Free Past All Dishonor by James M. Cain Page B

shooting whether I hit the target or not. Because another important thing, I figured, was to get the habit of doing it a certain way, because when the time came, if your hand didn’t do it before your head woke up, why probably it wouldn’t wake up.
    My real practice came by accident, one night when I was ready to go home. I heard something behind me, and before I knew it I had wheeled and fired and a jack rabbit went straight up in the air and when he lit he was dead. Then I noticed the moon coming up, and all around rabbits were coming out and starting to play. I stayed there and practiced what I needed most, which was to wheel and shoot at anything coming from behind. I brought so many rabbits home to Mrs. Finn, who ran the boarding house I lived in, that the other boarders began to complain. A jackass rabbit is not like a cottontail. He’s long, lean, and tough.
    All that time I saw a lot of Paddy, because even if he wished I hadn’t cut the union, we were friends and took walks and talked. Then one Sunday he said: “Is wrong, Rodrigo, how they mine, in a Dakota.”
    “In what way?”
    “They follow a lode, yes?”
    “You can’t blame them for that.”
    “Follow a lode, and all a time, a tunnel, a crosscut, estope, all slide down a mountain—must one time come out in air, yes?”
    “Looks like it.”
    “Real lode is dip.”
    “How you figure that out?”
    “No figure, fill. Dees goddam owner, especially Hale, too chip to buy estoff he need to go dip. Try near top, follow liddle pocket, have a bonanza one day, bad borrasca next, all because no dig a mine in big way, in rill way, only liddle way, chip way.”
    “So?”
    “Is old shaft up there, uphill, no?”
    “The little one they abandoned?”
    “We go down, try for big bonanza, dip under hill, yes?”
    “I’ll have a hell of a time with Williams.”
    “You tell, soon ’e have borrasca.”
    “How do you know?”
    “You see. Soon no ore, only rock.”
    It came the next week, as a matter of fact. The vein began to narrow, and instead of a deep blue-black, the ore began to run a slaty gray, a blue-gray, a dull gray, and Hale was down there every half hour, breaking off specimens with his hammer and putting them in a box for the assayer. Then all of a sudden we were getting nothing but rock, and had to lay men off. That night I stopped by the office to talk with the super and lay it out what Paddy had said, and I thought he’d be sore when he found out I was handing him stuff I had got from a Mexican working in my gang. He wasn’t.
    “They’re fine miners, the Mexican lads. They have a real skill with timber, and an instinct for metal. An instinct for a process and an instinct for a vein.”
    “He says the real ore’s under the mountain.”
    “He’s probably right.”
    “Then how about letting me dig?”
    “Duval, I’m employed by Hale and I can tell you without hearing any more what he’ll say. He’ll agree with everything I tell him, roll his big black eyes, thank me for the suggestion, weep on me collar, open a bottle of rum—and do nothing. He thinks of costs, and the deep stuff is expensive.”
    “The borrasca is worst of all.”
    “So I’ve told him.”
    “And he’ll wind up with no mine. You know what happens. They run bonanza a little while, then they run borrasca as long as they can, which means till they’ve spent the stake the bonanza piled up, and then some bank takes over.”
    “Stop talking about banks!”
    We had it again that night, with Hale, at the International Hotel, and he did just like Williams said he would. He wept, and told us how his mother was killed over in Hungary in 1848, and how much he loved America, because it stood for liberty. He said he didn’t ask anything of anybody except justice. He said was it fair he had to pay four dollars a day for his help when that very minute, for roustabouts in St. Louis, they were paying twenty cents an hour. It seemed to mean we couldn’t do what I wanted, so I