Seamus went back down into town and wandered through the saloons looking for a couple of hard rock miners in need of a job. After visiting several places and having a drink in each, he heard of a couple of Swedes that were currently residing in the jail for disorderly conduct. It seems they had a disagreement with a couple of gamblers about a possible fifth ace in a poker game and had busted up a saloon, the gamblers, and anyone who took an interest in the situation. It had taken the Marshal, a couple of deputies and a quite a few of the bars patrons to subdue them. His inquiries told him that they were good miners and hard workers; they just took their card playing real seriously.
He used the little money he had set aside to bail them out of jail. They turned out to be brothers, Jon and Ron Hansen. As alike as two peas in a pod, they had thick Scandahoovian accents, and a whole lot of bruises and contusions. He proposed that they come to work for him. They needed to build a cabin at the mine site and then could live at the site for free, and he would pay them ten percent of the taking from the mine. They had heard about the ore sample he had used to finance his little toot the night before, and it sounded like a good deal to them. When Jon asked if that was 10% each, Seamus replied he was the boss and owner, not a charity. The brothers talked it over and decided it sounded like a good deal. Free housing and a share in the profits was good. The only real drawback was they had to build their own accommodations.
They liked it a little less when he showed them where he wanted to build the cabin. He wanted it built right smack dab over a hole in the ground up next to a cliff. He explained that the hole was where they would be working after they got done building the cabin. He had never told anyone exactly where on the claim he had found the gold, and if he could get the hole covered up before the curious came calling, hopefully nobody would know except for himself and the Swedes. Nobody could raid a claim they couldn’t find. They got to work with the axes and the two man misery whip, and in a couple of days had the walls built up I took a little longer than they had figured, because Seamus insisted on making the only entrance to the hole through a trap door in the floor of the cabin. Seamus was a handy man with tools, and not afraid of a little hard work, so they set up a sawpit and made flooring. Seamus fashioned the trap door himself, and when it was done, you could hardly tell it was there. An appropriately placed knothole was used to lift the trap. He had counterweighted the trap so it could be lifted with ease and placed it against a wall to keep it out of the main traffic flow. Stairs went down into the hole. Using an old ratchet mechanism and the hand off an old clock, he made a primitive counter and tied it to the trap door. If the trap door was opened, it would move the clock hand a couple of teeth forward. He marked the intervals and mounted it on a round of wood. He would now know if anyone had entered or left the mine. Unless you knew where the hand was and how many turns it took to complete a revolution, you couldn’t reset the counter.
He had thought about just giving the brothers some money and sending them down the road when they were through building the cabin, but decided he would do better if he kept them on and kept his part of the bargain, but maybe not exactly as it was originally proposed.
The brothers were confused when he explained their new duties. They were to go up on top of the slab and start sinking a shaft along the face of the cliff to see if they could find where the slab had originally mated with the cliff face. He would handle the work down in the hole. They were not to ever enter the hole unless it was with him, or on his specific instructions. The top of the slab they were working was a couple of hundred feet tall, and the deposit was maybe forty feet from the bottom of it. It may have made more sense to start from the bottom and go up, but for right now, Seamus just didn’t want anyone down in that hole but himself.
The crumbly rock and quartz could be easily worked by one careful man, and Seamus was being as careful as he knew how. His life had never been anything about careful, so this was new territory for him, and all the thinking gave him a headache worse than a hangover. He was a doer not a thinker.
The next month was pretty uneventful. They all three lived in the cabin. In the morning after their morning coffee, the brothers would go up the slope and Seamus would go down the hole. They would meet up again for supper. After supper they would rough refine the gold Seamus had brought up from the hole. Seamus had a piece of railroad rail that had been cut off about a foot long, and a single jack. He would hammer the ore down, pick out the gold, and pan what was left. There were a couple of reasons for doing this. One was to make it easier to pack in to town; the other was to eliminate as much speculation about his claim as he could. Anyone bringing gold into a mining town is going to be the object of considerable speculation. He figured that the less they knew, the better off he was going to be. Friday he would take the ten to fifteen pounds of semi-refined gold into LaGrange to the mill and have it refined. The results were a net profit of around $4,000.00 a week. Giving the brothers their 10% left him $3600.00, which he mostly banked. The brothers were pulling in $40.00 a week which was good money, and if the Irishman was crazy enough to pay them to drill holes in ordinary rock, they weren’t going to complain.
Saturdays they took the day off and went in to town to buy supplies and let off a little steam. It seemed like everyone around them was sitting with their heads tilted, trying to catch their conversation so they could figure out what was going on. The Hansen boys were of no help, because they knew very little, and for once in his life Seamus was keeping his mouth shut. Each week, there was a little more interest, until finally it got to the point that none of them could have a drink in peace and quiet. Some people wanted a loan. Some people wanted a piece of the action. Some wanted to take it away from him, and some wanted to buy him out. But nobody but Seamus knew what he had, how big it was, or anything about it. They knew the Swedes were sinking a shaft, and someone had snuck up in the dark of night and grabbed some rock from the tailings, Not only were there no traces of gold, it wasn’t even the kind of rock in which you would expect to find gold. The gold was coming from somewhere, but they couldn’t figure exactly where.
After six weeks the quantity tapered off some. Seamus had taken the easiest and best ore and now was working out towards the edges of the deposit. The quality of the ore fell off pretty quickly at the edges. The take each week started going down.
After twelve weeks, the pocket was mined out. There was enough left to make wages, but Seamus had over $40,000.00 in the bank and he was tired of keeping everything so tightly under control. Rob and Jon had sunk their shaft almost a hundred feet along the interface of the slab and the mountain, and hadn’t found a thing. The damn deposit had to continue on somewhere, but they were having no luck finding it.
They finally cane to Seamus, hats in their hands and scuffing their toes. “Seamus” said Jon, “Ten percent of nothing is nothing, and we need to make a living. We need to rearrange the terms of the deal, or we will have to leave you. You’ve been a fair man to work for, although sometimes you see boogers in the night when there ain’t none.”
Seamus asked to have a couple of days to think things over, and that he would pay them $20.00 a week out of his own pocket until he decided what to do. They allowed that they could tolerate that for now, but if they continued to sink the shaft and came across the rest of the deposit, things would go back to the original agreement. They shook on the deal.
Now that the ore pocket had been mined out, there was nothing for Seamus to do. He would just be in the Swedes way sinking the shaft, and there was nothing worth doing down in the hole. He moved into the Hotel in town. So he began to hang around in the saloons. He played atrocious poker, drank outrageously expensive wines, ate the best food. After a while it all became a blur, and still the Hansons had not found a thing. The pressure was getting to him, and he began to drink more and more heavily. He loaned money on questionable mining ventures, made personal loans to individuals of questionable character.
No comments:
Post a Comment