WE DIG
Ashley McConnell
They felt the rumble first, a rise and fall like an ocean wave carrying them up and then down again, as if earth had momentarily become sea. Men’s eyes looked up from their breakfast eggs and met their wives’, and then went back to their plates. Forks scraped up the last bits just a little more quickly, and the women went out for water without saying anything. It might, after all, have been a planned detonation.
The church bells started tolling as the men were coming out of their homes, carrying their lunch boxes, kissing their wives goodbye. The sound froze them all in their tracks, as one and all they turned to look up at the hills around the town of Silverfield, seeking the column of smoke that had to be there.
The bells did not stop. The men shook themselves, started for the square between the church and the town hall, while their women and children clung to the doorways or windowsills, staring at the smoke, brown and gray against the blue sky.
A horseman came down the hill in a lathered gallop, shoving through the men, and the bells kept on tolling, tolling as they gathered, watching him spin the horse around, stand in his stirrups and wave frantically at the bell tower. It was not until all the men had gathered that the bells stopped.
“Half a dozen, I think,” he gasped. “In the Tolliver. We need…diggers.”
“What happened?” came a voice from the back of the crowd.
The man shook his head and licked his lips, trying to find enough moisture and air to answer. “Bad blast,” was all he said.
A mutter ran through the crowd: “Third time in six months!” Still, several men shouldered their way to the front, yelled for horses. Others did not wait, but started up the road, up the hill, toward the column of black smoke smeared against the blue sky.
By the time they made it to the mine head, at least twenty Flickers had joined the group and gathered in the open space before it. A frame office building stood perpendicular to the abrupt slope of the hill; across from it a sorting warehouse was open to the winds, and in front of it a set of railroad tracks ran into the mine. The entrance to the Tolliver mine shaft itself was a large hole, a black, forbidding square perhaps twice the height of a tall man framed by rough, squared-off timbers. Dust still hung in the air before the opening.
Next to the shaft was a tumble of huge rocks, waste from the excavation. On one of them, five men stood, arguing among themselves. Finally one of the foremen stood forth from the rest, his forehead creased, his face pale. “All right,” he said, raising his voice over the general mutters. “What do we have here? Diggers?”
“Macaque!” one man said indignantly.
“Pangolin,” Smetse—Smitty to his friends—Katangazu said, raising one hand.
“Moles,” chorused half a dozen others, squinting against the light.
“Armadillo,” another called from the back of the crowd.
“Fox!” someone yelped.
“Where the hell did we find a pangolin?” the foreman muttered to himself. “Never mind. Where’s Tom Mitchell?”
“Here.” Tom came up from the back of the crowd and elbowed his way through to the front. “What have you got, MacDougal? What happened here?” He was a relatively short man, grizzled hair at his temples, even though he was a young man, not yet twenty-five, with dark hair and dark, dark eyes, wide shoulders, powerful arms. He walked with his chin thrust forward, as if daring anyone to take a swing at him. His clothes were the same as the rest of the diggers’: worn jeans and short boots, stained cotton shirt. The crowd of diggers made way for him as if it was his right.
MacDougal tugged on his suspenders—a nervous habit that had long since resulted in suspenders stretched out beyond any use for holding up his trousers, leaving them sagging on one side. “Blest if I know. Far as I can tell, some charges went off when they weren’t supposed to, and we had half a shift down there. We got six out, but there are six more, near as we can tell, behind the collapse. We need to dig them out, boys.”
Another man, standing behind him, stepped forward. He was tall, red-haired, dressed noticeably better than the men he looked down on, in a clean, if dusty, coat with good trousers, and diamond links for his sleeves.
“We’ve got to clear that tunnel,” he said. “I’m paying you men good money to get in there and get it done.”
They stared at him. Gillings was a Still, one of those who didn’t change, had no second soul. He made no secret of the fact that he thought that made him superior to those who Flickered between one phase and the other. He was not well liked. He also owned the mine.
