The Earth Lords Read online

  “Oh?” he said now, still clearly off balance from the contrast between Bart’s language and appearance. “Well, I don’t know. I mean—well, come in.”

  He opened the door behind him and backed through it. Bart followed him through into what seemed to be an outer office. There were two tall secretary’s desks and writing stools, although no one else was in view at the moment, and a sort of bench along the wall with a couple of instruments that Bart took to be microscopes. There was a dustiness and an air of relative unuse to the room. An open door in a far wall gave a glimpse of what seemed to be another office in the rear of the building.

  “Well, we . . .” The mine man was clearly floundering. “. . . appreciate your bringing the mule back. If there’s anything we can do by way of return . . .”

  “As a matter of fact, there is,” said Bart, and he repeated much of his previous words about needing another mule.

  “Sell you a mule?” said the man. “By the way, my name is Alan Morrison.” Bart chose not to ask about the man Arthur had named, Charles Waite.

  “Bart Dybig,” said Bart.

  They shook hands.

  “About selling me a mule . . .” said Bart.

  “Oh yes. I’m afraid that’s not up to me. I’d have to have you talk to our stock handler. Of course, I’ll explain to him . . . come with me; and we’ll go find Sorley. He’s the stock handler.”

  Morrison started up and reached for the door handle. Bart moved so that he stood in the way of its being opened.

  “First,” he said, “you might want to give me a receipt?”

  “Receipt?”

  “Yes, you know,” Bart came down a little harder on the accent, “for the mule I’ve brought you. Just so I’ve something to show the man I got it from that I did what I promised to do with the animal.”

  “Ah. Of course,” said Morrison. He turned back to one of the desks, took a piece of paper, dipped a pen into an inkwell and scribbled on the piece of paper.

  Bart watched him curiously. There was something wrong here but he could not put his finger on exactly what it was. Receipts were normally never asked for or given out in the western prairie and mountains for animals lent and returned like this. This man Morrison might be from the east of Canada, but he would know that much if he was on the staff at a western mine like this. Of course it had been Bart who had asked for the receipt, as a sort of test and stall . . .

  Granted, the man had been surprised and for some reason shaken by Bart’s arrival. The fact still remained that he was acting strangely; and Bart’s ever-ready wariness was stronger than ever. He studied Morrison as the other stood at the desk, writing. Plainly, he was not armed in any way; and unarmed he should be no serious threat to Bart, even if Bart had not had both knife and revolver at the belt under his jacket.

  The situation was puzzling. But Bart actually did need a replacement for the mule, if he was to give it up. Also, Arthur had said that here there would be people who would know about Bart’s relations, if the knowledge existed. But when Arthur had said that, Bart had taken it for granted that he was being directed to a town or settlement. Why should miners, who were usually from some other part of Canada or the U.S. originally, and normally did not know any territory but that immediately surrounding the mine, have any information about where relatives of Bart might be living?

  Morrison finished his writing and handed the receipt to Bart with a snappiness that was almost a flourish. Evidently he was getting over his initial uncertainty with Bart. Bart glanced at the receipt. It was a simple few lines giving the date and noting that a mule named Sidewinder, originally lent to Guillaume Barre, had been returned this day by Bart Dybig—with Morrison’s signature at the bottom.

  “Come with me,” said Morrison. “We’ll find Sorley and ask him about selling you a mule. We’re having to make some repairs at the moment and there’s only a few men around to do that and some general cleanup while the mine’s idle. We’ll look over in the bunkhouse. Sorley was up late last night as I seem to remember. I think he may be catching a nap.”

  Morrison led the way out of the building and down the steps. The day had turned cloudless and now in the later hours of the afternoon, the shale rock under their feet and the naked granite walls of the two close valley sides had warmed from the sun and now threw back their radiated heat at everything in between them, so that Bart felt the heat like a blow as he walked with Morrison across to the long, two-story building.

