Annabel flushed. She fanned a hand in front of her face. “My, it’s hot in here. I’ve had the stove going all morning.”
Mr. Hicks unbuttoned his shirt and flapped the edges to create a current of air. “You can say that again.” He winked at Annabel. “Kid, we might be at the Waldorf Astoria, but you can peel off your shirt.”
Annabel stirred her stew, her eyes downcast. She had anticipated such a comment, was prepared for it. She kept her voice bland. “I’d like to, but I have pale skin that burns easily. I’ll do better keeping my shirt on.”
She scooped up another spoonful of beans and rice and slipped it into her mouth. She waited for a second, tension vibrating within her, and then she darted a quick glance at Clay. He was watching her with a strained expression on his face. A kick of panic jolted her on the log stump. Did he suspect? Had he noticed something?
The stew stuck in her throat at the idea. It had seemed harmless fun to tease Clay the way young women of her social class might do with their suitors. But now caution whispered in her mind. If he caught on to her secret, she’d have to face the consequences, and the anger of Mr. Hicks might not be the worst of them.
* * *
The mule was getting tired. Clay lined up beside the animal at the arrastre and added his weight to the task. Muscles straining, he pushed at the timber spoke with all his might, boots scrabbling for purchase on the gravel ground.
But even the hard labor could not dispel the unease that throbbed through him. When the mule halted and the noise ceased, Clay could hear the girl singing her sea shanties in the kitchen, softly now, instead of the mad bellowing of earlier.
He did not want to look. And yet, his eyes drew toward the timber canopy. The girl was working with a rag and bucket now, wiping down the shelves. As she bent down, the loose clothing molded to her body, revealing the feminine curves. The sight sharpened the restlessness inside Clay. He swiveled on his heels, curled his hands around the timber spoke. “Pull,” he said to the mule.
Together they made the wheel turn, beast and man, working side by side, as the sun traveled across the sky. Clay’s shoulders grew sore from bracing against the timber spoke. Dust itched on his skin. Thirst parched his throat. His body ached with the effort, but the fatigue failed to obliterate the tension that seethed within him.
Finally, the sun sank behind the hills and the evening cool crept over the landscape. Clay unharnessed the mule and rubbed down the dusty hide with a piece of wool cut from an old blanket, and then he led the animal down the slope to picket him in the small meadow where the saddle horse already stood grazing.
By now, the restlessness in Clay was turning into anger at the girl, at how she had taunted him earlier, with her prying into his past and the song about a misbehaving mule. There had been something downright coquettish about her teasing. She was using feminine allure to unsettle him, while at the same time hiding behind her boy’s disguise.
Moreover, he hated lies, and she was forcing him to lie. In the West, if a man’s honesty was in doubt, he found himself handicapped in business and without friends. There was a bond of trust between him and Mr. Hicks, and it added to Clay’s sour mood that the girl was making him a participant in her deceit.
Boots thudding against the ground, Clay strode over to the kitchen. The girl was bustling about, stirring a pot on the stove, leaning in to taste, her lips pursing against the wooden spoon in a way that made his gut clench.
Alerted by his footsteps, she turned to look. Clay propped his shoulder against a canopy post and folded his arms across his chest. He’d put on his shirt but left it unbuttoned, and she was making those dinner-plate eyes at him again.
“So,” he drawled, “those sisters of yours. Pretty, are they?”
A startled expression flickered across the girl’s face. “Yes,” she replied, flustered. “They are very pretty.”
“What do they look like?”
“Miranda is tall with fair hair. Charlotte is a small and dark, like—” she caught herself just in time “—small and dark, with curly hair.”
Clay sent her a bold smile. “Myself, I like a dark-haired woman. But I prefer straight hair—long and straight hair that flows down like a curtain of midnight.” He made a smooth gesture in the air. “A man can lose his sanity running his hands through hair like that.”
A pink flush was spreading over the girl’s features. Her fingers gripped the wooden spoon tight. Her lips moved, but for once she appeared to find no words.
