The Secret of the Silver Mines Read online

  “Why don’t we just leave the old man alone?” she was saying as I tried to slip out the door. Good idea, Mom, I thought. As I tried to close the door behind me, I felt someone holding it on the other side.

  “Come here,” said Mom in a sweet voice. I moved up to her. She grabbed me and gave me a hug. “Never too old to hug your old mom,” she said, and she combed my hair with her fingers, in just exactly the direction I didn’t want it to go. She always did that. “Any time you have a project you want to work on after school, you just do it. You’re growing up, Mr. Maples.”

  What the heck did she mean by that? I kept wondering about it as I made my way down to the bus.

  When I got to school I saw Wyn, though we didn’t say anything to each other. All day we could hardly wait for each class to end. We raced home after school, munched down our suppers, and made a beeline for Larocque’s. The sun had long since set as we moved up the hill in darkness.

  We found the old man in his loveseat in front of the fire. He had that little box on his lap again. But this time he didn’t make a move to open it. Almost before we’d had a chance to catch our breath, we were all back in time again, on the dirt and silver roads of early Cobalt.

  The day after the man from Brown Industries gave Theo his card, the boy made his way to the Matabanick Hotel in Haileybury. It was already a legendary northern establishment, big and beautiful, with a gorgeous view of Lake Temiskaming. Many great and famous northern adventurers would sit in its saloon, and many others would toast newly made fortunes at the gleaming brass-and-wood bar. But young Theo Larocque wasn’t toasting anything that day. His hands were shaking as he asked the gentleman behind the desk, with the handlebar moustache and felt fedora, how he could find the man from Brown Industries.

  “Are you Theobald Larocque?” asked the man sternly.

  “Yes,” said Theo, shocked that he knew his name.

  “Top floor, royal suite. They’re waiting for you.”

  They? He wondered who they could be.

  Ten minutes later, after a tiring climb up the wide, red-carpeted stairs of the hotel, he approached the royal suite. His first knock was so quiet that there was no response. The instant his second knock struck the door he heard, “Enter!” from within.

  There appeared to be only one man in the room, and it wasn’t the squirrel-like guy who had given him his business card the day before. At the far end of a long, gleaming wooden table stood a short, fat gentleman with a red face and a little black moustache. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a starched white collar that looked like it might choke his bulging neck.

  “Mr. Theobald T. Larocque, I presume,” he said. “My name is Lyon L. Brown.”

  With that the door slammed behind him and the squirrel revealed himself, still wearing his suit, brown hat, and those circular wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Sit,” said Lyon Brown.

  When Theo had seated himself at the far end of the long table, Brown began to speak, pacing as he did. He had a booming voice and liked to use big words.

  “The way I see it, this is your situation. Conundrum, one might say. You, an adolescent, have discovered something very adult. One might speculate that fate did not intend you to have it, for its possession, in any real way, is well beyond you. Fate also put Doorslimer here, my trusted assistant, in a place where he was able to observe rather curious comings and goings: you, in and out of the boreal northern forest, in a series of daily reconnaissance missions. Let it be known that we are cognizant of what you are doing. In short, we know you’ve found SILVER!” He slammed his fist down on the table.

  “What say you?”

  Theo sat shaking in his seat.

  “I uh…I uh….”

  “Don’t deny it! We have you in a dilemma, you see. If you go to your trove we will follow and claim it as ours. Whom will a claims officer believe? You? A child?”

  “We know you aren’t sixteen yet,” added the squirrel-like man from near the door.

  “Precisely,” said Brown. “Will they believe you?…Or Lyon L. Brown of Bay Street, Toronto! And here is something else for you to consider: if you do not lead us to the silver, you will never benefit from it, not one iota.”

  Theo didn’t understand some of the words Brown was using, but the thrust of what he was saying came through loud and clear. They had him, and they knew it.

  “But,” said Lyon Brown, pasting on a fake smile and trying to speak in a friendly voice, “I am not an unreasonable man.” He moved out from behind the table and made his way towards Theo, his hard-heeled boots banging on the floor with each stride. When he was near him he reached out, like someone trying something he had never tried before, and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Then he spoke in that sickly-sweet, friendly voice again.

