Chapter 9 - Whispers Through Keyholes
The explosion did not bring the mountain down, but it sealed the front thirty feet of the adit with two hundred tons of splintered rock and white limestone powder that made breathing nearly impossible for ten minutes.
Ethan and Nahimana crouched in the dark, their shirts pulled over their noses, listening to the creaking of the cedar timbering as it settled under the new weight.
"They won't dig," Ethan said, his voice muffled by the cotton cloth. "Silas Kane knows the layout. There’s an air shaft three hundred feet up the ridge, behind the chimney rocks. He’ll send two men up there with sulfur pots to smoke us out like badgers, while the rest wait at the mouth with their Winchesters."
Nahimana reached out in the pitch blackness. Her fingers found Ethan’s wrist—not with the hesitation of a captive, but with a hard, certain grip that surprised him. Her skin was warm, the fever from her shoulder wound finally breaking in the cool air of the cave.
"There is another way," she said. "The old ones didn't use the tunnel to bring the ore out. They used the water sink."
"The creek runs under the mountain?"
"It did fifty winters ago," she said. "Before the white men cut the timber for the smelter. When the big rains came, the water would roar through the deep cavern and come out behind the mission at San Xavier. My grandmother took me through the dry bed when I was seven to hide from the Mexican cavalry."
Ethan stood up, his head brushing the stone roof. He felt along his belt for his extra box of cartridges. Twelve left.
"Can you find it in the dark?"
"I don't need light," she said. "The stone speaks if you keep your palm against the wall. Follow the air that moves against your ankles."
They moved for three hours through a labyrinth of narrow fissures, crawling where the ceiling dropped to eighteen inches, sliding through pools of stagnant, ice-cold water that tasted of iron and lime. Ethan lost the skin from his knees and his right forearm, but he didn't slow down. Behind them, twice, he heard the dull, distant thud of more black powder being detonated at the entrance.
Kane was trying to clear the mouth, but he was working against time. A blast that loud in the Santa Catalinas would be heard by the cavalry patrol out of Fort Lowell by sunrise.
At three in the morning, the draft against Ethan’s boots changed. It smelled of wet willow leaves and woodsmoke.
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They came out through a horizontal slit beneath the roots of a giant cottonwood tree, thirty feet above the Santa Cruz River. A quarter of a mile downstream, the white plaster walls of the San Xavier del Bac mission glowed like a pile of skulls under the setting moon.
And sitting under the mission porch, his gray horse tied to the cemetery gate, was Luke Vogel.