  So the mine was all but shut down at the moment? That would explain the fact that he had seen no one moving outside the buildings when he came in; but it did not feel right. The whole mine did not feel right; and Morrison himself rang as false as a lead dollar.

  When they reached the bunkhouse, which again had three steps up to a small landing before the door they approached, Morrison reached the landing, then stood aside to let Bart go first. Bart stopped and shook his head. His suspicions must have been showing, for Morrison did not urge him to go forward, but put his hand on the knob and pushed the door open, shouting as he did so.

  “Sorley?”

  There was the mutter of something unintelligible from within and Morrison entered. Bart stepped through after him, and stopped, one pace inside the building.

  The whole lower floor of the building was one large room. In that room, only the near end was occupied with cots, spaced apart by small chests of drawers. There were ten cots in all, and six of these were occupied by men half asleep and just waking up, in various stages of undress.

  It was none of this, however, that rang a sense of danger, loud and clear inside Bart. What had checked him so suddenly barely inside the door was the fact that from the dust on the empty section of the floor to the clutter around the beds that stood close together at this end, clearly the whole space had not been filled with cots for a long time, if ever. And it was clear from inside that the second story that had been promised by the outside appearance of the building did not exist, or if it did it had no floor, and was open to Bart’s view from the doorway. The open expanse almost shouted at him that the building was a fake, a mock-up.

  But he had no time to do more than notice this. He became aware suddenly that Morrison had stepped to one side and back against the wall to the right of the door through which they had both just entered. Even as he turned his head to see what the other man was doing, he caught sight of Morrison’s hand closing on and pulling down a wooden lever set in the wall, a lever connected by a movable joint to a length of two-by-four going upward—and in the next second something fell on and all around him.

  It was a net.

  Instinctively, he tried to throw it off, and his arms became entangled; while at the same time, as he tried to turn, his legs became tangled also in the meshes and he fell. A moment later, the men from the cots were all over him.

  Something hard hit the back of his head, and that was the last sight he had of the interior of the bunkhouse.

  It seemed to him that he was only unconscious for a second, no longer than the time it takes an eye to blink; but when he opened his eyes, he was someplace else. Just where, he did not at first notice, for with the return of consciousness a blinding headache had exploded in his skull.

  He fought that as his Indian childhood had taught him to fight all pain—by putting it off at arm’s length from him, treating it as if it was something separate and apart from himself. It was a knack, no more. As a very young child he had tried earnestly to master the technique and failed utterly; until one day, suddenly, it worked. As he later tried to describe it to his father, it was a sort of forgetting of the pain even as it happened, split-second by split-second. The pain had not gone away; it had simply become something that could be recognized or disregarded at will.

  So, now, with his headache from the blow on the head.

  “. . . Good,” he heard Morrison’s voice saying. “I was afraid your man had hit him too hard and wasted him. You’ve got to train those men of yours, Sorley. We need them to get us
people like this, but we need the people they get us to be alive and able.”

  Bart looked up. He was lying on a sort of tray with one foot over a blacksmith’s anvil, in what seemed to be a rocky cave about twelve feet in diameter. The blacksmith, a short, square man with a gray spade beard and a leather apron under a checked shirt pocked with small black bum-holes, was just finishing up the fastening of a hinged ring, made out of three-inch wide bar stock, around Bart’s right ankle. He was closing the ring by hammering the white-hot legs of a staple through two holes drilled in the turned-up ends of the open part of the ring. The legs of the staple were several inches from Bart’s leg, but their heat was close enough to his skin to make Bart put his pain-control trick to work a second time.

  Morrison stood watching. With him was a tall, thick-shouldered, clean-shaven man of about forty, with a smoothly polished, three-foot length of inch-thick wooden rod tucked under his arm. He was dressed in dark, baggy trousers and a dark red shirt that was open at the collar, showing a muscular neck.