  “I will offer you a deal that will change your life for the better. You are certainly entitled to something out of this. You, young man, in exchange for leading us to the silver and relinquishing all rights to it from that moment forth, will be given full employment in the world-renowned company of Brown Industries until the age of seventy, when you will be eligible for complete retirement moneys. And, in exchange for telling no one of this…forever…I will graciously give you ONE ENTIRE PERCENT of the earnings of the mine and the veritable industry we will build from whatever you have found in that backwoods. What do you think?”

  “I’m…uh…not sure…I, uh….”

  “If you do not agree,” came the whiny voice of the squirrel from behind, “you will get nothing. Nothing. Forever.”

  “We will merely watch you,” bellowed Brown, “and lay claim to your silver the instant you return to it. So there is your choice. Get something forever and be a part of a great Canadian company, or go on with nothing…less than nothing, one might say. I have a contract here. Sign it, my boy, and change your life.”

  He snapped his fingers and the squirrel scurried forward, pulling a contract from the inner breast pocket of his suit coat.

  And so Theo signed.

  Sitting there in front of the fire a lifetime later, Larocque could see it all as if it happened yesterday. And so could we. We had been staring into the flames, fascinated. Wyn reached down and gripped her great-grandfather’s hand. A tear appeared in his eye and rolled down his wrinkled face. Wyn turned slightly and glared at me.

  Oh great. Someone tells us the saddest thing in his entire life and now it’s my fault. It wasn’t me who forced him to sign that contract. And it wasn’t Dad either. But it was no use, I felt guilty, guilty as charged. Maybe I get that from my mom. I just wished there was some way to get the old man out of this mess, this ancient, contract-sealed mess. Maybe there was more to the story…?

  “What happened next?” I asked hopefully. “That couldn’t have been the end of your involvement with Brown. And didn’t he force you to sign the contract anyway? Couldn’t we tell my father that?”

  “There is more, much more,” said the old man.

  “Tell us!” said Wyn.

  “No. It gets very tricky from here. The problem becomes even more complicated.”

  Wyn and I looked at each other.

  “Remember,” said Wyn, “we have the lawyer’s son sitting right here beside us, and nothing you can say can hurt you, only help, because Dylan is sworn to secrecy unless you give the word.”

  I am?

  She turned to me. “Aren’t you?” She kicked me in the shins.

  “Yes!” I barked.

  The old man glanced over at me. That suspicious look was back in his eyes. He stared at me for a few seconds and then turned back to Wyn.

  “I can’t decide now…. Come back tomorrow anyway. I’ll tell you about Cobalt in its heyday, and I’ll think about telling you more of my case some other time.”

  I guess we must have looked disappointed.

  “Did you know,” said the old man, with a smile on
his face, “that the Montreal Canadiens and the Ottawa Senators both played hockey right here in Cobalt?”

  “They did?” I said, amazed. “They came up here for an exhibition game?”

  “No exhibition game, my dear boy. They both played the Cobalt Silver Kings and the Haileybury Comets in league games. We were in the NHL back then.”

  “You were?” I said, excitedly.

  “Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about it.”

  We got up to go.

  “I spoke to Grey Owl once, in a bar in Haileybury. He was one of the most famous men in the world at that time, a guide and an author who could speak to animals. I’ll tell you about that, too. There was a heavyweight world champion prizefighter here, and fortune-seekers and dance hall queens. And you know who else? Cyclone Taylor. The greatest hockey player in the world. I remember sitting in a front-row seat in the Cobalt Arena and feeling the breeze as he swept by. Cyclone! No man was ever more aptly named.”

  He seemed lost in thought.

  As we made our way home that night we again had a great deal to talk about. We were sad and frustrated about what Brown had done to Larocque long ago, and I just burned to tell my father. But I knew it wasn’t the right time. And we both still wondered about what was in that wooden box. We plotted how we might get him to open it.

