Two Thousand Miles Below Read online

  CHAPTER II

  _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 voicewent silent with the slamming of a door in one of the bunkhouses. Thesong was popular; some rimester in the Tonah Basin camp had writtenthe parody for the tormenting of the drill crews. And, high on themountainside, Dean Rawson hummed a few bars of the lilting air afterthe singer's voice had ceased.

  "Ten miles down!" he said at last to his assistant, sprawled out onthe stone beside him. "That's about right, Smithy. And maybe the restof the doggerel isn't so far off either. 'Pokin' through the crust ofhell'--well, there was hell popping around here once, and I amgambling that the furnaces aren't all out."

  They were on the outthrust shoulder of rock where the mountain roadhung high above the valley floor. Below, where, months before, Rawsonhad rescued a man from desert death, was blackness punctured by pointsof light--bunkhouse windows, the drilling-floor lights at the foot ofa big derrick, a single warning light at the derrick's top. But thebuildings and the towering steelwork of the derrick that handled therotary 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 thewhole circle of starlit mountains that enclosed the Basin. "That'swhat this was once. Twenty miles across--and when it blew its head offit must have sprayed this whole Southwest.

  "Now, those craters"--he pointed contemptuously toward the threeconical peaks off to the right--"those were just blow-holes on theside of this big one."

  * * * * *

  In the ragged ring of mountains, the throat of some volcanic monsterof an earlier age, the three cones towered hugely. Their tops wereplainly cupped; their ashy sloping sides swept down to the desertfloor. At their base, the gray walls of stone in the ghost town ofLittle Rhyolite gleamed palely, like skeleton remains.

  "I've seen steam, live steam," Rawson went on, "coming out of afissure 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; theycut 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 thedark ground; another, then a cluster of flood lights blazed out. Theypicked the skeleton framework of the giant derrick in black reliefagainst the white glare of the sand. From far below; through thequiet air, came sounds of excited shouting; the voices of men wereraised 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 quickshots came from below. His abrupt command was not needed; Smithy wasin the car while still the echoes were rolling off among the hills.Their own lights flashed on to show the mountain grade waiting fortheir quick descent.

  * * * * *

  The sandy floor of this part of the Tonah Basin was littered with theorderly disorder of a big construction job--mountains of casing,tubular drill rod, a foot in diameter; segmental bearings to clamparound the rod every hundred feet and give it smooth play. Dean drovehis car swiftly along the surfaced road that was known as "MainStreet" to the entire camp.

  There were men running toward the derrick--men of the day shift whohad been aroused from their sleep. Others were clustered about thewide concrete floor where the derrick stood. Clad only in trousers andshoes, their bodies, tanned by the desert sun, were almost black inthe glare of the big floods. They milled wildly about the derrick;and, through all their clamor and shouting, one word was repeatedagain and again:

  "Gold! Gold! Gold!"

  The big drill head was suspended above the floor. Dean Rawson, withSmithy close at hand, pushed through the crowd. He was prepared to seetraces of gold in the sludge that was bailed out through the hollowshaft--quartz, perhaps, whose richness had set the men wild beforethey realized how impossible it would be to develop such a mine. ButRawson stopped almost aghast at the glaring splendor of the goldendrill hanging naked in the blinding light.

  * * * * *

  Riley, foreman of the night shift, was standing beside it, a pistol inhis hand. "L'ave it be," he was commanding. "Not a hand do ye lay onit 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 fora breath of coolness. I wanted to get ye here quick."

  "Right," said Rawson tersely. "But, man, what have you done with thedrill? 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-likeafter it bruk through at the ten-mile livil. Then it come free--andluk 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 whinthere's oil struck on the reservation! Or is it gold ye were after allthe time?" he demanded.

  "Gold! Gold!" a hundred voices were shouting. Dean hardly heard thevoice of the foreman, made suddenly garrulous with excitement. Hestared at the big drill head, heaped high with the precious metal. Itwas jammed into the diamond-studded face of the drill; it filled everycrack and crevice, a smooth, solid mass on top of the head and againstthe stem. A workman had brought a singlejack and chisel; he was pryingat 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 ofdisgust, "I thought we were working on a power plant. Not that a goldmine is so bad; but we can't work it--we can't go down after it at tenmiles."

  "Gold mine!" Rawson echoed. "I'll say it's a gold mine--but notbecause 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 thegold to the men; tell them we'll divide it evenly among them. There'smore down there, but there's something better: there's energy, power!"

  He snapped out quick orders. "Get the temperature. Drop a recordingpyrometer. Let me know at once. There'll be plenty doing now!"

  * * * * *

  Drill rods and cables, all were made of the newest aluminum alloy. Thelong tube that held the pyrometer was formed of the same metal. Smithysent it down to get a recording of the temperatures of thatsubterranean cave into which their tools had plunged.

  He adjusted the recording mechanism himself and stood beside thetwenty-inch casing that held back the loose sand from the big bore.Then he watched ten sections of cable, each a mile in length, eachheavier 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 thepyrometer carrier had touched.

  "Up with it," Smithy ordered. "Make it snappy. We'll see if we've gotanother cargo of gold."

  There was an undeniable thrill in this reaching to a tremendousdistance underground, this groping about in a deep-hidden cave, wheremolten gold was to be found. What had they tapped?--he asked himself.He saw visions of some vast poo
l of hot, liquid gold. Perhaps Deanwould have to change his plans. They could rig up some kind of abailer; they could bring out thousands of dollars at a time.

  He was watching for the first sight of the metal carrier, far moreinterested in what might be clinging to it than in the record of thepyrometer it held. He saw it emerge--then he stared in disbelief atthe stubby mass at the cable's end, where all that remained of thelong tube he had sent down was a dangling two feet of discoloredmetal, warped and distorted. The lower part, a full twenty feet inlength, had been fused cleanly off.

  Dean Rawson was there to watch the next attempt. Again Riley's roaringbass rolled out the count, but this time the call stopped atfifty-two-seven. The jangling bell told that the carrier had touched.

  "Divil a bit do I understand this," Riley was calling. "We're right atthe point where we dropped through into the clear. Right at the roofof the big cave--fifty-two-seven, it says--and no lower do we go. Thebottom of the hole is plugged!"

  * * * * *

  Rawson made no reply. He was scowling while he stared speculatively atthe mouth of the twenty-inch bore--a vertical tunnel that led from thedrilling floor down, down to some inner vault. "Molten gold," he wasthinking. "It melted a cylinder of the new Krieger alloy--melted itwhen its melting point is way higher than that of any rock that we'vehit. And now the bore is closed...."

  He was trying vainly to project his mental vision through those milesof hard rock to see what manner of mystery this was into which he hadprobed. He shook his head slowly in baffled speculation, then spokesharply.

  "Drill it out!" he ordered. "We're into a hot spot sure enough, thoughI can't just figure out the how of it. But we'll tame it, Smithy. Senddown the drill. Clean it out. Then we'll poke around down there andget the answer to all this."

  Five days were needed to send down the big drill with a new drill-headreplacing the other too fouled with gold for any use. The tubularsections, a hundred feet in length, were hooked together and loweredone by one. Each joint meant the coupling of the air-pipe as well.Air, mixed with water from the outer jacket, must come foaming upthrough the central core to bring the powdered rock to the surface.

  Five days, then one hour of boring, and another five days to pull outthe drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it inthe severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been meltedcompletely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electricfurnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle in the blastof an oxy-acetylene flame.