Soldiers of Fortune

by Richard Harding Davis

The day set for the visit to the mines rose bright and clear. MacWilliams had rigged out his single passenger-car with rugs and cushions, and flags flew from its canvas top that flapped and billowed in the wind of the slow-moving train. Their observation-car, as MacWilliams termed it, was placed in front of the locomotive, and they were pushed gently along the narrow rails between forests of Manaca palms, and through swamps and jungles, and at times over the limestone formation along the coast, where the waves dashed as high as the smokestack of the locomotive, covering the excursionists with a sprinkling of white spray. Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of the cow-catcher. MacWilliams escorted Hope out into the cab of the locomotive, and taught her how to increase and slacken the speed of the engine, until she showed an unruly desire to throw the lever open altogether and shoot them off the rails into the ocean beyond.

Clay sat at the back of the car with Miss Langham, and told her and her father of the difficulties with which young MacWilliams had had to contend. Miss Langham found her chief pleasure in noting the attention which her father gave to all that Clay had to tell him. Knowing her father as she did, and being familiar with his manner toward other men, she knew that he was treating Clay with unusual consideration. And this pleased her greatly, for it justified her own interest in him. She regarded Clay as a discovery of her own, but she was glad to have her opinion of him shared by others.

Their coming was a great event in the history of the mines. Kirkland, the foreman, and Chapman, who handled the dynamite, Weimer, the Consul, and the native doctor, who cared for the fever-stricken and the casualties, were all at the station to meet them in the whitest of white duck and with a bunch of ponies to carry them on their tour of inspection, and the village of mud-cabins and zinc-huts that stood clear of the bare sunbaked earth on whitewashed wooden piles was as clean as Clay's hundred policemen could sweep it. Mr. Langham rode in advance of the cavalcade, and the head of each of the different departments took his turn in riding at his side, and explained what had been done, and showed him the proud result. The village was empty, except for the families of the native workmen and the ownerless dogs, the scavengers of the colony, that snarled and barked and ran leaping in front of the ponies' heads.

Rising abruptly above the zinc village, lay the first of the five great hills, with its open front cut into great terraces, on which the men clung like flies on the side of a wall, some of them in groups around an opening, or in couples pounding a steel bar that a fellow-workman turned in his bare hands, while others gathered about the panting steam-drills that shook the solid rock with fierce, short blows, and hid the men about them in a throbbing curtain of steam. Self-important little dummy-engines, dragging long trains of ore-cars, rolled and rocked on the uneven surface of the ground, and swung around corners with warning screeches of their whistles. They could see, on peaks outlined against the sky, the signal-men waving their red flags, and then plunging down the mountain-side out of danger, as the earth rumbled and shook and vomited out a shower of stones and rubbish into the calm hot air. It was a spectacle of desperate activity and puzzling to the uninitiated, for it seemed to be scattered over an unlimited extent, with no head nor direction, and with each man, or each group of men, working alone, like rag-pickers on a heap of ashes.

After the first half-hour of curious interest Miss Langham admitted to herself that she was disappointed. She confessed she had hoped that Clay would explain the meaning of the mines to her, and act as her escort over the mountains which he was blowing into pieces.

But it was King, somewhat bored by the ceaseless noise and heat, and her brother, incoherently enthusiastic, who rode at her side, while Clay moved on in advance and seemed to have forgotten her existence. She watched him pointing up at the openings in the mountains and down at the ore-road, or stooping to pick up a piece of ore from the ground in cowboy fashion, without leaving his saddle, and pounding it on the pommel before he passed it to the others. And, again, he would stand for minutes at a time up to his boot-tops in the sliding waste, with his bridle rein over his arm and his thumbs in his belt, listening to what his lieutenants were saying, and glancing quickly from them to Mr. Langham to see if he were following the technicalities of their speech. All of the men who had welcomed the appearance of the women on their arrival with such obvious delight and with so much embarrassment seemed now as oblivious of their presence as Clay himself.

Miss Langham pushed her horse up into the group beside Hope, who had kept her pony close at Clay's side from the beginning; but she could not make out what it was they were saying, and no one seemed to think it necessary to explain. She caught Clay's eye at last and smiled brightly at him; but, after staring at her for fully a minute, until Kirkland had finished speaking, she heard him say, "Yes, that's it exactly; in open-face workings there is no other way," and so showed her that he had not been even conscious of her presence. But a few minutes later she saw him look up at Hope, folding his arms across his chest tightly and shaking his head. "You see it was the only thing to do," she heard him say, as though he were defending some course of action, and as though Hope were one of those who must be convinced. "If we had cut the opening on the first level, there was the danger of the whole thing sinking in, so we had to begin to clear away at the top and work down. That's why I ordered the bucket-trolley. As it turned out, we saved money by it."

Hope nodded her head slightly. "That's what I told father when Ted wrote us about it," she said; "but you haven't done it at Mount Washington."

"Oh, but it's like this, Miss—" Kirkland replied, eagerly. "It's because Washington is a solider foundation. We can cut openings all over it and they won't cave, but this hill is most all rubbish; it's the poorest stuff in the mines."

Hope nodded her head again and crowded her pony on after the moving group, but her sister and King did not follow. King looked at her and smiled. "Hope is very enthusiastic," he said. "Where did she pick it up?"