  “Just lie still,” said this man to Bart, taking the rod from under his arm and holding it ready in his fist. Bart made no move. They were three to his one. Still, on his feet, he might have tried his luck against them even though the man holding the stick handled it as if he had had some experience using it. But attempting anything starting from his present awkward horizontal position was plainly foolish.

  The stick-handler, thought Bart, must be the Sorley whom Morrison named earlier and who he had been talking to just now. Bart tried to remember if Sorley had been one of those they Had wakened on entering the bunkhouse, but could not. The question was chased from his mind by the realization that already encircling his other ankle was a ring like the one now being put around his right ankle.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Bart said to Morrison.

  “We’re a long way from courts of law out here,” said Morrison, “so we make our own justice. Did you think we wouldn’t recognize Guillaume Barre because you’ve grown a beard? Or that we’d forgot you stole the mule in the first place? Borrowed it, indeed!”

  “Mule stealing—just like horse stealing—,” said Sorley. Incongruously, he had a high-pitched, rasping tenor voice. “In lots of places they’d hang you for that. You’ve just been sentenced to ten years’ work in the mine.”

  Bart ignored the clean-shaven man. He kept his eyes fixed on Morrison.

  “Along with those other workers you need?” he asked the pot-bellied man.

  Morrison did not look at him or answer him.

  “Your story about Guillaume Barre’s as much of a lie as that so-called bunkhouse you took me to,” said Bart. “Who are you anyway? What’re you mining here that you can’t do it with regularly hired miners, aboveboard and honestly?”

  Morrison turned to Sorley.

  “Take him to the latrine,” Morrison said, “then chain him up to wait for the shift just coming off work.”

  He went out. The blacksmith, his work finished, shoved Bart’s leg off the anvil and it fell heavily to the floor. Bart started to sit up and found the stick hovering in the air inches in front of his face.

  “When I tell you,” said Sorley, “and only when someone tells you, do you do anything from now on. Get that straight!”

  Bart said nothing. Perhaps half a minute went by and the stick did not move. Then it was withdrawn from before his face.

  “Now you can sit up,” said Sorley. “In fact, stand up! Stand up and move where I tell you to move to.”

  Bart got up. On his feet again, he was able to see that Sorley wore a revolver in a bolster at his belt. It was a good thing, thought Bart, he had not tried to attack them all from his lying down position.

  Sorley herded Bart out the door of what was obviously an underground blacksmith shop, into a tunnel lit at only the point where they emerged, by a parafin lamp fixed to one rocky wall. A faint breeze blew in Bart’s face, back past him through the doorway. It must, he thought, be caused by whatever vent connected the blacksmith’s shop to the surface—the gases from such work would have to be carried away somehow.

  “Stand still!” said the voice of Sorley behind him; and he felt a blow against his back in the area of his right kidney—probably from the end of Sorley’s rod. A moment later Sorley came around in front of him, carrying a cap with what looked like a small lamp attached to the front of it. He lit the small lamp with a flint-and-steel sparker, and a pale glow washed out from it into the darkness of the tunnel. Sorley jammed the hat onto Bart’s head and stepped once more around behind him. The blacksmith, hammer in hand, followed along.

  “To your left. Move, now!” said Sorley from behind.

  He moved, the light from the lamp on his cap showing the rock walls of a tunnel about six feet wide and the same distance in height, opening, out of darkness before him as he progressed. They came close to an outhouse odor which turned out to come from a dark opening in the rock off to his left.

  “Stop!” said Sorley. “The latrine. Use it while you can. You won’t get another chance for twelve hours.”

  Bart turned and went in, leaving Sorley waiting outside. What was called a latrine was clearly an abandoned length of tunnel which was now given over to be a place for the disposal of human bodily wastes. He took Sorley’s advice and when he was done came back out again.

  “Now,” said Sorley. “Straight ahead.”

