_Gold!_
"Ten miles down, drillers!
Hell-bound, and proud of it!
Ten miles down, drillers!
Hark to what I say:
You're pokin' through the crust of hell
And braggin' too damn loud of it,
For, when you get to hell, you'll find
The devil there to pay."
From the black, night-wrapped valley, far below, the singer's voice
went silent with the slamming of a door in one of the bunkhouses. The
song was popular; some rimester in the Tonah Basin camp had written
the parody for the tormenting of the drill crews. And, high on the
mountainside, Dean Rawson hummed a few bars of the lilting air after
the singer's voice had ceased.
"Ten miles down!" he said at last to his assistant, sprawled out on
the stone beside him. "That's about right, Smithy. And maybe the rest
of the doggerel isn't so far off either. 'Pokin' through the crust of
hell'--well, there was hell popping around here once, and I am
gambling that the furnaces aren't all out."
They were on the outthrust shoulder of rock where the mountain road
hung high above the valley floor. Below, where, months before, Rawson
had rescued a man from desert death, was blackness punctured by points
of light--bunkhouse windows, the drilling-floor lights at the foot of
a big derrick, a single warning light at the derrick's top. But the
buildings and the towering steelwork of the derrick that handled the
rotary drills were dim and ghostly in the light of the stars.
"We've gone through some places I'd call plenty warm," said Smithy,
"but you--you craves it _hot_! Think we're about due?" he asked.
Rawson answered indirectly.
"One great big old he-crater!" he said. His outstretched arm swept the
whole circle of starlit mountains that enclosed the Basin. "That's
what this was once. Twenty miles across--and when it blew its head off
it must have sprayed this whole Southwest.
"Now, those craters"--he pointed contemptuously toward the three
conical peaks off to the right--"those were just blow-holes on the
side of this big one."
* * * * *
In the ragged ring of mountains, the throat of some volcanic monster
of an earlier age, the three cones towered hugely. Their tops were
plainly cupped; their ashy sloping sides swept down to the desert
floor. At their base, the gray walls of stone in the ghost town of
Little Rhyolite gleamed palely, like skeleton remains.
"I've seen steam, live steam," Rawson went on, "coming out of a
fissure in the rocks. I know there's heat and plenty of it down below.
We're about due to hit it. The boys are pulling the drill now; they
cut through into a whale of a cave down below there--"
He broke off abruptly to fix his attention on the dark valley below,
where lights were moving. One white slash of brilliance cut across the
dark ground; another, then a cluster of flood lights blazed out. They
picked the skeleton framework of the giant derrick in black relief
against the white glare of the sand. From far below; through the
quiet air, came sounds of excited shouting; the voices of men were
raised in sudden clamor.
"They've pulled the drill," said Rawson. "But why all the excitement?"
He had already turned toward their car when the crackle of six quick
shots came from below. His abrupt command was not needed; Smithy was
in the car while still the echoes were rolling off among the hills.
Their own lights flashed on to show the mountain grade waiting for
their quick descent.
* * * * *
The sandy floor of this part of the Tonah Basin was littered with the
orderly disorder of a big construction job--mountains of casing,
tubular drill rod, a foot in diameter; segmental bearings to clamp
around the rod every hundred feet and give it smooth play. Dean drove
his car swiftly along the surfaced road that was known as "Main
Street" to the entire camp.
There were men running toward the derrick--men of the day shift who
had been aroused from their sleep. Others were clustered about the
wide concrete floor where the derrick stood. Clad only in trousers and
shoes, their bodies, tanned by the desert sun, were almost black in
the glare of the big floods. They milled wildly about the derrick;
and, through all their clamor and shouting, one word was repeated
again and again:
"Gold! Gold! Gold!"
The big drill head was suspended above the floor. Dean Rawson, with
Smithy close at hand, pushed through the crowd. He was prepared to see
traces of gold in the sludge that was bailed out through the hollow
shaft--quartz, perhaps, whose richness had set the men wild before
they realized how impossible it would be to develop such a mine. But
Rawson stopped almost aghast at the glaring splendor of the golden
drill hanging naked in the blinding light.
* * * * *
Riley, foreman of the night shift, was standing beside it, a pistol in
his hand. "L'ave it be," he was commanding. "Not a hand do ye lay on
it till the boss gets here." At sight of Rawson he stepped forward.
"I shot in the air," he explained. "I knew ye were up in the hills for
a breath of coolness. I wanted to get ye here quick."
"Right," said Rawson tersely. "But, man, what have you done with the
drill? It's smeared over with gold!"
"Fair clogged wid it, sir," Riley's voice betrayed his own excitement.
