Annabel took a step back. Clay lifted the hammer and brought it down to smash the rock.
Watching him, Annabel began to count out loud, the way Papa had once taught her to measure time.
“One hippopotamus...two hippopotamus...three hippopotamus...four hippopotamus.”
According to Papa, hippopotamus was a word comfortably spoken at a steady rate that helped to measure the passing of seconds.
“Twenty hippopotamus, twenty-one hippopotamus, twenty-two hippopotamus...”
Clay was speeding up his work, as if to prove her wrong. After Annabel reached thirty in her counting, Clay paused to take off his shirt. Throwing a quick, angry glance at her, he continued his pounding.
She watched the sheen of sweat on his bronzed skin, watched the play of muscles beneath. Not a heavily built man, like Mr. Hicks, Clay was lean but immensely powerful. Mostly, he smashed the rocks with a single blow.
“Fifty-nine, hippopotamus, sixty hippopotamus.”
Clay wiped perspiration from his brow with his arm. Annabel waited until he glanced in her direction again. “See?” she said. “A minute is quite a long time.”
“No amount of hippopotamuses is going to help you if a charge of gunpowder blows up in your face.”
“Could we at least try it out? Do a trial run and time it, to see how long it takes?”
“With explosives you need a safety margin.” Clay dropped the sledgehammer, walked up to her and placed his hands on her shoulders, his eyes intent on her upturned face. “How do you think I would feel if you died?” he asked. “How would you feel if you lost an arm or a leg? Lost your eyesight?”
He lifted one hand from her shoulder, curled the remaining hand tighter to hold her steady while he ran his fingertips over her forehead, over her nose, over her cheeks. “How would you feel if an explosion blew away that pretty face of yours?”
“I...” Annabel swallowed, not because of his words but because his touch was making her feel all quivery inside. He was leaning over her, the brim of his hat shadowing his face. His head bent lower, and for a moment Annabel thought he might kiss her again. But instead he muttered a curse, dropped his arms down his sides and moved away from her.
Annabel watched him pick up a stone. If there was no ore left in the mine, the men would leave the claim, and Clay would take her back to the railroad. The dream she’d had of forging her own path would die. She would have achieved no independence, made no mark as an individual, instead of the youngest of the Fairfax sisters. But if they found a way to get to the gold in the cave, they would mine the seam together, working in partnership.
“What about the gold?” she said. “Don’t you want it?”
Clay paused, the rock in his hand. He studied the glitter of gold in the piece of ore in silence. Annabel hurried to press her case. “Think of what you could buy. You could buy land, stock a ranch. You could have the best of horses. A fine house. You could travel the world.”
Clay turned to look at her. She could feel his gaze sweeping up and down her threadbare clothing and hand-me-down boots. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “A fine house and to travel the world?”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“I don’t know,” Clay countered. “Do they?”
“I...” Annabel swallowed. A blush flared up on her cheeks. Clay had a skill of using simple questions to ferret out excuses and half-truths. She had merely been trying to tempt him with what she thought all men wanted, instead of revealing her own hopes and dreams.
“I don’t know either,” she said quietly. “But I know what I want right now. I want a chance of a partnership. I want to achieve something, but I can’t do it alone, and I don’t think I’d even enjoy that. I’m used to doing things with others, and I’d like to share a successful mining enterprise with you and Mr. Hicks.”
Clay set the rock on the flat stone and smashed it with the hammer.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll try it out.”
Chapter Twelve
They practiced, and they practiced again. The holes drilled into the rock were empty, the charges waiting to be set. Stretched out on her belly over the aspen trunk, Annabel held a candle next to each hole in turn while Mr. Hicks counted out the passing of seconds.
“One fuse lit.” She moved the candle along. “Two fuses lit.”
Clay gripped her by the ankles and pulled her backward.
“Too far,” she called out.
Clay scratched a mark in the rock face with a piece of charcoal, and they started again.