  They continued to another opening, this one also lit by a lamp fastened to the rock wall of the tunnel beside it. This opening also smelled, but more of unwashed bodies and clothing than anything else. At Sorley’s direction he turned in and his lamp lit up a chamber hewn out of the rock, with what looked like a long wooden table down one wall. The table was empty except for a man with a badly swollen leg. The man lay flat on the table, secured there by a chain that was fastened to the rocky wall at the far end of the room, and then ran through the staple on one of the man’s leg irons; it was held to the near wall by a massive padlock.

  Sorley lit a lamp inside the chamber.

  “Go lie down beside him!” He prodded Bart forward. Bart moved down along the table, climbed up and lay down next ta the man with the swollen leg, who stared at him with interest—or seemed to. It was hard to read his expression, for hair and beard tangled together hid nearly all his face. His clothes were tom and worn to rags.

  Sorley had meanwhile unlocked the padlock. He came down with the free end, poked it through the staple on Bart’s right leg-iron and pulled it on through. He pinched out the wick of the lamp in Bart’s hat. The blacksmith stood close at hand, watching, hammer in hand.

  “Save your carbide for work hours,” Sorley said.

  He went back up to the far end of the room, carrying the end of the chain, which he re fastened to a heavy bolt set in the rock of the wall there, locking it in place with the padlock.

  “Now lie quiet until your shift comes back. Then you’ll be fed.”

  He turned out the lamp he had lit and left, leaving Bart, with the other man, in darkness except for what little light reflected into their rocky prison from the lamp in the tunnel, outside the opening.

  The man beside Bart stirred his leg on the bare boards. His voice came hoarsely out of the darkness, like the voice of a man who has gone so long without talking that his vocal cords have nearly forgotten how to work.

  “Welcome to hell, friend.”

  chapter

  four

  THE LENGTH OF the chain that dragged behind Bart, like all the lengths of that chain that bound the moving line of raggedly dressed men together, pulled at his ankle and rang on the rocky floor of the tunnel. But he no longer noticed its sound or its weight. As always, his mind was at work on other matters; and his body automatically followed the movements of the man one step in front of him, the length of that step determined by a pin dropped through the link of chain just before the chain passed through the staple on the right leg-iron of the man ahead.

  They moved in unison because they had
to, because their legs were spaced apart and linked together by the chain; but long practice had made that unison almost an instinctive movement.

  “Duck,” the word came back down the line of men, passed from each one to the man behind him.

  Bart was fifth in the line of eight, and far enough from the guard in front with his lantern so that the warning was ordinarily necessary. As usual, the small lamps by which they worked and which were a part of the caps they wore had been put out before they were moved, so that they would be that much less likely to know where they were being taken. But Bart knew anyway. Just as he now knew the low point in the tunnel ceiling was coming. However, he ducked and dutifully repeated the word back over his shoulder even as he bent his knees and his neck.

  He was taller than most of the men on the chain; and during the first few weeks here in the mine where they lived and worked, he had taken several hard blows on the head before learning to respond to that warning immediately and without question. The sickening crack of the rock against his thankfully thick skull was in his memory now, even though time had turned the lesson into an unthinking reflex. But now he knew when such bumps were coming, just as he—evidently alone among all the men on the chain—knew the route they were on and the destination in the mine to which they were headed.

  He knew these things because he had qualities of survival in him that his captors did not guess, nearly all of them the result of things learned either during his childhood years in the Indian camp or later from his father. Most of the captured men driven to work here died in a matter of months, if not mere weeks; but long before they died, they sank into an apathy in which they did not talk and hardly seemed to think at all. Seeing this, Bart had deliberately kept his brain busy every moment of his every waking hour, in the long months he estimated he had been imprisoned here.

  He had found in himself two tools for doing this; and the first was a legacy from his father. His father had not only been an omnivorous reader, always surrounded by books; he had also had a prodigious memory. And Bart, growing up at his side, had thought it only natural that anyone should remember word for word a book he had read once; consequently, with his child’s retentive memory he had stored in the back of his head everything he read, so that by concentrating a little he could see it all, page by page in his mind, and reread it as if it was physically before him.