Past All Dishonor by James M. Cain Page A

and it’s easy to believe once you’ve been there. It’s on the side of a big mountain with a flag on top of it, called Mount Davidson. Half the streets run almost straight up and down, and they have names. The other half, they run level but they’re tilted on one side, and they have letters. All over the place dust rises from the stamping mills that break up the ore, and in between the dust are big clouds of brown, yellow, and green chemicals they use to amalgamate the silver, depending on which formula they’re using, and practically every mill has a different one, because the process peddlers are in every saloon, and they’ve got everything from sulphuric acid to cyanide. The houses are made of everything there is, brick or shingle or frame or tin or sheet iron, but not one has a tree or flower or blade of grass near it, or even some moss in the chinks of the front walk. Some of the stores are big, three or four stories high and covering a whole block, but they’re ugly and you have to push and shove to get to a counter. The mines, they’re everywhere, with fences around them and signs that say Keep Out and guards walking up and down, and back of every mine is a tailings dump, and to one side is a pile of busted cars and rails and machinery. Practically any time you look on C Street, which is where the big stores and offices are, is a traffic jam, with coaches and wagons and cattle and pigs all snarled up together, and the muleteers shooting dice while the peace officers straighten it out, and the cussing and whip-cracking and mooing and hee-hawing are so loud you can hear it a mile. The hee-hawing they’ve got a name for. They call it the soft warble of the Washoe canary, meaning a jackass. The Washoe part I didn’t get straight for a while, but it’s the name of some mountains up the line a little way, and some Indians too, and some people use it for all of that end of Nevada, so that’s why they holler Washoe and mean anything from the town to the silver bricks to the mountains to the Indians to the state, or maybe nothing but they’re drunk and feeling a little high. Then everywhere you look are Chinamen, that work all around and jam the streets. Then, down Six-Mile Canyon they’ve got a cemetery, but it’s a hell of a civic problem, because what with sudden death from lead poisoning in the saloons, and smallpox and mine fires and falling cages and one thing and another, they can’t ever get the cemetery big enough. The undertaker parlors, they’re always complaining, but I never could see why, because even if they didn’t do anything but rent out their tin flowers they still would be getting along all right. The tin flowers are in place of real ones that don’t grow so well in Virginia, and after the funeral they collect them and use them on the next fellow—that is, if they got time to rush them around to the next fellow’s residence, because they fall fast, and sometimes the funerals conflict.
    I had seen all that stuff, but I didn’t know the hundredth part of what they meant by the devil and his health till I dropped down in the cage that morning to the thousand-foot level and saw what men would do for four dollars a day. That steam that comes out of the shafts and scares you to death comes from boiling springs down under, and those boiling springs are what the miners have all around them while they get out the ore. Practically every tunnel has hot water running between the rails, under the square sets, to the shaft, and at the bottom of that is a sump, and into the sump runs the suction ends of the pipes that run to the pumps. It didn’t take me any week to hate Hale, or any other owner that would let men work in a place like that, or Trapp, who stood over us like some overseer on a cotton plantation, and had men dragged out by the heels when they fainted in the heat, and set me to throwing water on them, because I was new at the work and there wasn’t much else I was good for until I