“What about you, kid?” Clay went on. He wanted her to feel some of the tension and confusion she had triggered inside him. “What kind of woman makes your blood run hot? You can tell me, man-to-man.”
The blush on the girl’s face deepened to scarlet. She turned away and made an attempt to sound casual. “Actually, I’m rather busy here, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.” Clay shuffled his feet and pushed away from the canopy post, getting ready to leave. “I’ll let you get on with your work. We’ll talk more some other time.”
When he walked away, his frustration turned into guilt. He’d resented her for baiting him from the safety of her disguise, but had he not done the same himself just now? For what he’d done had been akin to flirting, and he’d best put a stop to it before he took it too far—before he betrayed her secret to Mr. Hicks or got his emotions even more tangled up.
* * *
It surprised Annabel how quickly life could fall into a routine. Again, she awoke to the morning sunshine slanting into the empty cavern. She no longer slept on the hard ground, for last night Clay had spread his bedroll out for her, with a comment that his back was aching and he preferred the firmness of the earth floor.
Today, it was Clay’s turn to hack ore in the mine. The knowledge that she would see him only at mealtimes filled Annabel with a mix of relief and regret. Their strange conversation yesterday played on her mind. Was it a coincidence he’d talked about a woman with straight, dark hair? Or was there a chance he’d seen her without her hat and was teasing her?
It could not be. Surely, if he’d stumbled upon her secret, he would have confronted her, would have told Mr. Hicks. It had to be unintentional. A random match. But it added to Annabel’s restlessness to know that she possessed the kind of feminine features Clay found appealing.
In the kitchen, she found a coffeepot cooling on the stove and biscuits and honey on the table. She took a cup from the shelf and poured. The coffee was thick sludge at the bottom of the pot, bitter, only lukewarm. She drank a few sips and ate some of the biscuits, watching a pair of cardinal birds hopping around in search of crumbs.
While she was tidying up in the kitchen, Mr. Hicks strode up the path. Shirtless, he carried a yoke over his shoulders, with a steel bucket hanging on an iron chain at each end. His boots and trousers were covered in mud.
Annabel hurried over to him. “Can I help with anything?”
The empty steel buckets hit the ground with a clatter as Mr. Hicks shrugged off the yoke. Annabel made a covert study of the man standing only three paces away from her.
Despite his age, Mr. Hicks was thickly muscled, as powerful as an ox. Surprised, she noted that the dark whorls of hair on his chest were going gray, just like the hair on his head and some of the strands in his bushy beard.
“Is there coffee?” he asked with a glance toward the kitchen.
“No,” she told him. “But I can make another pot.”
“Good.” Saying no more, Mr. Hicks picked up a shovel leaning against the arrastre pit and set to work filling the steel buckets with the pulverized ore.
Curious, Annabel watched. “What are you doing?”
“I’m taking the dirt down to the creek to wash it.”
“Wash it?” Her voice rose at the incongruity of the idea. “How is it possible to wash dirt?”
“If you come with me, I’ll
show you how.”
Annabel stood aside while he bent to lift the yoke over his shoulders and straightened with a grunt. She followed him down the path. The horse and mule greeted them with a whinny as they marched past.
Mr. Hicks came to a halt by the creek a short distance beyond the small pond where they came to bathe and fetch water. He lowered the yoke and pointed at an elongated wooden box about four feet long. “This is a rocker box.”
The box was tilted, one end higher than the other, with an extra tier attached to the higher end. Into this extra tier Mr. Hicks now tipped half a bucketful of dirt. A few paces upstream, where the creek formed a tiny waterfall, water cascaded through a funnel into a hose about five yards long.
When Mr. Hicks lifted the lower end of the hose, a current of water spilled out. With one hand, he directed the spray onto the pile of dirt in the box, and with the other hand he gripped a wooden handle and cranked it to and fro, making the box rock side to side, stirring the dirt inside.