“One fuse lit,” Annabel called out. “Two fuses lit.”
Clay pulled her backward to the mark.
Annabel held the candle flame steady by a drill-hole in the rock. “Three fuses lit.”
Clay yanked her out of the fissure and propped her on her feet. She passed the burning candle to him, bent to pick up one of the lanterns from the ground and raced out of the mine, silently counting hippopotamuses.
Carrying the lantern slowed her down, but they couldn’t afford to lose their sources of light, so the only option was to transport them to safety. By the count of forty, she was lying flat on the gravel ground behind the arrastre pit and Clay was hurtling down the slope toward her. By the count of fifty, he was lying beside her.
“See?” Annabel said. “A minute is a very long time.”
“A minute is not a very long time.”
Clay got to his feet, held down a hand to pull her up. “We don’t know if we are counting too fast or too slow. The candle could blow out before all the fuses are lit. You could stumble and fall while running out of the mine.”
Mr. Hicks walked up to them. “That went well.” He combed his fingers through his gray-streaked beard, slanting an uncertain glance at Clay. “Are we going to do it or will we leave the gold to other men who possess greater courage?”
Annabel could see the flicker of anger in Clay’s eyes. It was unfair of Mr. Hicks to hint at cowardice when they all knew Clay’s concern was for her.
“We’ll do it,” Clay said in the end. “But we’ll cut three long fuses and two shorter ones. We’ll measure the longer ones to burn for one minute and fifteen seconds and the shorter ones to burn for forty-five seconds.”
Annabel bit back a protest. On the face of it the suggestion made sense, since she lit her fuses first, which meant they would have more time to burn, but nowhere near the thirty seconds Clay had allowed. What he was proposing would jeopardize his safety in order to provide a greater safety margin for her.
* * *
Lantern light reflected from the damp walls of the mine tunnel. The charges were set, the fuses trimmed. Annabel stood beside Clay in front of the fissure, going over the final preparations.
“Candle.” Clay held up a spermaceti wax candle. “I’ll pass it to you once you are in position to light the fuses.” The whale wax candles were expensive, but tapers made of tallow had a tendency to melt in the summer heat, and Mr. Hicks distrusted them.
Annabel patted the pocket she had sewn to the top of her shirtsleeve for the purpose. “Matches. Tested and dry.” She didn’t wear the heavy leather coat, for they had discovered clothing could become wedged between the aspen trunk and the rock wall, and her flimsy cotton shirt would be easier to rip free.
“Remember what we practiced,” Clay said as he put aside the candle. “If the flame blows out, don’t try to relight it. Drop the candle and use a match to light the remaining fuses. Call out to me so that I know what’s happening.”
He tapped a pocket on the front of his shirt, mirroring her action. “Matches. Tested and dry.”
Annabel looked up into his face. For a long moment, their gazes held. She wanted to say something, to make some sort of declaration and hear him do the same, but Clay merely contemplated her in silence. Finally,
he lifted one hand and cupped her chin and brushed his thumb over her trembling lips.
“It’s going to be all right, Annabel,” he said quietly. A crooked smile tugged at his mouth. “A pretty girl once told me a minute is a very long time.”
“You’ll only have forty-five seconds.”
“I’ll be fine.” He withdrew his hand, efficient and focused now. “Let’s get started.”
Annabel took a deep breath, gave Clay one final glance, as if to memorize his features. Then she climbed up the wooden ladder Clay had built to provide easier access into the opening they had taken to calling the funnel.
Mr. Hicks had been banished to a safe distance by the creek. If disaster struck, they wanted him able to provide medical care or to ride out for help.
Annabel had written a letter to her sisters. She’d addressed it to Charlotte under her false identity as Mrs. Maude Greenwood, and had extracted a promise from Mr. Hicks to personally deliver the envelope to Gold Crossing if something went wrong.
It was late afternoon. The weather had broken, with a blustery wind sweeping along the hillside. Annabel could feel a new coolness in the current of air that flowed out of the cave.