  But I had to admit to myself that I was almost equally intrigued by the old man’s promise of hockey stories. The Montreal Canadiens, here? I looked out over the bleak, cold winter night in tiny, dying Cobalt, and I just couldn’t believe it.

  10

  The Silver-Rush Towns

  As soon as I fell asleep that night another dream came. This time I was out after dark in the booming town of Cobalt long ago. Masses of people were flowing towards a black arena with a curving roof near the lake.

  Inside the sound was ear-splitting. On one side I saw the Silver Kings, lining up to defend the town’s pride, and on the other the mighty Montreal Canadiens. The puck was dropped and the action was on. In the stands the fans went wild, drumming on tin washtubs, banging their feet on the wooden floors like thunder, and shouting their players’ names. Suddenly the Cobalt coach looked up into the stands and stared right at me.

  “Cyclone!” he shrieked at me. “Cyclone, get down here! We need you!”

  That’s when I woke up.

  The next morning there was a strange silence at the breakfast table. Finally, my father spoke.

  “Frank and Joe came by last night.”

  “Yeah?” I muttered, my mind far away, slurping my Lucky Charms.

  “They had been over at the library themselves,” said Mom.

  Gulp. My mind raced back to the breakfast table like a shot.

  “They, uh, hadn’t seen you there.”

  “Or Miss Dixon, for that matter,” said Mom.

  “Care to take the stand?” asked Dad.

  Oh great, I thought, cross-examined by John A. Maples, professional super-lawyer. I frantically thought of excuses, alibis. But first, before I really buried myself, I needed to know just exactly how angry the parental units were. I had been staring down at my cereal. I looked up at Mom first.

  She was looking back at me.

  “You don’t have to lie about it, Romeo,” she said, and grinned. “She’s a great girl. Doing a little homework together is a wonderful idea.”

  “Way to go, champ,” said Dad.

  Oh, great.

  “Don’t call me champ, Dad.”

  “Right. No one calls his kid champ any more. Sorry.”

  Well, it could have been worse. I suppose I could put up with their silly smiles about Wyn, as long as it got me another night or two inside old man Larocque’s house. But I wondered how long I could keep fooling them.

  We went to the haunted house right after school that day. On the way up the hill we put together a plan: we would start talking about the little wooden box as soon as we sat down in front of the fire, and we’d both say as much as we could about Lyon Brown being guilty of a swindle. Edison Brown, we’d tell him, has a very weak case. Surely that would get the old man back to his story.

  But it didn’t. Larocque just wouldn’t bite. It was obvious that there was much more to the story than he was telling us, but he just wasn’t prepared to say anything else. At least not for now. He had other things he wanted to talk about, and before long we had actually forgotten about trying to get him back to his story and were sinking into wonderful old historic Cobalt.

  Larocque explained that a silver rush attracts two kinds of people: those who want to get rich and those who already are. The first are adventurers and gamblers, and the others are much more cautious. But the mix always produced something explosive. It was said that Cobalt and Haileybury, by 1910, had not only the most millionaires, but the most saloons, and the most colourful characters per square metre of any place in Canada, maybe in North America. And they were tearing silver out of the ground like nowhere else in the world. This exotic place, this magnet for adventure, was like something from a cowboy movie—and to hear Larocque tell it, twice as entertaining.

  Among the richest men to set foot in town were Noah Timmins, after whom a northern town would be named, and Michael John O’Brien, a wealthy southern Ontario gentleman who built railways and who, within a year, had acquired property in Cobalt worth ten million dollars. Timmins and O’Brien fought each other tooth and nail for mining rights. And then they built hockey teams and took their battles to the ice. That was how the Montreal Canadiens, the Ottawa Senators, and Cyclone Taylor made their way to the hard-rock hills of this New Ontario.

  Timmins put together a Haileybury club, seven on the ice per side in those days, and O’Brien’s son Ambrose built one in Cobalt. They also put up arenas, modern natural-ice rinks that each held more than three thousand fans and looked like huge, partially buried drainage pipes. A couple of years of a Temiskaming League, one that drew big southern stars up north for key games and caused a great deal of miners’ money to be lost in bets, was not enough. In 1910 they bought their way into the biggest and greatest league in the world, the National Hockey Association, soon to be the NHL.

