Laughter erupted from inside the cabin. “Besides, you won’t deny the girls the pleasure of each other’s company, will you? It’ll be so good for Caitlin.”
The happiness emanating from the girls was almost enough to convince him. But Gertie didn’t seem to understand how dangerous the situation was.
“But will they be safe?”
Though Gertie looked offended at the question, he had to ask. She hadn’t been at the cabin when those men tried taking Nugget.
“Annabelle and Polly will be up there, too. There’s no better shot than Annabelle. And Polly, well, this miner tried taking advantage of her at the creek one day, and let me tell you. She done such a number on him that he left town.”
Gertie’s warm laugh shook her belly. “No, you won’t find a safer place for Nugget than with Annabelle and Polly.”
He peered inside the tent he’d be sharing with Gertie’s sons. “It’s awfully cramped. Are you sure I’m not imposing?”
He stood and looked back at Gertie, who’d crossed her arms across her chest.
“You’ve been giving me all these reasons why you can’t, or why this is a bad idea, but let me tell you. You won’t find a better offer or a safer place. You’ll be well taken care of, but if you can’t accept that, then maybe you want to take your chances on your own. I guarantee you will be looking over your shoulder every night. Get much past our encampment, and you’ll find plenty willing to slit your throat over a day’s wages. Folks find out you’ve got information on a mine, well…they’ll do that and plenty worse if they think it’ll get them out of this place.”
Her words shamed him. She was only trying to be nice. He’d just been thinking about the wonderful hospitality, and here he was spitting on it.
“I’m truly sorry for any offense. You have to understand, we’re not used to this kind of treatment. Back home, our own family and church is barely lifting a hand to help us. Where I come from—”
“This isn’t where you come from,” Gertie said. “Why do you think we’re all here? Every person in this place has come looking to build a better life. I know there are some who think that living in a cabin and taking in wash is no life, but one of these days, we’ll be able to afford a house. Maybe it won’t be one of those big mansions, but it will be our house.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? A home where he and all of his siblings could be together without Aunt Ina breathing down their necks, barking orders and threatening them all the time.
If anyone could sell him on the dream of mining, it was Gertie. But then, he didn’t need her words to convince him. He already had a mission of his own. Six sisters and a brother, all of whom who needed him. As much as he’d like to find a dream of his own to follow, that wasn’t possible right now.
“Thank you, Gertie. I really do appreciate all you’ve done for us.”
“Mama, we’re hungry.” Caitlin ran to them and tugged at her skirts.
“There’s an extra biscuit or two in the cabin.” She smiled at her daughter and patted her on the head as she raced off. “We don’t do a proper noon meal here, on account of everyone being up at the mine. But I fix them all a good lunch to take with them. Supper’s at dusk, and you’ll want to be prompt with the way my boys eat.”
She looked at him. “I know you won’t be going up to the mine, but I’ll still pack your lunch all the same. Mind you get home by dusk. As safe as we’ve made it, it’s still not a good idea to go wandering about by yourself.”
Her words reminded him of the bandits and the danger they faced. Yes, this was the best option. Frank reappeared. “I’ve got some visiting to do. Why don’t you come with me so I can give you the lay of the land?”
Joseph nodded. They’d wasted so much time already. Though it had done his heart good to see Nugget so happy, it’d do him even better to have her safely settled.
As they walked back to the horses, Joseph asked quietly, “Any word on the men who were after Nugget?”
Frank shrugged. “Slade isn’t back yet. I’d put Gertie and Annabelle up against any man if it meant keeping a child safe.”
Though he knew firsthand how capable Annabelle was of keeping Nugget safe, it didn’t cause him to worry any less. Not with the attempt against Nugget, and the niggling feeling in the back of his mind about his father’s death. If someone was going to this length to find his father’s silver, his father’s death was looking less and less like an accident. Which meant the danger they faced was far greater than they were imagining.
Chapter Thirteen
Annabelle approached the creek where Polly was working on the wash. Lumps of rock lodged in her throat, preventing her from speaking. Not that she had any idea of what to say. What separated them called for a whole lot more than a simple, “I’m sorry.”
“Hello, Polly.”
Polly didn’t look up from the shirt she was scrubbing. “Annabelle.”