“That’s suicide,” one of the moles said. “You’ve got a blast, no way to know what supports are still good, no way to know what else is going off? Just like the last time and the time before that?”
“Yeah,” Tom said, lowering his head and glaring at the mole under knitted brows. “And if it’s you next time? I’ll do it.”
“Damn badgers,” someone muttered. “More teeth than brains.”
Tom smiled, showing teeth. The crowd jostled back a half step, starting with the moles. “I’m going for it. Who’s with me?”
“I’ll go,” Smitty said.
“And I.” “I’m with you.” “I’ll go.”
MacDougal nodded, clear relief washing the worry from his expression for at least a few seconds. “That’s good. Good. Look, boys, sign up before you go change, so Mr. Gillings here will have a record—“
“Because he has to have a record of every breath we take, in case we inhale some silver in his mine,” someone shouted from the back. Gillings’ head jerked up, and he stared at the crowd of diggers, looking for the speaker. The crowd stared back at him, sullen.
“What are the chances there’s anybody alive in there, really?” Mitchell asked. He had jumped up on the rock beside MacDougall and Gillings, brushing his hands together as if to get the dust off, and lowered his voice. “Why do you think they’re alive?”
“I heard them,” said another man at the foot of the rock, craning his neck to look up at them. His face and one leg were soaked in blood. “The roof came down right in front of us, but we could hear screaming. We were down the main shaft, past the store rooms, right where it branches. There’s a good vein there.”
“So what happened?”
The man shrugged and winced, putting one hand against the platform rock as he staggered. “We were setting charges. Mikey, he said he thought they were greasy, but—”
“It couldn’t be,” Gillings said. “I knew we were opening up a new shaft. New equipment, new everything. Somebody made a mistake. Somebody lit a short fuse.”
MacDougal shook his head. “Look, boys, there are six men still in there. The reason why doesn’t matter. Can we go get them? Now?”
Tom Mitchell looked at him consideringly. “It matters if it means there’s going to be another explosion that will take the rest of us out, yeah.” The Flickers behind him nodded, and a few yells of agreement echoed. “But you’re right. If someone’s still alive down there, we’re going to try to get them out.” He jumped down from the rock and started up the slope to the hole in the side of the hill. The other diggers looked at each other, shrugged, and followed. Behind them, MacDougal waved papers. They ignored him.
The first few yards past the timbers were illuminated by the sunlight through the opening, and their shadows stretched before them. When the shadows disappeared, they turned as a group into a small room carved into the guts of the hillside. There was barely light at all, as if light was only a memory from the outside.
They stripped, bundled their clothing in careful piles against the wall, and Flicked. In one instant they were men, scruffy, muscular, poor. In the time it took to look away and back again—in the Flick of an eye—they were not men any more. Not, at least, in shape.
The mine Flickers shook themselves and looked around the darkness, and a chorus of snorts and sniffs filled the space around them as they oriented themselves by smell. Tom Mitchell growled low as someone brushed by him—Smitty, by the feel of the scales that covered his body. The scent only confirmed it.
He could smell the moles, clustered together in a corner as far from him as he could get, and the human still within him grinned without humor. Badgers ate moles. Flickers didn’t eat each other—generally speaking—but the animals remembered. Tom wasn’t planning on eating anyone today, but the moles’ caution still amused him. The same magic that gave him, as a man, the proportionate strength of a badger—as well as the short temper, aggression, and weak eyesight—gave him a man’s ability to think, to reason, in his animal form. He was never one or the other, but always both.
Whelford was the macaque. Almost useless, really, in mines, but he did have one gross advantage over the rest of them: he still had hands. He also had a monkey sense of humor, and Tom found himself being used as a springboard as Whelford leaped from the floor, to Tom’s back, to a shelf above their heads. For a blind leap, it wasn’t that much of a risk; he’d done it before, knew what was stored there, and like the rest of them had been there before with a lamp.
And there was a lamp on the shelf. Whelford brought it to the floor, fumbled with a match, and lit it. His job was to carry it down the shaft, hang it on a hook, and then leave. The single flame would provide enough light for the moles, who were nearly blind anyway, and the badgers, and the rest of the diggers to see where they were going, and more importantly, the way back out.
