by the rinsing of those fibre disks in water?
“Copper?” as asked.
“Pure copper,” Ryder answered. “We have our own recovery sluice, further down the hill. Looks as if somebody’s taking our copper out before the water gets to us.” He rubbed some of the sludge between his fingers. “You see, the copper is like a man who’s hungry for affection. It comes drifting along, arm in arm with the sulphate — the girlfriend, so to speak. When this combination meets up with a piece of iron, there’s your old eternal triangle, again.”
Garret began to catch on. “The sulphate reacts with the iron, eh?”
“Like a sailor to a red-headed siren.” The general manager joined the little procession that began to move slowly along the wider tunnel in the direction of the current. “The sulphate-girl deserts her boy-friend, copper, and grabs hold of her new acquaintance, Old Iron. So the copper sulks. It sinks down to the bottom. The iron mates with the sulphate, forms a new marriage, if you want to put it that way. About two tons of iron are used up for every ton of copper sludge you get. We’ve been recovering the metal this way at our own sluice for years. Nothing new about it — except this idea of sluicing off our sulphate water to make copper for somebody else. That’s brand new!”
There was a wild yell from Scat, up ahead.
“Hold on!” Garret hollered. “We’ll get you!” He stumbled over old rails, bits of broken gears.
“I’m all right,” the ex-con shouted. “But there’s another guy here who ain’t.”
Scat had stepped on the body, face down in the stream. There was an ugly wound in the man’s forehead; the face was clotted with red muck. But Garret had no difficulty in recognizing the corpse. Allen Loomis.
Ryder splashed along the tunnel toward them. “Who is it?”
“Loomis.” Garret lifted the man’s body half out of the water.
“Must have fallen,” Scat said, “over one these hunks of iron. Cut his head open.”
“He was clubbed,” Garret growled. “Struck with the hot end of a gun. See where the front sight cut the skin, there?”
“Body’s still warm!” Ryder exclaimed. “Can’t have been dead more than ten or fifteen minutes.” He swore fervently. “Maybe I ought to be sorry, but I’m not. I think he got what was coming to him.”
Garret looped a limp arm back of his shoulders in the fireman’s carry. “Can’t leave him here, whether he deserved it or not.”
Ryder sloshed ahead, in the direction of the current. “If Loomis came up this way, we ought to be able to get down. It’s the first time I ever was sure there was a connection between our shafts and Consolidated’s smelter. He and Darcy must have found a way to divert our drainage; by-passed our own sluice somehow. Then, after the copper’d been extracted, they sent the waste back into our stream so we wouldn’t notice any lessened quantity of flow.”
“Darcy must have been in it, all right.” Garret had to follow Ryder closely to keep from bumping into old castings, bed-frames, sections of iron fence. “But I’m not so sure about Loomis.”
Ryder slogged along in silence for a few minutes, except for cursing at barked shins. Then, “You’re right, of course. If Loomis was killed up here, it wasn’t by Darcy. You saw Loomis at his office after Darcy was shot, so there must be a third one in on it.”
“Must be.” Garret had no breath to waste; Loomis was becoming terribly heavy. Once he stepped on an old anvil which crumpled and gave way beneath his weight as if it had been made of papier-mache.
The tunnel became wider, its downward slope decreased, the current slowed. A raised path appeared at one side, wide enough for a battery-operated carrier truck. This was how they got the copper sludge out of the sluice then — scraped it up with shovels, scooped it into the truck and ran it — where? The precious sludge must have been dried out and melted down into blister copper somewhere in the Consolidated smelter.
Ryder, in the lead, held up a hand. “The tunnel forks, right ahead. Water goes off into the hill somewhere at the right. This stope swings left — and listen!”
Garret heard it. Above the murmur of the stream, the pounding of an ore-crusher!
“Must be Consolidated,” Scat said. “You can hear them ‘verbratory furnaces roarin’.”
Garret was too weary to lug his burden any further. Besides, he didn’t want to be hampered in his movements here at the smelter. He laid Loomis down on one of the carrier trucks, just inside the mouth of the tunnel. In another hundred feet, they were crunching the slag of the flotation-mill yard under their feet.
There was no moon, yet somehow the night sky seemed luminous to Garret, in comparison to the gloom of the hill’s interior; the air was remarkably cool and fresh.
Ryder stopped to wring out his trouser cuffs. He took off his steel helmet, ran his fingers through the shock of white hair. “Ball’s in your court now, fella. I came, I saw and I’m convinced. With what I know now, I can file counter claims against Loomis’ outfit that will shut them up in a hurry.”
Garret felt of the lumps on his shins. “Don’t gamble on it. Suppose it turns out that an Ajax man was in on the deal? What if he was someone who had a certain amount of authority?”
Charlie Ryder made tracks toward the office building. “I know who you’re thinking of. But I don’t believe—” He broke off, staring up at a rear window of the office building. Silhouetted against the glare of a bright light, with his hands upraised beside his shoulders, was Ken Brann!