“The water makes the dirt run down the slope inside the box,” he explained, raising his voice to carry over the rumble of the gravel. “Gold is heavier than dirt and it falls to the bottom. The base of the box has slats across it. They are called riffles. Nuggets are caught in the riffles. A piece of coarse wool cloth at the end of the box catches the gold dust, leaving the worthless gravel to tumble out.”
While Mr. Hicks lectured, Annabel craned her neck to watch. A fine mist rose from the waterfall, reminding her of the ocean at Merlin’s Leap. The heat of the sun dispelled the chill of the night. She could smell trees and fresh mountain air.
A sense of contentment stole over her. She’d grown up in the safe confines of a loving household, and the enclosed world of their mining camp offered the same sense of security, the same sense of togetherness and unity.
Ever since her parents died, Annabel had felt a little lost, alone in the world despite the close relationship with her sisters. Now some of that emptiness inside her seemed to ease. In its place stirred a new desire to find her own place in the world, to forge her own future.
“Can I do anything to help?” she asked eagerly.
Mr. Hicks did not cease his rocking. “Let’s see your hands.”
Annabel held her palms out. The burly old man squinted to peer at her skin where calluses were forming at the base of each finger. “Leave it for another day or two,” he suggested. “I’ll see if I can find some smaller gloves for you.”
“Holding the water hose would not hurt my hands.”
Mr. Hicks gave an amused huff. “You sure are a hard worker, kid.”
But he passed the hose to her. Annabel experimented. If she held the hose low, barely over the edge of the box, making the most of gravity, she could make the water gush out a little faster.
“That’s good,” Mr. Hicks said, surprise in his tone.
Annabel beamed. “If you show me how to make those biscuits, I can get up earlier in the morning and have them ready for breakfast.”
The benign expression faded. “I’ll eat no biscuits apart from my own,” Mr. Hicks bellowed. “Never met a body yet who can do them right.”
The spray went wide as Annabel flinched. Clay had warned her that Mr. Hicks had a volatile temper, but so far she’d seen only a hint of it. Instinct warned that when fully unleashed his anger might be like a tempest that crushed everything in its way.
Carefully, she pointed the hose to the dirt in the rocker box. For the rest of the morning they worked together, fetching more gravel, emptying the riffles to take out the tiny nuggets of gold and rinsing the coarse wool cloth to remove the trapped dust. Occasionally, they paused to shovel aside the gravel expelled at the other end of the rocker box. By the time Mr. Hicks told Annabel to start preparing the midday meal, they had filled the bottom of an empty honey jar with gold.
“That’s about two ounces,” Mr. Hicks said, holding the thick glass jar to the sunlight. “A mite over thirty dollars.”
Annabel admired the glittering product of their labors. “How long did it take you to mine the ore in the arrastre right now?” she asked.
Mr. Hicks considered. “I reckon that’s about a ten days’ work.”
As Annabel hurried to the kitchen, she calculated in her mind. They had washed perhaps one-quarter of the pulverized ore in the arrastre. If she allowed fifty percent for expenses, at the current rate they were making around seventy dollars per person per month, but it might be less in the winter, and they would need to allow for a period without income if the mine played out, or if one of the men got injured or became sick.
But could they not increase the efficiency of their operation? The buckskin could carry the dirt down to the creek. And there might be a way to increase the flow of water to allow for a bigger rocker box. At the very least, when her hands healed, she could speed up the process by taking a turn on the rocker box while one of the men carried down the pulverized ore.
Her brain buzzing, Annabel explored ways to increase the profitability of their mining enterprise. She’d always been good at coming up with ideas, and now she could put that talent to use. Of course, she was merely passing through, and neither of the men had suggested she might become a permanent addition to the team. However, she refused to let the circumstance dampen her enthusiasm. She was developing a skill for dealing with obstacles, and she would deal with that one, too.
Chapter Eight
Clay spooned his stew, eager to get back into the mine. He tried to avoid looking at the girl, but his eyes kept straying to her across the table. She was chattering like a magpie, coming up with suggestions to improve their mining techniques.