Tom let Whelford scamper well ahead before padding out of the change room, Smitty at his side. He couldn’t smell gas, and the flame should be safe enough, but he didn’t like fire, and he liked it less in fur form. They passed several more rooms, used to store carts, tools for the Stills—the ones who couldn’t change—and crates of explosives. Tom paused to look inside, sniffing deeply of the scent of dirt, explosive, wood, primer cord, the scent of the men who had carried the boxes here.
Smitty snorted and shouldered past, his long tongue touching here and there across the crates. Whelford, insatiably curious, came back to see what they were looking at, but there was nothing, nothing but the skittering of long gray insects across the crates. Smitty caught up a half dozen on a long, flexible tongue. The labels, with their large red warning text, were relatively bright against the wood, even in the impossibly dim light from the lantern. Tom snarled, and Whelford scampered away. Reluctantly, Smitty turned back to go with him down the shaft, wobbling a bit as he went. Pangolins walked on their foreclaws, huge and curved and impossibly sharp. Tom’s claws, by comparison, merely scarred the dirt and rock floor, a mixture of earth, rock, and guano under their paws. All the bats had fled when the collapse had started. The path sloped gently, and then not so gently, downward into the earth.
With a happy chirp, Whelford hung the lamp from a hook and took down another waiting in a niche beside it and continued leading them downward into the dark. They followed the railroad tracks laid down for ore carts until they veered away down the tunnel and a new hole appeared. This one was round, rough, without the relatively smooth finished sides of the mine shaft; rock outcrops jutted up from the ground and hung down from the ceiling. The scent trail said that miners had gone this way.
New lamp niches appeared every twenty feet, leaving tiny flames to provide more hope than illumination, marking support beams that grew shorter and shorter as the tunnel narrowed. The Tolliver mine contained mainly silver, with some gold, zinc, lead, and even an occasional turquoise outcrop. The group of Flickers straggled into single file, ducking under outcrops that hung down from the ceiling, scrambling over knots of rock that had been too hard and too unproductive to bother removing from the floor. Three niches down, the macaque stopped and chittered. The shaft before them was completely blocked, with support beams sagging and splintered across boulders bigger than any one of them, and a fan of dirt poured out at their feet. As they surveyed the damage, the pile shuddered. More rocks fell, and more earth whispered down the sides of the tunnel. Whelford squeaked again, set down his lamp, and scampered back up the tunnel. The opening before the rock fall was too low for a human form to stand comfortably, even one as short as most of them were.
The moles moved up, with nearly supersonic squeaks, and Mitchell snarled. One turned blindly toward him, still squeaking, and he reached out with a casual paw and batted it against the far wall of the tunnel. Every Flicker froze in place.
Mitchell listened.
A badger can hear the sound of an earthworm moving, smell the memory of a prairie dog’s passing. A Flicker could do that, and more. He could hear the air moving in and out of the lungs of the Flickers around him, the tiny, uncontrolled moan of the mole whose leg had been broken by his blow, and taste their fear in the air. He could hear the shifting of the earth above him, before him. He could smell, through layers of rock and dirt, blood and death and the stink of explosives. Stretching up on four short legs, he raised his head and focused on the rock fall before him. Next to him, Jerry’s long, wide ears swiveled forward to scoop sound out of the air.
When he had heard enough, he Flicked back into human form, coughed once to clear dust from his lungs. “I hear them,” he said. “Moles, take your friend back up and have him looked at. Next time,” he snarled at the protesting moles, “shut the hell up when you’re told to. Now move. Jerry and I will start here. Send us some Stills to move earth.”
One of the moles Flicked, hunched over in his human form, and spat on the ground between them. “We can help,” he said. “They’re our people, too. Even if they are Stills, they’re miners.”
