At dawn, the frost on Mount Sunder was thick enough to crust the wheel ruts like white glass. Down the six-mile switchback road that wound from the mouth of the Gray Pit to the company town of Sunder-Foot, a column of three hundred and twenty men, women, and children was marching in total, disciplined silence.
They didn’t carry banners, and they sang no songs. They carried the tools of their labor. Steel hand-chisels tucked into leather aprons, five-foot pry-bars resting on broad shoulders, and sixteen-pound sledgehammers balanced across forearm muscles hardened by decades of stone quarrying.
At the head of the column walked Sile Rook, his thirty-year-old oak tall body-shield held upon his left arm, its iron rim catching the first pink rays of sunrise over the eastern peaks. Beside him walked Tomas Reed. His ash-wood pack frame carried the eighty-pound evidence hamper containing Dennis Cole’s twenty-two Welsh slate leaves and the taken away company ghost ledgers.
Tomas’s boots struck the frozen gravel with a measured, steady beat—two paces per second, eighty paces per minute. His left forearm throbbed beneath its fresh wool and vinegar dressing, the calfskin brace tightened to its third notch to keep the inflamed forearm bone lined up. The ache was deep and grinding. But the seventy-five-pound load across his hips was balanced to the fraction of an ounce. A cart driver didn’t falter on the final mile.
