Beyond the Great Snow Mountains by Louis L'Amour

Author:Louis L'Amour [L'Amour, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Western
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2005-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

IV

Here, where i stood, there was a level place where waste rock from the mine had been dumped and smoothed off. Across the narrow canyon the opposite side loomed up black against the night, and above it there was a scattering of bright desert stars. It was still, so still a person might almost have heard the movement of a bat’s wing. Breeze touched my face gently, drying the perspiration on my cheeks.

To my left the mine opened, black as death. Nobody needed to tell me this might be my last look at the stars. Old mines were something I knew all too well. I knew the thick, loose dirt of the floor, gray and ancient, untouched by any breeze, undisturbed by any walking foot. I knew the pale gray dust that gathers on the side walls of the drifts and lays in a mantle over the chutes and the rusted ore cars.

I knew how the ancient timbers crack and groan with the weight of a mountain on their shoulders, and I knew how the strain on those timbers grew, how the hanging walls of the drifts and stopes began to buckle. Water would seep through, finding cracks and private ways, weakening the vast weight above. The guts of the mountain lay there suspended, a gigantic trap for the unwary.

I walked into the mine entrance. When I had felt my way along for thirty feet, and the opening was gray light in back and above me, I put my hand over the reflector of the carbide lamp and struck sharply to light it, brushing the tiny wheel against the flint. Flame spurted from the burner, a long, knifelike jet of flame standing out at least six inches and hissing comfortably. I turned it down to a mere two inches and, drawing a deep breath, started down the steep incline that led into the old workings of the mine.

When I had gone fifty yards or so, the floor became level and I passed the first ladder leading upward into a stope and, beside it, two chutes. Under one of them stood an ancient, rusted ore car.

A little farther on there were more chutes, and I continued walking. So far the timbering was in fair shape. From my few careful inquiries and a study of the map I’d obtained, I thought I could tell where the troublesome area began, but when I had gone beyond the last of the chutes, I realized I need not have worried about that. I stopped and flashed my light farther ahead; then I knew what hell was like.

When a vein of ore is discovered off of a mine tunnel, the miners follow it, hollowing out the richest rock to form what they call a stope. These man-made caverns are often too large to be supported by timbers and are the most dangerous areas in a mine…especially an older, unmaintained mine.

The tunnel before me fell away into blackness and vanished. It was not hard to see what had happened.

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