Mitchell’s face twisted, as if to issue a snarl more suited to his other form, and then took a deep breath and let it go instead. “All right,” he said. “But take care of him first.” He looked the injured Flicker in the face. “I’m sorry.”
The tiny, blind eyes blinked, as if in surprise. His human-form kin picked him up, carefully, and started back up the tunnel, bent double with the mole tucked against his chest. The rest of the moles gathered, shoulder to shoulder, and settled in, oozing stubbornness.
“I’m going up to the top of the slide,” Mitchell said. “I’ll let you know if—when—I need you.” There was general grumbling, but they kept it quiet, and Mitchell Flicked into his badger form. His real form, the form where he could breathe and move and dig.
He sniffed at the pile of dirt and rocks, then swarmed up the slope, ignoring the way the rock fall slid and shifted under his paws. In this form, he weighed only about thirty pounds, and it wasn’t enough to move the bigger boulders.
The ground wouldn’t stay still, though. He had to scramble to stay in place, get to a rock that would hold long enough for him to sniff deep at the place where the ceiling had given way. The Flickers below and behind him were silent. Silent as the tomb, he thought, and his lip curled, showing fangs. Some jokes weren’t so funny. Tombs were only supposed to be six feet deep.
Poised at the top of the collapse, he reached out one paw to test the consistency of the dirt, and snarled to himself. There wasn’t room for him to Flick back, not up here, and he’d wind up sliding all the way to the bottom and bringing more of the ceiling with him if he tried. He couldn’t talk in this form, and he really wanted Jerry’s claws right now to rip into the dirt and rock.
But he’d Flicked, he’d climbed, and now—he stretched out his front paws, armed with five long flat claws each, four of which were two inches long, and he took hold of the earth, and he began to dig.
His front feet scooped out the dirt, while his back feet shoved it clear behind him. In the right dirt, a badger could dig faster than a man with a shovel, and no man with a shovel could get in the places he could go. He could hear the Flickers below him chittering and talking—some of them must have Flicked back—but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the movement, the resistance of the earth, the eagerness with which he sank into it, swimming through it, snarling as he hit rock, shaking dirt from his nose, digging deeper and deeper toward the voices and the howls and cries he could hear on the other side of the earth.
He could feel the earth pressing down against his back as he clawed at it. To either side he could feel the heat of other bodies that had followed him up the slope of the rock fall and were digging as well.
The ground shifted under his paws, and he stopped and growled a warning. Around him, the others stopped too, waiting for Earth to decide whether it would bury them today.
As they waited, Earth shuddered, and they could hear the frightened cries from the other side of the rock fall clearly now. They were close, close enough that the smell of blood and terror of the trapped Stills—all of the living ones Stills, according to his nose—filled his nostrils, and Mitchell reached farther, harder, to pull away the rock and grit separating them from him.
Off to one side a Flicked fox yelped as rock tumbled and slid. Mitchell forced himself to slow down. They didn’t have to remove the entire fall, only enough to allow the trapped men to get through. Behind him he could hear voices of Flickers in human form, talking about stretchers. He felt a shiver in the fur of his left foreleg, reached over, and snapped. A spasmodic quiver of life and blood between his teeth told him it was a mouse, and he swallowed without pausing in the steady reach, claw, swing back, shove rhythm of his excavation. His paws were bleeding now. Even badgers rarely tried to tackle rock.
Bugs, he thought, in some distant corner of his mind. He needed to talk to Smitty about the bugs.
His claws reached and pulled, narrowly avoiding the other Flicks around him.
A mole was the first to punch through, announcing its achievement with a startled squeak as it fell into the chamber on the other side. For an instant there was silence, and then they could hear voices, moans, cries from the miners on the other side. A single lamp’s-worth of light glowed feebly from the blocked chamber.
There was still no room to change to communicate. Mitchell growled and redoubled his efforts, nearly following the mole into the next room when he emerged at the top of a mass of rock that dropped off abruptly on the other side. Earth rumbled.
The trapped miners screamed as fresh air came in the opening and began clawing frantically toward it, and Mitchell, and the mole. Mitchell moved to one side as one by one they scrambled through.
