Chapter 8 - The Secret of the Copper Lode
They crawled the last three hundred yards through the drainage flume.
The entrance to the Santa Rita adit was nothing more than a black square cut into the rotten red granite of the canyon wall, half-strangled by wild blackberry vines and the gray skeletons of dead scrub cedar. The original lintel—a massive oak beam ten inches thick—had sagged in the middle, held up only by a pile of dry-stacked stones that Ethan’s grandfather wouldn't have trusted to hold a pigpen.
Nahimana went in first, flat on her stomach, squirming through a gap no wider than a flour barrel. Ethan followed, dragging both Winchesters and the saddlebags, his spurs catching on the loose rubble until he had to unbuckle them and kick them behind him into the dark.
The air inside was forty degrees cooler than the desert floor, smelling of bat guano, sulfur, and the cold, dead dampness of stone that hadn't seen the sun since the Spanish priests were hauling ore in rawhide sacks.
Ethan struck a sulfur match against the sole of his boot.
The small blue flame flickered, then caught the sulfur tip, throwing a ring of yellow light five feet across.
Nahimana was standing ten paces ahead, her hand pressed against the cavern wall.
The rock wasn't copper oxide. It wasn't the green-stained malachite Ethan had seen in the test pits down by Bisbee. The vein running through the ceiling was five feet wide, pure white quartz, split down the middle by a seam of native gold that looked like melted butter poured into the cracked earth.
"This is what Chaska died for," Ethan said softly, the match burning down until the wood scorched his fingertips.
"No," Nahimana said from the shadows. "He died for what is on the floor."
Ethan lit a second match.
At her feet lay three skeletons. They weren't miners; they wore the rusted remnants of Spanish iron breastplates, their ribs pierced by long, obsidian-tipped war points that had turned green with age. In the center of the three men sat an iron chest, eighteen inches square, bound with heavy copper straps.
The lid was open.
Inside, resting on a bed of rotted sheepskin, were twenty-four steel stamps—the same stamps used by the territorial assay office in Santa Fe to certify the gold bars for the Federal mint in Philadelphia.
Ethan picked one up. It was heavy, cold, and marked with an eagle clutching a banner that read UNITED STATES ASSAY OFFICE—1854.
"They weren't looking for a mine," Ethan whispered, the cold reality hitting him like a blow to the ribs. "The mine was played out thirty years ago. Kane and Vogel are using this tunnel to brand stolen Mexican bullion with Federal stamps so they can ship it east on the stage without paying the export tax."
"And the mark on my back," Nahimana said, turning her shoulder toward the matchlight, "is the proof. The brand they put on me was the test die. They burned it into my skin to see if the steel would hold its temper under heat."
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Outside, the first stick of dynamite hit the gravel apron before the tunnel mouth.
The roar blew the match out, and the mountain began to fall.