“I’m gonna be here for a while, I guess, so I thought maybe I could help you with your chores.”
Brushing her arm against her forehead, Polly looked up. “Don’t make no nevermind to me.”
No, there was no easy fix for this. “I’m sorry about what happened, you know, when—” Annabelle swallowed. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. You were just trying to help.”
“You accused me of lying about Henry to deliberately hurt you.”
The words reverberated in Annabelle’s head. The sight of her best friend, her face whiter than the snow she’d been standing in, filled Annabelle’s vision.
Annabelle grabbed a shirt and started working. “I said a lot of things I didn’t mean. I couldn’t imagine that Henry would simply leave without me. Not when he knew I’d just lost Peter and Susannah and Mother was so sick.”
Pouring out her heart seemed almost easier when she had her hands occupied. She turned her attention to a spot that wouldn’t come out. “I was wrong to accuse you of being anything but a friend. I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to tear a hole in it.” Polly’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she stared down at the shirt.
“I can’t get this spot out,” she said, holding it up for inspection.
“It’ll do.” Polly took the shirt out of her hands and stalked over to where she had the other clean shirts drying.
Annabelle sighed and brushed the stray curls off her face. An apology would never be enough to mend the damage she’d done.
Polly turned and stared at her. “You barely knew Henry. Sure, he was handsome and charming and helped you deliver things to your father’s parishioners. But we’d known each other our whole lives. And you’d call me a liar before you’d believe that your precious Henry would betray you.”
Annabelle deserved every bit of the ire directed at her. Probably even more than that. “I was wrong,” she said again, but Polly had returned to her work.
“What next?” she called over her shoulder at Polly.
“Go find my ma and tell her to put you to work elsewhere. You’re slowing me down. I’ll never get all this done with you around.” Polly gestured to the pile of laundry.
“I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do…” She looked for any sign of understanding in her former friend, but Polly merely frowned at her.
“Just go.”
The camp was quiet as Annabelle returned to Gertie’s cabin. Everyone was probably up working in the mines. With such good weather, they were probably trying to get as much extra work done as they could.
“Hey, pretty lady.” An obviously drunken miner stumbled out of a tent. Disheveled, and smelling more like liquor than the mines, he reached for her with hands knotted with age. An old-timer, most likely. But who could tell with the way this place prematurely aged people.
She turned to go between the tents, but another miner stepped from behind the tent she was trying to go around. Younger, the sandy-haired man also reeked of drink.
“What’s your hurry?”
Her father hadn’t given her a gun to re
place the one that had been in her saddlebag. Which would be a problem living in the camp. She’d gotten proficient at scaring men off with a quick wave of the pistol.
“I need to get back to my friend’s cabin. She’s expecting me.”
The men moved closer, sandwiching her in. “We can’t have no delay, now can we?”
Even with considerable distance between them, she could smell the younger man’s foul breath. She looked for an escape route.
“Aw, pretty birdie wants to fly the coop,” the man in front of her said with the kind of leer that spelled trouble.
This was precisely why young ladies did not venture beyond certain boundaries unescorted.
Her momentary lapse in looking for an escape gave the man behind her the opportunity to bump into her, pushing her closer to his friend. He might have looked like an old-timer, but he was quick.
“We don’t mean no harm,” he whispered, his foul odor stinging her nostrils. “Just tell us where the silver is.”
Naturally. That’s all anyone in this crazy place wanted.
“I don’t know anything about any silver,” she said stiffly, realizing that a hard object was pressed into her back. A gun.
She tried to take a deep breath to calm herself, but the gun pressed deeper into her back.
“What’d you find at the cabin?” the man rasped into her ear and pushed her forward into his friend.
“Nothing. It was just a cabin.” She tried to keep her voice steady, calm. These were no ordinary ruffians, but dangerous men who clearly knew much more about her activities than mere happenstance.
The man in front of her grinned an ugly toothless grin as he rubbed his stubbled chin. “And silver is just a rock.”
As his eyes narrowed, she recognized him as one of the men who frequented her father’s Wednesday night dinners.
“I know you.” She stared at him harder, trying to remember if she knew his name. There were just so many, coming and going, and with trying to stay unattached…
“Our family has done you great kindness. Please repay that kindness and let me go.”