All but one man, not much older than Mitchell, but with softer hands, and a left leg that clearly could not bear his weight. Mitchell growled down at him as the man tried again and again, with human hands and human feet, to climb up, but his injury was against him.
A rumble shivered through the air, and a fine patter of dirt and rock fell across them.
“Help me!” the Still screamed up at him. “Help me!”
This man didn’t belong here, down in the mines; he was too soft, his clothes too good, and Mitchell could smell the incipient panic in him from the closeness and darkness pressing in on them. But here he was. And here Mitchell was. The mole beside him squeaked a shrill warning as the ground shifted again, and fled.
“Hel—”
The man didn’t have the chance to finish the plea before Mitchell slid down the pile of rocks and Flicked. “Lie down on the slope, face up, and shut up,” he said. And then he Flicked again, and badger jaws clamped down on the rough collar of the Still’s shirt, and he began backing upward.
A fine patter of dirt rained down from the roof of the chamber. The Flicks at the top of the rock fall screamed, and Mitchell set his jaws hard and yanked, pulling nine times his own weight uphill, backwards, with only the man’s good leg pushing to help as he pulled, and now rocks were falling on them both. One chunk of ore, almost as heavy as he was, smashed down next to the man’s shoulder, and he arched up in panic, carrying the badger with him. Mitchell snarled again through the mouthful of cloth and slapped the man’s arm, and he settled into pushing as Mitchell pulled. They were nearly at the top when the roof caved in.
* * *
A week later, Tom Mitchell was summoned to the offices of the Tolliver Mining Company. MacDougal had sent a runner, a child of seven or eight years, down to Silverfield to find him as he prepared to join his shift for the first time since the rescue.
“What does he want?” Mitchell asked.
The child shrugged. “Don’t know. Just says, they want to see you in the big boss’s office.” He gave the man a sideways glance. “Trouble, maybe?”
Mitchell’s lip curled. “Maybe.” For whom, though?
Once again he trudged the familiar path up the hill to the square, the warehouse, the mine shaft. This time there were no crowds milling around, just the miners gathering, waiting to be checked into the mine for their shift in the bowels of the earth. He raised a hand to them, but instead of joining them, climbed the wooden steps to the door of the office building.
MacDougal, smiling, met him in the foyer and led him down the hall to the office in the back. “It’s a great thing today,” he said, “a great thing.” Mitchell lifted an eyebrow and did not bother to respond.
Six men were waiting in Gillings’ office, including Gillings, four well-dressed strangers he thought were members of the Board of Directors—their portraits lined the hallway—and another, younger man he could not place. By their scents, they were all Stills; they stank of cigars and wool and sweat. They were all seated in comfortable leather chairs, with Gillings behind a broad desk and the rest in a semicircle to the right and left, with a gap in the middle so the visitor would be properly awed. Gillings and the Board members glanced at each other as Mitchell came in and stopped in the middle of the room, hands on his hips, waiting. He was wearing his work clothes and boots, and a rough bandage was still visible under the collar of his flannel shirt. There was not, he noted, an extra chair available for him, or for MacDougal either.
“Mr. Mitchell!” Gillings said, rising from behind his desk and coming around it, a broad smile fixed on his face. “Thank you so much for joining us. This is a very special day. These gentlemen here are from the Board of Directors for Tolliver Mines, and they’ve all come together today just to meet you.”
The younger man cleared his throat. A shadow of annoyance flashed across Gillings’ face. “And of course this is Mr. Norris, from the Bureau of Mines.”
The last time Tom Mitchell had seen “Mr. Norris” was when he had dragged him by main force through a hole in the ground, just as the roof collapsed in the chamber where the miners had been trapped. Now Norris was cleaned up, smiling, levering himself out of his chair with a crutch, limping forward with hand outstretched. “Mr. Mitchell. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again.”
