Hunter whipped his head toward the round circle of gray-green light that marked the cave’s entrance. A slender, murky figure stood there, holding something.
The man raised whatever he was holding. There was a thudding sound as he smashed what appeared a stick—maybe a pick handle?—against the rotting side-beam of the crumbling portal frame.
“’Cause home is what this place is gonna be for a long, long time!”
Frank Stillwell’s jeering voice rocketed around the mineshaft, bouncing off the stony walls.
The sheriff laughed loudly as he continued rapping the pick handle or whatever it was against the portal’s rotten side-beam.
“No!” Hunter shouted.
Leaving Annabelle, he took off running.
The rapping continued. He could hear Stillwell grunting with the effort.
“Stillwell!” Hunter bellowed. “You son of a—!”
Hunter’s boot clipped a rock hidden by the darkness. He hit the mine floor hard, skidding forward on his belly. He looked up. Stillwell was laughing as he hammered the pick handle against the portal beam. The top beam was sagging and dirt and gravel was dribbling down to clatter onto the cave floor fronting the sheriff.
“Stillwell, no!” Annabelle screamed as she ran past Hunter.
Hunter heaved himself to his feet. Anna was ten feet ahead of him. He could see her silhouette against the light of the cave entrance. Beyond her, Stillwell stepped back, shouting, “See you in hell, lovebirds!”
Hunter reached forward. “Annabelle, stop!”
He grabbed her as the portal beam collapsed and the light at the end of the tunnel was snuffed like a doused flame.
CHAPTER 14
Annabelle screamed as darkness filled the mine shaft.
The scream was nearly drowned by the thunder of the cave-in. Hunter held her tight against his chest and closed his eyes against the dust billowing over them on a wave of warm air smelling like earth and pine from the timbers. He braced himself as he heard the timbers above and around him groan, threatening to give.
If that happened, he and Annabelle would be crushed. The mine would be, as Stillwell had termed it, their home for a good long time.
A sarcophagus.
Finally, the rumbling dwindled to near-silence. A few more rocks clattered onto the pile now blocking the mine entrance and onto the floor behind it. Then full silence. The air was so thick with dust that Hunter could barely breathe. He could feel Annabelle convulsing in his arms, gasping.
“Come on!”
Hunter took her hand and led her back toward where the weak light angled down from the crack in the ceiling, near his stolen cache.
“The air should be fresher here,” he said.
They both lifted their faces toward the crack and drew in the cleaner air filtering down through the natural flue.
Hunter looked toward the dark mass of the cave-in. “The dust will settle in a bit.”
Annabelle drew another deep breath of the relatively clean air and looked up at him, her eyes glassy and round with terror. “And then what?”
Hunter looked around, feeling the walls and ceiling closing in on him. “Yeah,” he said, drolly. “Good point.”
Hunter looked up at the crack in the ceiling through which the light angled. He probed the crack with his fingers. It was only about five or six inches wide, varying by degrees along its length cutting across one corner of the ceiling and into the wall. “I wonder how wide that flue is farther up.”
“You mean, you think we might be able to crawl up through that crack . . . and get out?”
“It’s a thought.”
“Not a very good one.” Annabelle moved back and slumped down against the opposite wall, drawing up her knees, wrapping her arms around them. “I think . . .” She paused, licked her lips. When she continued, her voice was thin, trembling. “I think we’re finished, Hunter. I think that rat Stillwell has killed us.”
“Don’t say that.” Hunter looked at the crack and then back toward the mine entrance. At what had been the mine entrance but which now was a several-ton pile of raw ore and splintered pine timbers. “We’re just gonna have to dig through that . . . that’s all.”
Whatever optimism and calm he was feeling was shattered when a thundering crash sounded from the direction of the cave-in. More dirt and rock tumbled out of the ceiling.
“Oh God!” Annabelle cried, closing her arms around her knees and lowering her head, bracing herself for death.
Death under tons of dirt and rock.
Hunter hurried over and sat down beside her, wrapping an arm around her, drawing her toward him. She pressed her cheek against his chest and trembled as the thunder gradually died.
