The master bench on the granite dais stood beneath a natural arch of dark stone. There, a single square-set timber of massive white oak supported the center of the hanging roof.
Tomas Reed climbed the three low stone steps. His safety lamp cast a broad circle of warm yellow light across the stone base. Behind him, Mara Flint and Nessa Vale followed, their steps slow, hesitant, filled with the solemn awe of people entering a royal tomb.
Dennis Cole lay upon his cedar bedroll beside his bench.
He was a tall man, broad-framed even in the stillness of death, wearing a master splitter’s heavy cowhide waistcoat heavy with brass rivets across the chest. His hair was silver-gray, neatly combed back from a broad, square forehead lined with the deep furrows of a man who had spent fifty years calculating fracture angles in hard mountain stone. His hands, massive and calloused, rested across his stomach.
In his right fist, clamped so firmly that the dried tendons of his fingers had locked around the cold steel like an iron vise, he held his signed name tool. A nine-inch diamond-point splitting chisel, its hardened head mushroomed and burred from thousands of hammer strikes.