Just the way the girl talked—cheeks flushed, voice high with excitement—ought to have been enough to betray she was a female. Clay glanced over at Mr. Hicks. Was the old man deaf and blind?
Putting down his spoon, Clay cleared his throat and set in motion the plan he’d made while he hacked at the seam of ore in the mine. “We’re low on lamp oil. I reckon I ought to ride out to Hillsboro and buy some. I could take the kid with me, put him on the stage, and he could be off on his way.”
Mr. Hicks mopped up his plate with a piece of bread. “There’s another can of coal oil at the back of the cavern, behind the box of nails and iron chains.”
Clay adjusted his balance on the log stump. “I reckon I ought to take the kid back to the railroad anyway. We don’t have enough food for three to last a whole month.”
Mr. Hicks looked up, frowning. “It’s a two-day trip. I can’t afford to let you go. We have work to do, and the kid can help. If we run out of grub, you can hunt for game.” He shoved the piece of bread into his mouth and spoke around it. “The kid has brains. He did good today. I’ll start him on the rocker box tomorrow.”
The girl beamed at the praise. “Thank you, Mr. Hicks,” she said with that solemn air of hers. “I appreciate your confidence in me, and the invitation for me to stay.”
The last words were spoken with emphasis, and even though the girl was addressing her comment to Mr. Hicks, she was contemplating Clay across the table, her brows lifted in a meaningful arch. If Clay had ever seen a feminine display of triumph, he was looking at one now.
The old man raked his gray-streaked beard with his fingers. “Kid, a couple of days ago you asked to see the mine. Now’s good a time as any. Clay will show you around.”
Clay tensed. His fingers drummed against the edge of the tin plate as he sought for a way out. Women didn’t go into mines. It was bad luck. And he didn’t want the girl stumbling against him in the dark, tempting him to put his hands in places he shouldn’t be putting them.
“The mine tunnel is no place for a—” he stopped just in time “—for a scrawny city kid. It’s dark and dank. The walls are slimy. There are bats in the cave at the back.” Clay racked his brain for more nasty prospects to scare a w
oman. “There could be snakes, and you don’t see them until you step on them. The roof of the tunnel is unsound. It could cave in.”
Frowning, Mr. Hicks stared at him. “What’s gotten into you, Clay? If I didn’t know better I’d believe you’ve developed a fear of the mine.”
“I’m thinking of the kid. A tenderfoot.”
The girl spoke up. “Are the snakes poisonous?”
Clay felt success within his grasp. “The deadly kind.”
The girl tilted her head to one side and gave him a rueful smile. “In that case, I’ll make sure that you walk ahead of me.”
Clay pushed up to his feet. He cast a longing look at the slices of bread and the jar of honey on the table, but the lure of the food was not enough to persuade him to stay around and continue the debate.
“Sorry,” he said. “Today is not a good day to have a scrawny kid tagging after me. Mr. Hicks can take you tomorrow when it’s his turn to work the mine.”
A woman should understand when a man has said his final word. Clay marched off, heading back toward the mine tunnel. He half expected a protesting call to ring after him, but all he could hear was the incessant prattle of that too-feminine voice as the girl went on about reorganizing their business.
* * *
Annabel watched Clay retreat. Just before he disappeared out of sight behind the dead oak that hid the mine entrance, he lifted one hand and gave his hat a thump, ramming it deeper over his head.
She fisted her hands in her lap, fighting to suppress the forlorn feeling. Why did he suddenly want to be rid of her, send her away? It was not fair to have rescued her, lulling her into a sense of safety, and then withdraw his protection, as if she had become too much of a burden.
“Kid, have you done something to annoy Clay?”
Annabel snapped her head around and saw Mr. Hicks studying her with a curious look on his bearded face. “No,” she hurried to reply. “Nothing...” She heaved out a guilty sigh. “I did ask him about his past...and perhaps I was a bit...relentless...in my questioning.”
From Runaway to Pregnant Bride Page 7