Clay had suggested they might prefer to wait until morning, when they would be refreshed from sleep, but Annabel knew another night of worry would only serve to ratchet up her nerves.
“In position,” she called, stretched out on the aspen trunk.
“Passing the candle,” Clay replied.
The funnel was too narrow for her to reach back for the candle, and transporting it on her person might have damaged the wick, so they had rigged up a loop of rawhide cord beneath the aspen trunk, and now Annabel reeled the loop along to transport over the small leather pouch containing the candle.
She extracted the candle, examined the shape with her hands to check which way up to hold it. Her body blocked most of the light from the mine tunnel, and until she had the candle burning she had to work in near-complete darkness.
It took a bit of wriggling to extract a match from her sleeve pocket, but she’d practiced the movements. Annabel paused, candle gripped in one hand, a match in the other. Last chance to turn back. She filled her lungs with the damp air, held her breath for an instant and then released it in a whoosh, forcing her body to relax.
With her left hand, she scraped the match against a dry spot in the rock, as high up as she could reach, well away from the fuses below. The flame flared with a hiss. She held the burning match to the candle. The wick caught. Annabel blew out the match and let it cool a moment before dropping it to the bottom of the fissure.
She waited until the candle burned with a steady flame, and then she held it up to illuminate the fuses. They had worried a wire dangling down might burn faster than one resting against a flat surface, so they had drilled the holes into a narrow rock ledge where the fuses could be laid out horizontally.
“Starting,” Annabel called out.
She picked up the end of the first fuse and held it to the flame.
Clay began to count. “One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus.”
The fuse wire sizzled into life. They had sacrificed a two-inch section for her to get a demonstration of how quickly the Bickford Safety Fuze caught and what it looked and sounded like as it burned.
“First fuse lit.”
When Annabel moved the candle backward for the second fuse, a sudden draft from the cave made the flame flicker. She halted her motion, cupped her free hand around the flame until it steadied. The precaution lost her three precious seconds.
“Four hippopotamus, five hippopotamus,” Clay counted.
Annabel picked up the end of the second fuse, held it to the flame.
“Second fuse lit,” she called out. “Pull me back.”
Instead of controlling her movement with her free hand, she used it to protect the flame, and her chest and stomach scraped painfully against the aspen trunk as Clay hauled her backward by the ankles.
“Nine hippopotamus. Ten hippopotamus,” Clay counted.
The last fuse was slow to catch, but finally it glowed orange and Annabel heard the reassuring sizzling sound. “Third fuse lit,” she called out.
In a smooth slide, Clay pulled her out of the funnel. As Annabel lifted the candle to cup her hand around the flame, her elbow bashed against the rock. With a cry of pain, she released her grip on the candle.
“Fourteen hippopotamus. Fifteen hippopotamus.” Clay settled her on her feet, pointing her toward the exit.
“I dropped it,” Annabel wailed and pivoted back to face him. “I dropped the candle.”
“Start counting.” Clay gripped her by the shoulders and gave her a sharp shake, scowling down at her. “Eighteen hippopotamus,” he prompted. “What comes next? Say it.”
Annabel blinked. Panic clouded her mind. She clamped down on the fear and gathered herself. “Nineteen hippopotamus.”
Clay spun her around once more, to face the route to safety, and gave her a small shove to urge her along. “I’ll use a match,” he told her. “Run!”
“Twenty-one hippopotamus. Twenty-two hippopotamus,” Annabel called out.
She’d forgotten to pick up a lantern to carry out, and she ran stumbling in the darkness, her hands extended out in front of her. When she reached the sharp twist in the tunnel, sunlight guided her into the open.
“Twenty-nine hippopotamus. Thirty hippopotamus.”
She was behind the times they’d achieved during their practice runs, for the damp air in the tunnel had made the fuses slower to ignite, and protecting the flame from the sudden draft had used up a few precious seconds.
