Sister Carmela slumped into her straight-backed wooden chair. There were no easy chairs in St. Vincent Hospital, nor would she have any.
The mines were failing. The harder Noble smiled, the worse he lied, and this time he was smiling like an undertaker during a plague. It would be painful to let go after she had struggled so long. She remembered the awful sight of a jerry-built town, a collection of shacks, really, huddled below a string of headframes along a lonely ridge, all of them looking like gallows, and how faint of heart she and her dear sisters in the Lord had felt when they first beheld this desolate place one twilight long ago.
She remembered meeting Mr. Yancey himself, who ushered the sisters down to the postage-stamp flat where the hospital would rise. It was an oddly sweet corner, verdant with willows and aspen, notched into an arid slope. And that's all there was. An almost level patch, thick grass, a purling spring, and no sign of a hospital, much less a convent.
"Here's your deed. Carved out of the town lot company's holdings. Ten acres, free and clear, deeded to the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth."
"Mr. Yancey, but we need a hospital building," she had said, surveying the little meadow. "Not to mention a place where we might, ah, find repose."
In response, Will Yancey escorted the sisters upslope to the narrow main street, Mineral Avenue, notched into the hillside, and then straight into a gaudy saloon jammed with miners just off-shift. The rank odor of sweated flesh and stale ale nauseated Sister Carmela. No sooner had she set foot within this odious place than a startled hush settled.
"This is Sister Carmela," said Yancey quietly. "She and the other sisters in the wagon outside have come to give us a hospital. This is what the Sisters of Charity do. Just as they have done in many mining camps, such as Virginia City, Montana. We'll build the hospital for them. Every man here, every man in the other clubs. Starting now. And we'll build a home for these dedicated souls as well."
"Now?" asked a miner.
"Now. Get shovels, picks, wheelbarrows. We're going to lay up a foundation, using rock from the tailing piles, and we'll do it in the moonlight. And then we're going to saw wood."
That was the start. Amazingly, the burly miners filed out, but not before downing the tepid contents of their mugs and tumblers, and soon a gaggle of them was trudging down the slope to the Spring Flat, as it was called.
That was a September day three years ago. By the first of November, a rude hospital and adjacent house stood, and she had discovered that her name had become Sister Drill Sergeant for reasons that were plain to all the males in the camp. It didn't embarrass her; she would have her hospital one way or another.
Soon they had secured the services of Doctor Borden, and found others to help out. One was Slow Eddie, a bachelor miner bashed in the head by falling rock, who was not quite right after that though he seemed bright enough. Slow Eddie kept the place going, not only as an orderly who could carry patients, but also as the man who filled the stoves, cleaned the floors, emptied the thundermugs, cooked some of the meals, and ran errands.
Now she thought of all those miners who had been rushed into her twelve-bed hospital, bloody, wounded, sobbing, unconscious. Some lived, some died. They had all been cared for, their pain eased with laudanum or Dover's powder or belladonna, and prayed for, too. Hundreds and hundreds of admissions; beds filled and emptied and filled again; sometimes filled to overflowing, cots in the corridor. Women bearing children, children bit by snakes, but rarely the very old because there hardly was anyone in Yancey over the age of forty.
And always the miners, men crushed by falling rock, pinned by an ore car, blinded by a blast, choked by noxious gases, deafened by a premature charge, mauled by a hammer. They had arrived bloody, moaning, comatose, sawn into parts, choking, blue in the face, wild-eyed, weeping. And the sisters had summoned Doctor Borden, laved the wounded, administered opiates, held hands, wept with widows, prayed for each and every soul.
Sister Drill Sergeant indeed. She was that. She had no authority but her stentorian voice and the will to get things done, which she employed to full effect whenever necessary. Little by little the building was improved, whitewashed, furnished, rendered proof against brutal winter storms that swept that high ridge, and wherever there had been improvements, Sister Carmela's hand and will had been the driving force.
Now she stared at her trim white hospital, with good glass in its windows and stoves in every room, with at least one sister on duty at all times, and wondered if it had all been for naught. The town was doomed. She and her sisters were dedicated to acts of charity performed in the service of their Lord, and especially nursing the desperate. Everything she and the sisters did was tied to the mines. If they failed, the hospital would fail. If the mines shut down, Yancey would shut down. There was no excuse for a town huddled on top of a lonely ridge, save for the mines.