  The first team ever to play the Montreal Canadiens? The red-white-and-blue-clad Cobalt Silver Kings! And Cobalt’s greatest rivals? The maroon-and-white-striped wizards with the huge “H” on their chests, the Haileybury Comets. Two of the Comets’ players—Art Ross and goaltender Paddy Moran—would later make it to the Hall of Fame. Ross, who would become the father of the Boston Bruins, and for whom the NHL scoring champion’s trophy is named, was a northern sensation for one glorious year. But perhaps the greatest hockey, even greater than when the Habs or the Sens appeared, or even the Stanley Cup champion Montreal Wanderers, was played when the Renfrew Creamery Kings, known to the hockey world as “The Millionaires,” arrived in town. Anyone who had come to the Cobalt train station on a right frosty winter day in 1910 would have seen before them perhaps the most remarkable team ever assembled: seven superb “hockeyists,” among them the great Newsy Lalonde, the legendary Lester Patrick, and the immortal Cyclone Taylor.

  Theo came early to get a spot on a wooden bench near the ice and watched in wonder as “the Cyclone,” nicknamed by Governor-General Earl Grey, swept around the small ice surface at the speed of a runaway train. The boy had never seen anything like him: a little fire hydrant of a defenceman, wearing a cap to hide his bald head and flashing a look of devilish confidence in his dark, penetrating eyes. He and his swaggering Millionaires took it to Cobalt 12 goals to 7, and then jumped on the trolley train that ran north to Haileybury. Theo made the trip too, and watched as the Millionaires smacked the Comets 11—5. Even Art Ross couldn’t make a difference. For many years after, Theo and his friends would run their hands along the spot in the visitors’ dressing room in Haileybury where the words “Cyclone Taylor” were carved on the wall.

  Hockey in th
e tri-towns in that silver-rush era was unlike any kind ever seen before or since. Pre-game betting could be so heavy that nearly entire mine payrolls were sometimes locked in the Matabanick’s safe. A goaltender once used a washtub to pick up silver coins thrown to the ice by a roaring audience after a stunning comeback victory. Crowds would gather at the Idle Hour Theatre to hear reports of out-of-town games. And yet hockey, even when the game was as romantic and thrilling as that, was only a part of young Theo’s life in those days. All he had to do for excitement was keep his eyes open.

  There was “Big Jack” Monroe, a prizefighter who had once fought for the heavyweight championship of the world in San Francisco against James J. Jeffries. He strode along the wide plank sidewalks above the muddy streets like a man larger than life. There was a strange old white-bearded prospector named Sandy McIntyre who would make his fortune in the north and his name legendary—though it wasn’t actually his name at all. He had made it up, so that a Mrs. Oliphant of England, who happened to be his wife, wouldn’t find him or his millions. And then there was Harry Oakes, who claimed his worth reached $260 million and was later killed in an unsolved murder in the Bahamas.

  But perhaps the weirdest of all was Grey Owl. Theo had heard tell of him in the early days, living as a hired hand at a Temagami lodge a short distance away. He returned in the 1920s, not long before he became as famous as anyone in the world, at least to young boys and girls.

  Walking along Main Street in Haileybury one day, Theo happened to notice him enter the nearby Maple Leaf Hotel, dressed in an Ojibwa leather coat and moccasins, a live beaver in each of his hands. Inside he spoke to the little animals as someone would to his friends. People flocked to the lobby and paid to watch. Ten years later, his books about Canadian wildlife and his experiences living as an Indigenous man in a land increasingly dominated by white people captured imaginations everywhere. Fifty thousand copies sold in England alone in a single year.

  “And you know,” smiled Theobald T. Larocque, “he wasn’t an Indian at all. He was an Englishman named Archie Belaney. An Englishman just like me. He fooled the world….” The old man paused. “I couldn’t even fool Lyon Brown.”