"You remimber we couldn't pull it at first--the drill was jammed-like
after it bruk through at the ten-mile livil. Then it come free--and
luk at it! Luk at the damn thing! Sent down for honest work, it was,
and it comes back all dressed up in jewelry like a squaw Indian whin
there's oil struck on the reservation! Or is it gold ye were after all
the time?" he demanded.
"Gold! Gold!" a hundred voices were shouting. Dean hardly heard the
voice of the foreman, made suddenly garrulous with excitement. He
stared at the big drill head, heaped high with the precious metal. It
was jammed into the diamond-studded face of the drill; it filled every
crack and crevice, a smooth, solid mass on top of the head and against
the stem. A workman had brought a singlejack and chisel; he was prying
at a ribbon of the yellow stuff. Riley went for him, gun in hand.
"L'ave it be!" he shouted.
"But, confound it all, Dean," Smithy's voice was saying in a tone of
disgust, "I thought we were working on a power plant. Not that a gold
mine is so bad; but we can't work it--we can't go down after it at ten
miles."
"Gold mine!" Rawson echoed. "I'll say it's a gold mine--but not
because of the gold. Do you notice anything peculiar about that,
Smithy?"
His assistant replied with a quick exclamation:
"You're right, Dean! I knew there was something haywire with that.
Solid chunk--been cast around that stem--melted on. And that means--"
"Heat," said Rawson. "It means we've found what we're after. Give the
gold to the men; tell them we'll divide it evenly among them. There's
more down there, but there's something better: there's energy, power!"
He snapped out quick orders. "Get the temperature. Drop a recording
pyrometer. Let me know at once. There'll be plenty doing now!"
* * * * *
Drill rods and cables, all were made of the newest aluminum alloy. The
long tube that held the pyrometer was formed of the same metal. Smithy
sent it down to get a recording of the temperatures of that
subterranean cave into which their tools had plunged.
He adjusted the recording mechanism himself and stood beside the
twenty-inch casing that held back the loose sand from the big bore.
Then he watched ten sections of cable, each a mile in length, each
heavier than the last, as they went hissing into the earth.
From the cable control shed the voice of Riley was calling the depth.
"Fifty-two thousand." Then by hundreds until he cried:
"Fifty-two-seven. We're into the big cave! Now another hundred feet."
The cable was moving slowly. In the middle of Riley's call of
"Fifty-two-eight," a jangling bell told that the bottom of the
pyrometer carrier had touched.
"Up with it," Smithy ordered. "Make it snappy. We'll see if we've got
another cargo of gold."
There was an undeniable thrill in this reaching to a tremendous
distance underground, this groping about in a deep-hidden cave, where
molten gold was to be found. What had they tapped?--he asked himself.
He saw visions of some vast pool of hot, liquid gold. Perhaps Dean
would have to change his plans. They could rig up some kind of a
bailer; they could bring out thousands of dollars at a time.
He was watching for the first sight of the metal carrier, far more
interested in what might be clinging to it than in the record of the
pyrometer it held. He saw it emerge--then he stared in disbelief at
the stubby mass at the cable's end, where all that remained of the
long tube he had sent down was a dangling two feet of discolored
metal, warped and distorted. The lower part, a full twenty feet in
length, had been fused cleanly off.
Dean Rawson was there to watch the next attempt. Again Riley's roaring
bass rolled out the count, but this time the call stopped at
fifty-two-seven. The jangling bell told that the carrier had touched.
"Divil a bit do I understand this," Riley was calling. "We're right at
the point where we dropped through into the clear. Right at the roof
of the big cave--fifty-two-seven, it says--and no lower do we go. The
bottom of the hole is plugged!"
* * * * *
Rawson made no reply. He was scowling while he stared speculatively at
the mouth of the twenty-inch bore--a vertical tunnel that led from the
drilling floor down, down to some inner vault. "Molten gold," he was
thinking. "It melted a cylinder of the new Krieger alloy--melted it
when its melting point is way higher than that of any rock that we've
hit. And now the bore is closed...."
He was trying vainly to project his mental vision through those miles
of hard rock to see what manner of mystery this was into which he had
probed. He shook his head slowly in baffled speculation, then spoke
sharply.
"Drill it out!" he ordered. "We're into a hot spot sure enough, though
I can't just figure out the how of it. But we'll tame it, Smithy. Send
down the drill. Clean it out. Then we'll poke around down there and
get the answer to all this."
Five days were needed to send down the big drill with a new drill-head
replacing the other too fouled with gold for any use. The tubular
sections, a hundred feet in length, were hooked together and lowered
one by one. Each joint meant the coupling of the air-pipe as well.
Air, mixed with water from the outer jacket, must come foaming up
through the central core to bring the powdered rock to the surface.
Five days, then one hour of boring, and another five days to pull out
the drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it in
the severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been melted
completely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electric
furnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle in the blast
of an oxy-acetylene flame.