“While you’re at it, watch your feet, too.”
Bushell followed him into the tunnel. He hadn’t gone more than twenty feet before he banged the top of his helmet on the ceiling. He did it again a couple of paces later, and then again a couple of paces after that. Ahead of him, Rufus Fitzwilliam was moving along easily. “This tunnel isn’t tall enough to stand up in,” Bushell called to him.
“Just noticed that, did you? You’re not the tallest feller I’ve ever seen, or you’d’ve found it out sooner.”
Fitzwilliam’s stooping gait didn’t interfere with his speed at all. Bushell did his best to imitate it. Before he’d gone very far, a knotting in his thighs warned that it required practice - practice he’d never had. He suspected he’d spend the next few days shambling around like a chimpanzee with the rheumatism. And, despite everything, he kept banging his helmet on the rough stone just above him. “What did miners do back before they wore helmets?” he asked.
“Oh, I expect we was just a bunch of knotheads in them days,” Fitzwilliam replied with a chuckle. Bushell would have laughed, too, but he tripped over a rock the size of both fists and staggered, flailing his arms wildly to keep from falling on his face. The tunnel wasn’t very wide, either; he caught the back of one hand a painful whack against the jagged rock of the side. He held the hand in the beam of his helmet lamp to see if it was bleeding. It was.
“Told you to watch your feet,” Fitzwilliam called back over his shoulder.
“Lots of people tell me lots of things,” Bushell answered, panting a little. He was getting a crick in his neck to go with the ache in his thighs. He’d come only a few hundred yards, but already he felt worse than he had at the end of his hike through the woods of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Then something moved in the tunnel, something that wasn’t him or Rufus Fitzwilliam. “What the devil’s that?”
“A mouse, is all,” the miner said. “You’ll see ‘em every now and again. They fall down the shaft, they’re too little to smash themselves when they hit bottom. Wish us miners could say the same thing.”
Not much later, they came to a stretch where Bushell could walk upright for fifty yards or so. The relief was indescribable. But then the roof got lower again, and lower, and lower. Before long, he was waddling forward like a duck; it was either that or get down on all fours. Rufus Fitzwilliam took it utterly for granted.
Bushell wondered if he’d have any legs left by the time he got to Michael O’Flynn. He rather hoped not; if they fell off, he wouldn’t have to feel them anymore.
When the ceiling got higher, Fitzwilliam showed off by taking perhaps ten yards at a waddling, arm-swinging run. Bushell was barely able to stagger on, let alone run. Any trade had its tricks, and he knew none of the ones that worked here.
Noise came echoing up the tunnel from ahead. It got louder till it grew into a dreadful din of saws grinding through rock and pneumatic hammers pounding away at it. Bushell set his teeth and hoped that meant they were getting closer to where O’Flynn was working. If it didn’t, it probably meant he’d died and gone to hell.
Moving shapes in the lamplight up ahead were not demons armed with pitchforks, so they had to be miners. One of them turned and spotted Fitzwilliam and Bushell. Seeing Bushell’s unminerly apparel, he called to Fitzwilliam: “Who you got there? Some big steam from the company?”
“Not today, Henry,” Fitzwilliam answered. “This here’s a RAM. He’s looking for Mike O’Flynn - wants to ask him some questions.”
“A RAM?” Henry’s voice rose in surprise. He waved to Bushell. “Come on, buddy. I’ll take you to Mike. He’s tending the coal-cutter.”
That machine looked like an enormous, electrically powered handsaw. It had teeth that would have done credit to a shark. One of the miners shifting it to make a new cut smiled unpleasantly at Bushell and said, “How’d you like to have it bite you in the leg?”
“Given the choice, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” Bushell answered. “Are you Michael O’Flynn?”
“No, he’s right - “ Before the miner could say there, the coal-cutter started up, and its hideous racket made speech impossible. It ground into the black seam of coal. Clouds of coal dust spurted out over the crew at the cutter - and over Bushell. For a little while, everyone was too busy coughing to worry about anything else. Great chunks of coal and gray shale crashed to the floor of the tunnel, making it shake beneath Bushell’s feet.
The coal-cutter stopped. The silence that slammed down afterward was almost like a blow. Into it, one of the miners said, “I’m Mike O’Flynn.”
“I thought you were a powderman, not a slicer,” Bushell said, pointing to the infernal device.
“A damn fine one I am, too,” O’Flynn said. A couple of other miners nodded to show they agreed with the self-assessment. He went on, “That means I’ve got the sense to know when to use the stuff and when to leave it alone. Use it here and we’d be wearing that roof.” He gestured up toward the rough stone just above his head. “Now - my wife told me you came by the house last night. What the hell do you want to know bad enough to come down here and ask me about it?”
Bushell looked at the other miners, who’d gathered round to listen. “Is there any place we can talk just between ourselves?”
O’Flynn shook his head. “I’m not afraid of my chums’ hearing what we have to say. Are you?”
“No,” Bushell answered. If O’Flynn and his chums took it into their heads to make him have an “accident,” there wasn’t much he could do about it, the more so as he’d left his pistol behind in a suitcase. Stupid, he told himself: he’d done what he’d warned Felix Crooke against. Too late to worry about it now. The best way to keep the miners from getting the idea was to go on as if it had never occurred to him, either. He said, “You’re the Michael O’Flynn who went to New Liverpool to picket the governor’s mansion?”
“Yeah, that’s me.” O’Flynn studied him. “I saw you there, didn’t I? After Tricky Dick got his head blown off, I mean. Is that what this is about? About The Two Georges?”
“Yes and no,” Bushell said. “Has Joseph Kilbride from Doshoweh been visiting your home?”
“Yeah. I took him to the train station last night - my wife told me she told you that already. What’s it to you, anyhow?”
“Where did Kilbride tell you he was going?” Bushell asked.
“What’s it to you?” O’Flynn repeated. “Nothing against the law about having somebody over at your house, is there? What’s he done? What do you say he’s done?”
“He’s involved in running rifles into the NAU. I have evidence for that,” Bushell said, stretching a point only slightly. “The people who run guns are involved one way or another with stealing The Two Georges.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Michael O’Flynn declared.
“I didn’t say you did,” Bushell said. “But you do now.” He glanced from O’Flynn to the other miners. They looked solemn, thoughtfuclass="underline" not everyone in the Pennsylvania coal country was an Independence Party man or a sympathizer with the Sons. The call of King-Emperor and country was heard here, too, even if not so loudly as in most of the NAU. Bushell pressed ahead: “So. Where did Kilbride say he was going?”
O’Flynn licked his lips. After he’d done it, they were the only color in a face blackened by coal dust. At last, reluctantly, he answered, “He told me he was heading up to Boston for a while.”
“Is that a fact?” Bushell’s voice was soft, toneless, the better to conceal the elation he felt. But he had to nail down what O’Flynn had given him: “Why did you take him to a train that was bound for New York, then?”