Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt 4)

"Oh, I know that and much more." Young smiled. "Mining engineers, or the Lace-Boot Brigade, as they were once known, are a rather cliquish group. It's one of the few professions where sons follow fathers and also marry sisters or daughters of other mining engineers."

"Are you about to say that you were related to Joshua Hays Brewster?"

"My uncle." Young grinned.

The ice parted and Donner fell through.

"You look like you could stand another drink, Mr. Donner." Young signaled to the waitress for another round. "Needless to say, there is no daughter who is seeking a claim to a pension; my mother's brother died a childless bachelor."

"Liars never prosper," Donner said with a thin smile. "I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you by foolishly painting myself into a corner."

"Can you enlighten me?"

"I would prefer not to."

"You are from the government?" Young asked.

Donner showed him his credentials.

"Then, may I ask why you're investigating my long-dead uncle?"

"I would prefer not to," Donner repeated. "Not at this time, at any rate."

"What do you wish to know?"

"Whatever you can tell me about Joshua Hays Brewster and the Little Angel accident."

The drinks came along with the salad. Donner agreed that the dressing was excellent. They ate in silence. When Young had finished and wiped his tiny white mustache, he took a deep breath and relaxed against the backrest of the booth.

"My uncle was typical of the men who developed the mines in the early nineteen hundreds; white, eager, and middle class, and except for his small size-he stood only five feet two-he could easily have passed for what the novelists of the day vividly depicted as a gentlemanly, two-fisted, devil-may-care, adventurous mining engineer, complete with shining boots, jodhpurs, and a Smokey-the-Bear ranger hat."

"You make him sound like a hero from an old Saturday matinee serial."

"A fictional hero could never have measured up," Young said. "The field is highly specialized today, of course, but an engineer of the old school had to be as tough as the rock he mined, and he had to be versatile-mechanic, electrician, surveyor, metallurgist, geologist, lawyer, arbitrator between penny-pinching management and muscle-brained workers. This was the kind of man it took to run a mine. This was Joshua Hays Brewster."

Donner kept silent, slowly swirling the liquor around in his glass.

"After my uncle graduated from the School of Mines," Young continued, "he followed his profession in the Klondike, Australia, and Russia before returning to the Rockies in 1908 to manage the Sour Rock and Buffalo, a pair of mines at Leadville owned by a group of French financiers in Paris who never laid eyes on Colorado."

"The French owned mining claims in the States?"

"Yes. Their capital flowed heavily throughout the West. Gold and silver, cattle, sheep, real estate; you name it, they had a finger in it."

"What possessed Brewster to reopen the Little Angel?"

"That's a strange story in itself," Young said. "The mine was worthless. The Alabama Burrow, three hundred yards away, coughed up two million dollars in silver before the water in the lower levels began running ahead of the pumps. That was the shaft that hit the high-grade lode. The Little Angel never came close." Young paused to sip at his drink and then stared at it as though he were seeing a vague image in the ice cubes. "When my uncle advertised his intentions to reopen the mine to anyone who would listen, people who knew him well were shocked. Yes, Mr. Donner, shocked. Joshua Hays Brewster was a cautious man, a man of painstaking detail. His every move was carefully calculated in terms of success. He never played the odds unless they were steeply in his favor. For him to publicly announce such a hare-brained scheme was unthinkable. The mere act was considered by all to be that of a madman."

"Maybe he found some clue the others had missed."

Young shook his head. "I've been a geologist for over sixty years, Mr. Donner, and a damned good one. I've re-entered and examined the Little Angel down to the flooded levels, and analyzed every accessible inch of the Alabama Burrow, and I'm telling you positively and unequivocally there is no untapped vein of silver down there now, nor was there one in 1911."

The Monte Cristo sandwiches came and the salad plates were whisked away.

"Are you suggesting your uncle went insane?"

"The possibility has occurred to me. Brain tumors were generally undiagnosed in those days."

"So were nervous breakdowns."