Chapter 14: La mina del diablo

[The mine of the devil]

For two days, the caravan crossed the dry plains, creosote and dried sagebrush the only sign that there was once something alive here. They entered rolling hills and Winona guided them toward a cave that she said had ‘weeping walls.’ The walls did indeed weep, but it was from an underground spring, not Apache spirits protecting some hidden danger.

They unlimbered the digging tools and looked around, as best they could.

The cave entrance yawned black against the canyon wall, its mouth littered with sun-bleached animal bones. Winona crouched, running fingers over a strange metallic sheen on the rocks. “The old stories were true,” she murmured, scraping off a fleck of dull gray crust with her knife. Dawson knelt beside her, rubbing the substance between thumb and forefinger—heavy, malleable. Raw lead ore.

“This is Galena,” Thomas said, hefting a handful of the greyish rock. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s silver deeper. But for now, we’ll take the ore that’s right here, at our feet. C’mon boys, let’s fill up the two carts we have and get ‘em back to our forges. Uhh ... do I need to tell you not to eat the rocks?”

A warrior laughed under his breath. “Dogs eat rocks, not Apaches.”

The warriors fanned out with their deer antler picks and stone hammers, the metallic scrape of tools echoing unnaturally against the cavern walls. Winona moved deeper, her torchlight catching strange blue veins in the rock. Helmut licked his lips unconsciously—years of smelting told him this was high-grade ore.

Dawson’s boot knocked against something hollow. He knelt, brushing away decades of dust to reveal a rusted Spanish helmet, its interior crawling with scorpions. “They beat us here,” he muttered, flipping it over with his knife. Three more helmets lay in a neat row beyond it, each punctured by what looked like musket balls. “But not by much.”

Winona’s torch flickered violently as a draft whispered through a fissure in the back wall.

Thomas signaled silence with a raised fist, motioning Helmut toward the dark crack in the rock. The German gunsmith grabbed a discarded Spanish breastplate, angling it to reflect torchlight deeper into the crevice. The reflection revealed bones—but not animal. Human rib cages stacked like firewood. Wind Rider had a random thought: The caves under Paris had ancient piles of bodies like this. Among them, crude Spanish muskets leaned against the wall, their wooden parts warped from age. At least twenty or thirty years old. No disease, too old.

“Plague burial,” Dawson murmured, spotting the telltale blackened pustules on one desiccated hand. Winona recoiled, but Wind Rider stepped forward, examining a rusted crucifix jammed between two rocks. “Conquistadors sealed their sick here. Probably thought the cave was cursed.” He kicked aside a skeletal foot—the tibia snapped with a dry crack, revealing marrow blackened by disease.

Warriors backed away — fearful at the signs of pox. Winona didn’t retreat. She crouched, examining a Spanish musket’s breech with a warrior’s practicality. “The sickness sleeps in bodies, not stone. This is a Spanish burial ground. What does the sigh-ENS [science] say about long dead pox, Wind Rider?” Her fingers brushed a blackened box filled with lead balls — then froze. Beneath it lay a moldering leather pouch spilling silver coins. “They died guarding something.”

“The Spirit of Science says we came for lead,” Wind Rider said in a voice of command. “Not Spanish witchcraft.” He nudged the crucifix with his knife. “We leave the bones of the dead in peace. Take the helmets and breastplates and gather the lead. Let’s get busy.”

The warriors hesitated, eyeing the blackened bones. Yellow Hair rolled his eyes and strode forward, grabbing an intact Spanish helmet and dropping it into the cart with a metallic clang. “Stop acting like a bunch of grandmothers,” he said,. “If you’re scared, go wait with the horses.”

Winona took a breastplate, flipped it over, and filled it with lead ore. “I should have brought more women. They’d not be scared by looking at bodies long dead.”

Night Scout didn’t shy away, and one by one, warriors began to gather the ore.

Thomas gestured toward the stacked bones — a warning to stay clear — but Winona was already doing what nobody expected. She pulled her knife and scraped flakes of lead from the wall above the corpses, letting them rain into a folded deerskin. “Dead men don’t curse,” she said flatly.

The cave’s draft intensified, moaning through the fissure like a wounded animal. Yellow Hair’s torch guttered, casting elongated shadows that made the Spanish skeletons seem to twitch. Night Scout suddenly hissed, pointing — a live scorpion scuttling from a hollow-eyed skull. Yellow Hair crushed it with his boot heel, the crunch echoing grotesquely off the cavern walls.

Helmut pried loose a chunk of galena with his antler pick, the metallic screech setting teeth on edge. “Enough for twenty rifles,” he muttered, weighing the ore in his palm. Winona’s torchlight caught the blue-black glint of silver veins deeper in the wall. She traced them with her knife, then froze — her blade tip scraped something hollow behind the rock.

A muffled clang echoed as she levered the stone aside, revealing a rusted iron strongbox fused shut by time. Warriors murmured as Thomas wedged his knife into the seam, muscles straining until the lock sheared with a gunshot crack. The stench of mildew and old blood billowed out — inside lay a moldering ledger, its pages spiderwebbed with precise Spanish script, and beneath it, an oilskin-wrapped bundle.