Arms swinging, feet pumping, Annabel ran down the path. The ground thudded beneath her big boots. She passed the cavern...the water barrel...kitchen canopy. A blue jay screeched, flying up. The line of forest blurred in her vision, and then she was behind the arrastre circle and threw herself down on the ground.
“Forty-two hippopotamus. Forty-three hippopotamus.”
By the count of fifty, Clay should have emerged, but there was nothing but the blue jay that had landed back on the ground, wings flapping, to resume its search for crumbs beneath the kitchen table.
“Fifty-four hippopotamus. Fifty-five hippopotamus.”
Frantic now, Annabel rose to her feet. She wanted to cry out Clay’s name or say a prayer and plead with God, but she had to keep counting.
“Fifty-seven hippopotamus. Fifty-eight hippopotamus.”
The shorter fuses were timed to burn for forty-five seconds. What had been the count when she set off running and Clay began lighting his fuses? In their practice sessions they had achieved ten seconds, which meant fifty-five would have been the point of explosion for the shorter fuses. What would the point of explosion be now, with the extra delay? What number did she need to subtract from her count to know when it was too late for Clay to get out alive?
“Sixty hippopotamus.”
Annabel’s heart seemed to shrivel up in her chest. She took a step back up the slope toward the mine, then another, her feet moving of their own volition. Clay’s image filled her mind, the tousled brown curls, the lean, stubble-covered cheeks, the carefree smile that was all too rare.
She couldn’t let him die alone.
She was about to set off running when a blur of motion by the kitchen made her halt her steps. On the edge of the clearing, Clay burst into sight. His hat tumbled down to roll on the ground and he carried a lantern in each hand. Hurtling along, curly brown hair flying in the wind, the flapping shirt molded to his chest, he raced toward her.
“Sixty-two hippopotamus,” Annabel shouted. “Drop the lamps! Run! Run!”
“Get down!” Clay yelled back at her. “Get down!”
Frozen, Annabel watched him advance, each step bringing him toward her. Barely sl
owing his pace, he ducked to deposit the lanterns inside the arrastre circle, and then he was beside her. He grabbed hold of her and knocked her off her feet and threw his body on top of hers, pressing her against the stone barrier that provided an extra shield.
“Sixty-five hippopotamus.”
A boom echoed deep within the cliffs, and the ground shook beneath them. Like thunder, the explosion reverberated through the air. A cloud of acrid smoke and dust billowed out of the mine entrance.
Annabel huddled on the ground, the warm weight of Clay on top of her, protecting her, his arms cradling her head. Her lips were still moving, but no longer to count the time. She was saying a prayer of thanks because her life with Clay was no longer measured in seconds.
* * *
As the sound of the explosion faded away, Clay could hear heavy footsteps pounding up the slope and the frantic hollering of Mr. Hicks. “Clay! Kid! Are you all right?”
Clay rolled his weight from the girl and shook her shoulder. “Kid?”
The girl lifted her head to look at him. He studied her face. Dust streaked the smooth skin, but he could see no visible sign of injury. In fact, she looked radiant, her eyes shining, her expression rapt, her lips parted and trembling.
Clay wanted to bundle her into his arms and hold her tight. He wanted to kiss those trembling lips, but Mr. Hicks had reached them, forcing him to restrain the impulse, for he could not predict the severity of the old man’s reaction if—or when—he discovered he had a woman in his mine.
Clay got to his feet. Not waiting for him to reach down for her, the girl bounced up. She barreled into him, her arms clinging to him in one of those lightning hugs. Then she did the same to the old man and pulled away, a big smile on her face.
“We did it! It worked!”
“Hold your horses,” Clay cautioned her. “The charges went off as planned. We don’t know if we cleared a passage. We might have buried the gold under a mountain of rubble.”
“But...” The light in her eyes went out, and Clay wished he could take back his words.
The old man spoke again. “You cut the timing a mite close.”
From Runaway to Pregnant Bride Page 12