She had always thought that two things could fell the place; failing mines, or a failing spring. The bountiful spring gushed sweet and pure water from a seam in the rock just above the meadow. It tumbled off a ledge into a pool. The water had been ample for the whole city as well as the hospital, and she thought maybe the water was blessed, or even miraculous, because so many of her injured patients drank it, sighed, and seemed to start on the road to health. Some iron pipes brought the cold water right into the hospital, thanks to a gift from the syndicate which had shoved poor Hard Luck Yancey out of his mine.
No sooner had she thought of the quiet man than he walked into the hospital, peered about owlishly, his gaze finally settling on Sister Drill Sergeant.
"Mr. Yancey?" she said.
The man fumbled with his felt hat, a hat very like the ones worn by the miners while working in the bowels of the earth.
"I guess it's nothing," he said, and started to back out.
"Mr. Yancey!"
This was the ritual. Hard Luck always had to be coaxed. He had been that way ever since the syndicate had euchred him out of everything he possessed. She had never heard him whine about it, but she knew it had crushed something inside of Yancey.
He dug into a pocket and extracted some curious pebbles, very dark, pitted, twisted, lustrous. These he dropped into her hand.
"What pretty little things," she said.
"Black gold."
"They do look a bit like gold."
"Black gold. Telluride gold."
She studied the heavy little stones. "Gold? Mr. Yancey, you're taking advantage of a poor sister."
He frowned. "I was poking around down below, on the slope, and found these. They're called float. They've broken out of a lode, or seam, somewhere above. Float's what prospectors look for, it's a trail we follow up to where the mineral is."
"And where did this trail lead you, Mr. Yancey?"
"Here."
She studied the innocuous dark pebbles that were about to change her life. "You'd better explain," she said.
"Right under this hospital, unknown to anyone until now, is a seam of telluride gold. It could be just a small pocket, or it could be an outcrop that leads back into a bonanza deep in the mountain, and under the city. You've gold under you. It apexed here. That's a word for cropping out here on your land. So you own it."
This amazed her. "We own a gold seam, a lot of gold?"
"I just don't know."
"And what are we to do with it?"
He grinned. "Pray, I guess."
She waited for more of an explanation.
"Some people, they're going to take advantage of you if they can."
"How?"
He smiled owlishly. "Just about every way there is, Sister."
She rubbed a finger across the pitted lustrous surfaces. "I'm not sure this is a good thing."
"I have just filed claims on both sides of you, along this granite escarpment. Regular mining claims, two hundred by six hundred."
"You what?"
"Might be a bonanza for me, maybe not, maybe nothing there. Where the spring creek runs back of the hospital and falls over the granite ledge, that's where the black gold outcropped. It's all yours unless the syndicate decides it's all theirs. The mining law gives all the breaks to the outfit that owns the place where the mineral crops out--that's you-- but by the time the mine company lawyers get done with you, you'll think that the gold outcropped in the bottom layer of hell first. Believe me, I know."
She peered at him. "Why did you come here? You could have kept it secret."
"Guess I'm a fool, Sister."
"I don't really want gold under this hospital. We've worked so hard..."
"Oh, the syndicate will offer to move you off of here, you can bet on that, or maybe just mine under you, or maybe just take it without even talking to you. Gold does that to people. But I guess what you'll be hearing is that you should move the hospital, and maybe they'll even pay you a little for the gold, but I guess that you won't see any royalties."
"We are religious, Mister Yancey, and we're caring for the sick, not trying to manage a gold mine."
He smiled, not responding.
"Are you really saying someone will find ways to take what lies under the hospital?"
He nodded. "I hope I'm wrong. I think you'd better do a few things. File a discovery claim to document that the gold seam apexed on your land, and hire a lawyer."
The more Sister Carmela listened, the deeper her dread.
"What about you, Mr. Yancey? What's your interest?"
"Oh, I was beat out of a bonanza once or twice, but I learned something each time. Maybe I've learned enough this time."
She started to hand the pebbles back, but he shook his head. "You keep those. When you're ready for a walk, I'll show you where the seam outcrops. It's there, behind some brush."
"Let's go now, Mr. Yancey."
He led her behind the hospital to the icy spring creek, and helped her down a short sharp grade through brush, which caught at her heavy skirts and white nursing smock. There, at a horizontal fault in the pink granite, lay a strange seam, thirty yards wide, several inches thick, of lustrous quartz laced with something dark. She marveled. A few years earlier, several hundred miners had erected a hospital only a few yards from a bonanza and never suspected what lay at their feet.