“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. Dormer, 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 harebrained 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.”

Young wolfed the first quarter of his sandwich and drained his second martini. “How is your Monte Cristo, Mr. Dormer?”

Dormer forced a few bites. “Excellent, and yours?”

“Grandly delicious. Would you like my private theory? Don’t bother to be polite; you can laugh without embarrassment. Everyone else does when they hear it.”