More dust wafted thickly.
When the debris had settled and the rumbling had ceased, Hunter gave Anna a reassuring squeeze. “Stay here.”
He rose and, stepping out of the dim light, moved into the darkness toward the debris pile. He reached into his denims pocket for a small, tin matchbox. He slid open the cover and snapped a lucifer to light on his thumbnail.
The flame sputtered, flickered, shedding a fluttering circle of amber light. The debris pile lay just ahead. Hunter slid the match flame close and then up and down, from side to side. His belly tightened. He didn’t like what he saw.
It appeared that a huge, slab-shaped chunk of granite had broken out of the ceiling. It was sandwiched by smaller rocks, dirt, gravel, and pieces of framing timber. What he was looking at was essentially a solid wall of debris. There was no way to move that slab of granite. Which meant there was no way through the debris. No way to get out by way of the mine’s entrance.
The entrance was sewn up tight as a heifer’s ass in fly season, as old Angus would have said.
Hunter was on his third match, studying the blockage in a stubborn belief that there must be some way to squirrel through it, when boots crunched behind him. Annabelle walked up to squat beside him, facing the pile.
“Doesn’t look good, does it?” she asked.
Hunter shook his head. “No. I don’t think we’re going to get out this way.”
He let the match drop and flicker out on the dark floor, and turned to gaze behind him, beyond the weak ray of gray light.
“There’s not a back door, is there?” Anna asked quietly in the eerily dense silence.
Hunter shook his head. “I’ve checked out the whole tunnel. It goes on for maybe thirty more feet and ends in solid rock.”
They stood in silence together, shoulder to shoulder. Their breathing was the only sound until Anna said, “Does anyone know we’re here?”
“I haven’t told anyone about the shack . . . or the mine. I told Pa an’ Shep an’ Tye about us eloping together, but I didn’t mention where we were meeting up today. Just that we’d be home in a few days.”
“Just out of curiosity,” Anna said after awhile, “what was their reaction to what you told your father, Shep, and Tye?”
“About us runnin’ off to get hitched?” Hunter grinned. “Pa said he was mad because he wanted to marry you himself.”
“That old devil!”
“Shep wanted to ride over and snatch you away from the Broken Heart last night, bring you back to the 4-Box-B for a good, old-fashioned, wedding-night hoedown.”
Anna laughed.
“Tye thought it was a good occasion to tap one of Angus’s kegs. So that’s what we did. Even after several glasses of the old man’s ale, though, I couldn’t sleep for thinkin’ about today.”
Hunter wrapped his arm around her again and pressed his lips to her forehead.
“They don’t mind you marrying a Yankee girl?” Anna asked him.
Hunter smiled. “Not this one. Those three ole Rebels don’t hold nothin’ against a pretty girl. Especially one so nice, like you are. And who can ride a horse as well as you do. They’ve never known a pretty, rich Yankee girl who don’t put on airs . . . and knows horses. Old Angus still can’t wrap his mind around the fact you don’t
ride sidesaddle!”
They laughed briefly.
Anna pressed her head against his shoulder. She didn’t say anything. After a time, he felt her shuddering, and then she sniffed quietly. She was crying.
“Oh, Hunter . . .”
He took her hand in his. “Come on over here. Let’s sit down.”
He led her back into the light angling down through the crack in the mine ceiling. He helped her sit down against the wall opposite where the cache had been. He sat down beside her. They both drew their knees up toward their chests.
“We could have had such a wonderful life together,” Anna said. “Even without the gold. We didn’t need gold to make us happy.” She looked up at him through watery eyes. “Or rich.”
“No,” Hunter said through a long, fateful sigh. “It would have helped though. We could have bought old Johnson’s ranch.” He paused, shook his head. “That damn Stillwell.”
“How do you think he knew about the cabin?”
“I don’t know. He must have followed us out from Tigerville yesterday. It’s the only way I can figure it. Must’ve been spying on us. Seen us walk into the mine.”