“We’re all very grateful,” MacDougal said from behind him. “We’re still trying to find out what happened; nobody wants this to happen again. Mr. Norris has been trying to discover what’s behind this.” He started to say something else, Mitchell thought, but Gillings made a sudden movement and MacDougal fell silent.
“We’d like to make a little presentation,” Gillings said, still smiling. “The Board has decided that we should show our appreciation for your courage in recent events.”
Mitchell looked around. The Board was nodding and smiling. Norris was still holding out his hand.
Mitchell waited a second before taking it. He could feel some calluses, but they weren’t from handling a shovel or pickaxe. Evidently men from the Bureau of Mines did not actually work in mines very often. The grip was not soft, though. It was the grip of a man who was sure of himself, and Mitchell thought he liked Norris, soft or not.
“I wasn’t the only one digging,” Mitchell said directly to Gillings. “Aren’t you going to call the rest of them in?”
Gillings laughed, taken aback. “Well. It was you who led them, Mac tells us. So we’re going to make our presentation, our thanks to you, and we’ll count on you to convey it to the rest of the…men. And of course you can share this with them, as you see fit.” He had turned back to his desk, picked up an envelope, and now offered it to him.
“As I see fit,” Mitchell said flatly. The news would be all over Silverfield, of course. “You can’t give each of them an award, can you.” He had not taken the envelope.
“Well.” Gillings laughed again. The Board members looked at each other. Mitchell had the feeling that this was a surprise to them, too. “That would be pretty expensive. And we’re really not sure just how many of you there were, of course. We wouldn’t want to overlook anyone.”
“Of course.”
“What we really want,” Norris said, “is to find out exactly what happened. That’s why I was here. I’ve been investigating the recent explosions at the Tolliver mines. I’d like to talk to you about that—”
“So you were spying on us?” Mitchell asked, his voice carefully neutral. “What were you looking for?”
“Spying? No, not at all. I was investigating. We’ve been trying to find out what’s behind this series of mine explosions.”
“Really.” Mitchell smiled suddenly, showing teeth. “That’s very interesting, Mr. Norris. I’m glad to see you, too. Very glad. Because I think I’ve got some answers to your questions.”
The Board members stirred and looked at each other. Gillings, still holding on to the envelope, went back around behind his desk and stood, holding the back of the desk chair. His smile was still frozen in place.
“Really, Mr. Norris, it’s very unlikely Mr. Mitchell can give you any help on this. He’s a brave man, of course, that’s why he’s here, but he’s just a miner. And I’ve been trying to explain, sometimes accidents happen. It’s unfortunate, really terrible, but these things are unpredictable at best. Human—” he paused just an instant too long after the word— “error, gas pockets, any number of things can cause—”
“Or bad dynamite,” Mitchell said quietly. “Maybe you should be looking at that, Mr. Norris.”
Norris raised an eyebrow. “Really? Tell me more.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Gillings snapped. “There’s no bad dynamite in my mines!” The smile had finally, finally disappeared.
Tom Mitchell looked around at the group of men, Stills every one of them, staring at him as if he’d Flicked and a badger stood before them, talking.
“We lost three men in this last accident at Tolliver One,” he said. “Three of them didn’t make it.”
“Three Flicks,” Gillings interposed. “A tragedy, of course,” he hastened to add as one by one the directors looked at him.
“Three men,” Mitchell repeated. “I’m a miner, Mr. Norris. I don’t know the legal ins and outs. But it seems to me that if somebody tries to hide something, he must have a reason. And our Mr. Gillings here, he’s been hiding something.
“He’s careful with his coin, is our Mr. Gillings,” he went on. “Just you look at the charges in the company store. Or what our families are paying to bury their dead. He’ll even save money on the coffins.” Or on “rewards” and “recognition”, he did not add.
“That’s not what you’re here for,” Gillings said harshly, coming around his desk. “You ungrateful Flick, you show some respect...” His voice trailed off as Norris raised one hand.
