The Spirit by Thomas Page

Author:Thomas Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2019-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

8

Guests at Colby Lodge were discouraged from going to Oharaville. The mine area was thin earth pocked with sinkholes. People had fallen into the ground at Oharaville and vanished. Children had been trapped there with broken limbs. The Forest Service would run you out if they caught you there.

The road around the north face had been built when muscle and dynamite smoothed the earth and transportation was by horsedrawn buckboard. It followed a rusted railroad line used for transferring ore from the Limerick mine to the town of Garrison.

Oharaville lay at the terminal of a creaky railroad trestle spanning a gully full of old tin cans, newspapers, broken beams, and bald tires. The town was laid out on a slope running upward away from Mount Colby’s north face. Basically, it was a single rutted road called Bullion Avenue, which originated at a huge hole blasted out of Colby’s side, from which a collection of rotted, decrepit buildings seemed to spill out. All the windows in the ghost town had been boarded up. The most distinctive edifice was an old wooden church with a leaning steeple at the end of Bullion Avenue, almost in the trees.

When Jason pulled into the town, he was twenty-­five hundred feet above sea level. He wondered if that were some kind of record for a mine. He parked the car on Bullion Avenue.

A faint wind blew down the street, creaking a hanging sign with the faded word SADDLERY on it. Of the two dozen or so structures, half were little houses around which long-­dead housewives had tried to grow gardens which were now thickets of fungi and tight grass, enclosed by rotting fences.

Jason looked into the saloon. Shelves and counters with dusty glass jars lined the walls. The floor was full of jagged holes. Jason envisioned a winter in the Cascades when miners huddled blind drunk under a swaying lantern in here. The wind would sweep like a flash flood down Bullion Avenue as if draining into the mine shaft, rattling doors and shutters back and forth and tilting the church steeple. Up here skies were always gray and mountain peaks crowded your horizons.

Before the gaping hole of the mine was a string of twisted rail and some overturned ore cars. The mine supervisors’ hut was a long-­gone jumble of wood. Metal barrels were strewn about, and piles of earth were stacked against the cliff. These were tailings, heaps of dirt through which scavenger prospectors picked for small hunks of silver ore.

Jason opened the glove compartment and took out a brand new .38-­caliber revolver, a heavy flashlight, and a ball of twine on a rotating spool. With his pocket knife he carved a notch into each of the soft-­nosed lead bullets, then loaded them into the pistol.

As he walked toward the mine he searched the ground for any depressions or other weakness. He flashed the light inside the entrance. Water dripped. A small avalanche of wet gravel hissed down the wall.

He tied the twine to a wooden beam and spun it out as he continued downward.

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