Page 3 of Stolen Time

It seemed I’d answered my own question.

“‘Once more into the breach,’” I quipped, and Bellamy raised an eyebrow.

“Huh?”

“Shakespeare,” I said briefly. Well, not everyone had a displaced warlock from the nineteenth century for a father, someone who’d made sure that I and my older sister Jessica and my little brother Patrick were well-versed in the classics.

Flashlight in hand, I moved closer to the opening and shone it inside. To be honest, the shaft didn’t appear all that impressive — just a space about fifteen feet wide or so, with some sketchy-looking timbers holding up the rock sides, and more rocks strewn on the ground below. I recalled Bellamy’s comment about how shafts like these had been dug to look for additional deposits of the copper and silver and gold hidden in the hill.

They probably hadn’t found much, or this part of the hillside would have been blasted open as well.

“It’s not going to bite,” came her voice from behind me, and I shook my head.

“That you know of.”

But since there wasn’t any point in drawing this out, I went ahead and squeezed through the opening she’d made by pulling back that one piece of plywood. Almost at once, the temperature seemed to drop a good ten degrees…or maybe that was just my inner heebie-jeebies taking over.

Because I couldn’t lie — the place was creepy. Maybe it was the utter darkness, broken only by the narrow beam of the flashlight Bellamy had given me, or maybe the oddly musty scent of cold stone and confined spaces.

Or maybe it was only that I couldn’t tell how deep the shaft went.

It can’t be that deep,I told myself as I took a gingerly step forward, then another.This was an exploratory shaft, so it’s not like they would have been drilling hundreds of feet inside the mountain.

At least, that was what I wanted to believe. Since what I knew about mining probably would have fit in the palm of my hand, I couldn’t know for sure.

Another cautious step. I paused and shone the flashlight all around me, but everything still looked pretty much the same — evenly spaced timbers along the wall that were beginning to show signs of rot, loose stones and gravel spread over the ground beneath my feet.

On one wall, though, I noticed something that seemed to be chalk markings on the dark surface. I headed over there, figuring I might as well take a look, even though I guessed the scrawls were probably graffiti left behind by some long-ago McAllister coming in here to get their wiggles out.

It didn’t look like graffiti, though. No, it looked like purposeful markings of some kind, numbers and letters that didn’t appear to be real words but possibly abbreviations. At the end were the letters SLM and the number 26.

Initials and a date?

Possibly. It didn’t seem too out of bounds to guess that it might have been an inscription left behind by a long-ago surveyor or someone else who worked for the mine.

For some reason, seeing that physical evidence left behind by someone who’d been working here made me feel a little better. True, the shaft was still creepy and not the sort of place I’d want to hang out, but really, it was just a place that people had surveyed and moved on. Nothing to see here.

A little lighter of spirit, I shone the flashlight around again. It looked as though there was another set of markings on the opposite wall, and I hurried over to take a look.

Except with my flashlight fixed on the wall and not on the uneven ground at my feet, I didn’t notice the gaping crack in the stone surface until it was too late. The toe of my hiking boot caught in the fissure, and I went down hard, my head smacking against the rocks.

The last thing I remembered was the metallic clank of the flashlight as it fell from my limp fingers.

2

A TIME TO HEAL

Seth Lewis McAllisterpaused at the entrance to the new shaft they’d sunk only the week before. He already knew they weren’t going to continue exploring in this area, not when the amounts of copper the surveyors had found had proved it wasn’t worth wasting money on this branch of the mine, but he wanted to go inside one more time to take a few additional samples, just in case. Technically, he wasn’t a surveyor or a geologist, just a recently promoted foreman at the United Verde, and yet he thought if he was able to prove that the operation could be expanded here after all, it might mean a decent bonus, or maybe even another promotion.

Jerome was booming, and he wanted to boom right along with it. Maybe then he’d feel as if it was safe to start thinking about settling down.

The day shift had already gone home, which was why he’d taken the detour over here. He’d said goodbye to his men and watched them troop down the hill to their various rented homes and boarding houses, and once he knew he was safely out of eyeshot, had walked back up to the place, hidden by a curve of the hill, where the mine shaft was located.

It stood exposed to the sun and the wind, mostly because everyone working at the United Verde knew it was going to either get boarded up or filled in within the next couple of weeks, whenever they got around to it.

Not if he could prove them wrong, though.

He paused to fish a box of matches out of his pants pocket and lit one of the lanterns sitting on the ground closest to the entrance. The surveyors had already noted that the excavation was free of any flammable gases, so using the lantern wouldn’t be a problem.

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