“Mr. Gillings, here, found a cache of old dynamite and decided to use that in the mines instead, even after the frost we’ve been having,” Mitchell went on, ignoring the owner. “Instead of blowing it up in place, he slapped new labels on it. Smitty saw the bugs.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Gillings yelled. Layers of composure were falling away, like earth sliding from a cave wall. “What kind of nonsense—”
“Now, Gillings, let the man talk,” said the oldest of the directors, pointing a half-smoked cigar at the other man. “This is interesting. I want to hear more.”
“So do I,” Norris said, stepping back to give him room, to let everyone see him. “Old dynamite? Why was the frost important?”
“Dynamite’s tricky stuff, Mr. Norris. Especially old dynamite. It goes unstable pretty easy when the temperature changes. Starts sweating nitro. Tastes greasy, that stuff.
“If it wasn’t old, it might not have mattered so much. Gillings here, he likes to save every penny. Makes him look good to these gentlemen, I’m sure. He thought he’d save money buying older explosives, and it might have worked for a while. But then the freeze hit.”
“That’s ridiculous. It’s my job to watch costs, keep them under control. That’s what they pay me for, to run this place at a profit. You can’t prove it was old,” Gillings sputtered. He was directing his words as much to the directors as to Norris. “I’ve been buying all along. It’s in my monthly reports. If I got old stuff, I didn’t know. It was labelled, dated. You saw the dates on the boxes.”
“New labels, pasted over old ones, in case anybody checked,” Mitchell riposted. “Look for yourself, if you want to take the risk. We knew the old labels were there. Like I said, Smitty Katangazu saw the bugs. He’s a pangolin. He knows bugs.”
“What bugs?” Norris was trying to follow, laboring to keep up.
“The little silver ones, the ones that go after the glue on the labels. Those bugs like the old glue, and he tasted them, but the labels were fresh. If the bugs were there, those fresh labels had to be pasted over old ones, ones that had old glue.”
“You can’t prove it!” Gillings yelled. “You can’t take the word of, of an animal!” His face was almost as red as his hair, Mitchell thought. Mitchell bared his teeth in a badger’s grin.
“That’s what we thought you’d say,” Mitchell replied. “Knowing how you feel about us. So a couple of nights ago, a bunch of us went to the records room. You’ve got Flicks guarding the warehouse, Mr. Gillings. Did you know that?
“We found the books,” he said, his lip curled. “We found your monthly reports, and we matched all those expenses you carefully recorded for the company’s Board of Directors.” He gave the seated directors a nod. “But we found no entries for dynamite in the books, not for the last six months.” He dug into his pocket. “You haven’t been buying explosives recently.
“But we did find an order to the printers, and their invoice.” He held up a piece of paper. “You made yourself a private deal. You ordered a new set of labels, with new dates, and pasted the new labels on your old boxes. It was all in your records, your papers. You never throw anything away. Too cheap.”
“I didn’t do it!” Gillings shouted. “It was all—MacDougal handles all that! He did it!”
Behind him, Mitchell could hear MacDougal take an indignant breath. Norris was looking at the invoice, and back at Gillings. One of the directors held out a hand for it.
“Yeah, Mac handles your orders and your invoices. We could tell, you see, because we could smell it. His scent was all over them. But not on this one.” The Flick had to swallow back a snarl, and the urge to swipe the look off the other man’s face. “He never touched that order. Or this invoice, either. The only scent on it from this end is yours, Gillings. You handled this deal all by yourself. You found a way to save some money, and to hell with the risk to the men. Even after the dynamite started exploding off schedule, causing cave-ins.”
“It’s a lie,” Gillings said. He looked around at the directors. “You can’t believe him.”
They had passed the invoice around. They looked at him stonily.
“I think I’ll pass on your reward, Mr. Gillings,” Mitchell added. “Maybe the directors can find a better use for it.”
“How did you find it all?” Norris asked, as his deputies led Gillings away in handcuffs. “I’ve been in there. There are thousands of invoices and records in that warehouse. It must have taken you—”
“I’m a badger, Mr. Norris,” Tom Mitchell said, showing sharp teeth again. “We follow our noses. And we dig.”