The clerk’s wild footsteps had faded up the central access shaft into the howling night wind of the limestone rim. Then, Geth Marr walked slowly across the intermediate narrow high walkway toward Len Vey.
The old foreman moved with heavy, deliberate strides, his hobnailed boots squelching on the wet spruce planks. His sheepskin vest was stiff with dried lime slurry, his coarse woolen undershirt soaked through with sulfur steam, his gray hair plastered to his weathered forehead. In the crook of his massive right arm, his six-pound steel sledgehammer rested easily. Its hickory handle was dark with the sweat of forty years of labor.
He stopped three paces from the cedar chest where Len sat. The young courier looked utterly spent. Len was leaning his back against the damp limestone wall, his chest heaving with shallow, rattling breaths, his skin the color of skimmed milk. A thin line of dark blood trickled from where his teeth had bitten into his lower lip to suppress the painful throbbing of his braced left forearm.
Geth reached into the deep pocket of his canvas trousers. Then he pulled out a clean, folded handkerchief of coarse raw, unwhitened linen—a rare luxury in the dusty, grimy drifts of the deep digging pits. Without a word, he held it out to Len.
