Part 2
Eliza did not answer right away. She finished the stroke she had started, and the last chip fell onto the canvas.
Then she looked up again.
"Rock," she said. "I'm finding rock, Mr. Fenwick."
He crouched at the edge of the shaft. She could see the shine of his silk vest in the gray light, and the dark shape of the windlass beside him. The ladder ran straight up between them. One kick would send it clattering down onto her.
He did not kick it. He sat down on the edge, with his boots hanging over, as if they were two neighbors on a porch.
"You know what I like about you, Mrs. Marsh?" he said. "You're honest. It's a rare thing in this camp. It's so rare I didn't plan for it."
The cold was coming up through the soles of her shoes. Her candle wavered.
"Every man in Leadville salts something," Fenwick said. "His story. His claim. His poke, when he sits down to cards. Half the deeds on Chestnut Street are paper and hope. I give folks a good rock to dream on, and a better one than most." He spread his soft hands. "Nora Doyle has scrubbed floors for six years. For one month she gets to be a mine owner. Who in this town gives her that?"
"Nora's six years," Eliza said. "That's what you're taking. Not a month."
Fenwick did not answer. Far down the hill, somebody was calling her name.
"Mrs. Marsh? Mrs. Marsh!"
It was Henry Ames, red in the face, coming up the trail at a run with his tight collar undone and his hat in his hand. Behind him, slower, came Jake Swanberg in his leather apron.
Fenwick stood up. He brushed off the seat of his trousers. He looked down at her one more time, and for a moment something almost like respect went across his face.
Then he walked away down the other side of the hill, not hurrying, toward town.
Henry and Jake held the ladder while she climbed. She came up the last rungs with her canvas bundle tied to her belt and her knees shaking so hard Jake had to lift her the last step by the arms.
She sat on the windlass frame until her heart slowed.
"You told me ten o'clock," Henry said. "I came at eight. I couldn't sit still."
"Good," Eliza said. "Help me carry this."
By eleven o'clock the whole syndicate was crowded into the back room of the assay office, and the furnace was roaring.
Eliza did not explain. She let them watch.
She crushed the channel sample, every chip of it, the rich lumps and the barren rock together. She weighed it on Ben's balance. She mixed the fluxes and charged the crucible and set it in the fire. The heat came out of the furnace mouth like a blow, and the room filled with the smell of hot clay.
The furnace roared while it melted.
She poured. She broke the button free. She set it in the cupel and back in the fire, and they all watched the lead soak away into the bone ash, slowly, until only a speck was left shining.
She lifted the cupel out with her tongs.
The bead was smaller than a mustard seed.
She weighed it anyway, under the glass, with all of them breathing down her neck. She checked the weights twice.
"Four ounces to the ton," she said. "Not enough to pay for the candle."
Nora Doyle sat down on the flux barrel.
"But the other assay," Jake said. "Two hundred and nine."
"He assayed what they gave him." Eliza went to the shelf and took down the empty ore sack Fenwick had left on Monday. "So did I."
She turned it right side out.
On the canvas, in black stencil letters gone gray with dust, was the name of a mine on Fryer Hill that had been shipping rich carbonate since spring. The Cass Belle.
"They bought a sack of somebody else's best ore," she said, "and set a little of it into their own face, where a greenhorn would knock it off and carry it home. It comes off too easy. Ore in the ground fights you."
Henry Ames looked at the clock on the wall. It was twenty minutes to noon.
"The closing," he said.
"There won't be one," Nora said. She stood up, and smoothed her apron, and looked at Eliza for the first time that morning. "Not for my six years, there won't."
Avery Fenwick and Mr. Lyle took the noon stage to Denver. Several men in the State Street saloons talked about going after them. Nobody did. Eliza did not ask anyone to.
The syndicate's nine thousand dollars stayed in the Merchants' Bank.
That evening Nora came to the back door again, still in her apron. She was carrying a covered plate that smelled of pot roast and onions, and she set it down on the counter beside the brass balance without a word, the way she used to on Saturdays when Ben was alive.
After she had gone, Eliza ate standing up.
Then she got the ladder from the back room and climbed up to the sign over the door. With a rag and a can of turpentine, she rubbed the first name off, letter by letter, until the paint was gone and only the gray wood showed.
MARSH, ASSAYER.
She climbed down and looked at it in the last of the light. It would do.