“Unless he paid a visit to the tarot card reader in Tigerville—Madame Marcollini.”
Hunter gave a droll snort.
“He was probably watchin’ us in the cabin,” Anna said thickly, giving another jerk of revulsion.
Hunter thought about Stillwell ogling them through a window, and ground his back teeth in barely bridled rage.
“He must have overheard our plans, spent the night there in the cabin, waiting for us to return. Right now he’s probably heading for Mexico . . . with our gold.”
Anna lowered her head to her knees and gave another bereaved sob at their fate.
“What happened, Anna? Back at the Broken Heart. What made you so upset? I could see it in your eyes.”
Anna lifted her head, sniffed, and brushed a hand across her nose. She shook her red hair back, then told him about the dustup with her father and Kenneth Earnshaw and then her run-in with her brother Cass in the barn earlier this morning. About the fire.
“If we ever get out of here,” Hunter said, grinding his molars again, “Cass is gonna get his hat handed to him.”
Anna looked at the pile of debris humped darkly on their right. “I think he’s safe,” she said finally.
“I reckon so,” Hunter had to admit, studying the debris himself.
“Hunter?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Just know I love you, and there isn’t another man anywhere I’d rather die with deep in the earth’s bowels.”
Hunter knew she’d meant it seriously, but for some reason they both found it funny after she’d said it. They laughed together, raucously for a time, shuddering against each other. Deep down they were both just trying to distract themselves from the grimness of their situation, but laughing felt good. It tempered their fear—for a short time, anyway.
When their laughter dwindled, Hunter drew Anna to him again, kissed her forehead, and held her tightly in his arms.
They sat in the thick, stony silence, breathing together, for a long time.
Hunter gentled Anna away from him and gained his feet, crouching to keep his head from scraping the ceiling. “I just can’t let it go, damnit,” he growled. “There’s gotta be a way out of here!”
He looked around.
“If we could both lose some weight—I mean, a lot of it,” Anna said, “I guess we could climb up through that crack.”
Hunter looked at the narrow crack zigzagging across part of the ceiling. “Yeah.”
“Give us a few days without food.”
Hunter shoved the fingers of his left hand into the crack. He shoved his entire left hand into the crack, rage burning in him. He pulled against both sides of the crack at once, spitting out through gritted teeth, “If I could just . . . !”
“Hunter, honey. Please, stop.”
“Damnit all anyway! ” Hunter kept applying pressure against both sides of the crack, desperation boiling in him.
“Hunter!” Anna cried, rising to her feet. “Stop! You’re gonna hurt—!”
She screamed and leaped back as a tombstone-size boulder came falling out of the wall to crash onto the mine floor with a resounding thud, breaking in half. Hunter leaped back with a grunt as another slab of limestone, about half as large as the first, also fell out of the ceiling. It landed on the toe of his boot, and he hopped on the other boot, cursing.
“Damn my crazy Rebel hide!” the big ex-Confederate intoned, hopping on one foot while holding the other one in both hands. “Why can’t I let well enough alone?”
“Hunter.”
Anna’s tone was odd. He set his injured foot back down and looked at her. She was staring up at the ceiling, her lips parted, eyes wide. Her emerald-green eyes sparkled like a sunlit summer meadow as light shone into them.
Hunter turned to the gaping hole the dislodged boulders had left in the ceiling. The hole was roughly four feet by five feet in diameter. Hunter’s lower jaw hung. His heart quickened, his veins tingling with racing blood. He stepped slowly up to the gaping hole, peered into it, crouching and tipping his head far back on his shoulders so he could probe it more deeply with his gaze.
Mostly, he could see the stone sides of the cleft glowing gold and salmon with mid-morning sunlight. He couldn’t see an exit from the chasm, for the natural flue seemed to angle back against the mountain, but the sunlight was coming from somewhere. And the chasm appeared as big around as the hole in the ceiling was.
He looked at Anna. She looked back at him, her rich mouth slowly shaping a hopeful smile.
Hunter donned his hat and poked his head into the hole. The cleft twisted off to his left and then climbed upward, where the sunlight was even brighter. Hunter’s heart beat even more optimistically. There was open sky up there. Had to be. All he and Anna had to do was climb up through it.
Hunter lifted his arms up through the hole. He bent his knees and bounded up off his feet, smashing his elbows down against the bottom of the cleft, hoping to hell more rock didn’t give way. He began hoisting himself up, grunting and praying the rock wouldn’t give.
So far, so good.
He drew his legs up into the cleft that was rife with the smell of fresh air, the tang of pine, and the verdant aroma of summer leaves. He’d forgotten how wonderful the summer air smelled. He’d never take it for granted again.
On one knee, he thrust his left hand down through the hole.
“Come on, Anna!”
Anna stepped up to the hole, smiling. She thrust her hand into Hunter’s. He pulled her up through the hole.
“Come on!” he said. “Watch your step!”
He began climbing up through the cleft, setting his boots down on lumps of rock jutting out of a belly of stone bulging on his right. Using his hands, he pulled himself up by similar small bulges and dimples. He and Anna climbed up and around this bulging belly, and there it was just ahead and above—a large, round circle of blue sky containing a slice of lace-edged, puffy white cloud.
Hunter scrambled up out of the hole, which was a deep crack sheathed in wiry brush and rocks at the very top of the ridge. Setting his boots in a cleft among the pale rock, he reached down for Anna’s hand and pulled her up onto the crest of the ridge.
For a time, they just sat there, side by side, speechless with thankfulness. In awe at how close they’d come to doom. They looked around at the pines jutting around them. Birds flitted here and there. Several crows fought raucously in a branch behind them.
Squirrels chittered.
The breeze raked across the top of the ridge, caressing them.
The world was new and beautiful.
Finally, Anna turned to Hunter, smiling broadly. She held out her hand. Hunter took it, kissed it, squeezed it.
“Now what?” Anna said.
Hunter looked around once more, filling his broad chest with deep draughts of precious air. He heaved
himself to his feet and leaned forward to brush off his denims.
“You wait at the cabin. I’m going to pick up Stillwell’s trail. I’m going to run him down and get our gold back. And then you and I are going to head down to Cheyenne just like we—”
Hunter stopped. Anna was looking around, frowning, eyes thoughtful.
“What is it?”
“I heard something.”
Hunter waited.
A crack sounded from somewhere in the hills behind them. A rifle crack.
That wasn’t unusual. Many people in this neck of the hills hunted game.
But then there was another crack. Another one sounded close on the heels of the previous one. Then more and more rifle reports crackled off to the northwest, one after another.
“That’s not just someone after a deer,” Hunter said. He stared toward the northwest, as did Anna. Half to himself, he said, “The 4-Box-B is over that way.”
“Oh God.”
Hunter turned to her. She stared darkly in the direction from which the rifles were crackling now furiously, as though a battle were being fought in those piney ridges.
Anna turned to Hunter. “My pa’s men. I bet Pa sent them after me. After us. They probably figured they could find us at the 4-Box-B. Oh, Hunter!”
Hunter’s heart leaped into his throat. He imagined his father and two brothers being ambushed like he himself had been yesterday by Luke Chaney. Only, Angus, Shep, and Tye would be confronting a whole lot more rifles than Hunter had. Graham Ludlow had a good twenty, thirty men on his payroll, and many of them were better than good with a shooting iron.
“Come on,” Hunter said, taking Anna’s hand. “Let’s find a way down from here and get back to our horses!”
CHAPTER 15
Graham Ludlow stood at the bottom of the footpath climbing the rise to his sprawling, timbered lodge house, staring at what remained of his stock barn.
All that was left was a large, smoldering pile of smoking rubble. The roof had collapsed a half hour ago. Even before that, Ludlow had known the building was a goner, as engulfed in flames as it was even before his men could form a bucket brigade stretching from the skeleton-like Halladay Standard windmill, whose tin blades clattered in the warm morning breeze to Ludlow’s right.
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