Her words only made the man’s sneer deepen. Perhaps it had been the wrong thing, to ask for repayment for what they’d done.
“We’ll give you kindness, sweet lady.” The man behind her rubbed up against her in a vulgar motion that sent her stomach rolling. “You tell us where the silver is, and we won’t share you with our friends.”
Annabelle gritted her teeth. “I told you, I don’t know about any silver. I was merely showing Joseph where his father’s cabin was so that he could claim his father’s personal effects.”
Toothless gave her a murderous look. “We seen him in the mercantile yesterday buying mining supplies with the good preacher. So no more lies. Where’s the silver?”
She glared at him and tried to shake free of his friend, but the man pressed the gun harder into her back.
“If he had really found any silver, do you think that cabin would have been as desolate as we found it? Don’t you think he would have spent some of it on something nice for his daughter? You know miners. There’s no silver.”
Her words seemed to catch the miner who held the gun to her back off-guard because the pressure loosened and he hesitated.
“You think she’s telling the truth?” The waver in his voice was all she needed.
In a quick motion, Annabelle stomped back, using the heel of her boot to dig into the man’s leg, then darted past Toothless. As she rounded the corner past his arms, her heel broke, but she kept running, hoping Toothless would be more concerned about his friend’s yowls.
“I’m going to get you, she-cat.”
Annabelle ran, dashing between cabins, hoping that somehow the weaving would keep him from catching her. A short distance, and she’d be at Gertie’s.
“Gertie!” she yelled as loudly as she could.
“Your friend ain’t gonna help you, so save yerself the trouble.”
“Help!” Annabelle hoped the word would get someone in the area to come to her aid. She rounded the corner, feeling her ankle in the broken boot give way.
Oh, how she’d wanted these fashionable boots. But what good were they doing her with a bandit after her? At least she’d worn the sensible dress Maddie had forced upon her.
“Please,” Annabelle yelled again. “Someone help me!”
A man stepped out of the cabin nearest her.
“What seems to be the problem?” Though his face was grizzled, his voice was kind.
“There’s a man…” She gestured behind her at Toothless, who’d slowed up. “He and his friend had a gun. They were trying to hurt me.”
Her savior stepped past her. “That you, Bart?”
Bart. Now she had a name for her father and the sheriff.
“Just a misunderstanding.” Bart gave a grin that made her stomach turn, then headed in the opposite direction.
The man nodded and looked over at Annabelle. “You’re all right now. Bart don’t mean no one no harm.”
Oh, yes, he did. But she didn’t need to belabor that point with this stranger.
“Thank you, sir.” She offered a small smile as she nodded and turned toward the direction of Gertie’s cabin.
No one was at Gertie’s cabin, making her more grateful the unknown man had come to her rescue.
She sat on one of the logs and examined the damage to her boot. The heel had been torn clean off. Her foot… For the first time since the initial pain of twisting it, she realized that it throbbed. And was swelling rapidly.
“Gertie?” She called the woman’s name but received silence in return.
Annabelle leaned back and closed her eyes. Maybe if she took a few deep breaths it wouldn’t hurt so bad.
The crunch of shoes on gravel jolted her out of her tiny rest. If the men had been following her, they probably realized she was completely alone.
“Please. I’ve already told you I don’t know where the silver is. So just leave me be.”
Maybe she truly was a coward, but she couldn’t bear to open her eyes and face the victorious sneers of evil men who were going to triumph because Annabelle hadn’t truly embodied the Christlike behavior she had been supposed to model.
“What happened?” Slade’s soft voice jolted her, and she looked up, but not directly at him.
“Some men accosted me.”
He had no reason to take up her cause, so the less she said the better.
“About the silver?” He knelt before her and touched her broken boot. “How bad is it?”
Pain shot through her. “Ow!” She jerked out of his grasp.
“Yes, about the silver. That ridiculous metal that has blinded everyone to decency.”
His face contorted as though he’d been wounded more than her ankle hurt.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did,” he said quietly. “You’ve been seething in hate for months now. But I’m going to fix your ankle anyway.”
Tears rolled down her face.
He took her foot, not at all gently, and attempted to unlace her boot. Even Slade was ignoring what she had to say based on the prejudice she’d expressed.
She should have listened to his side of the story. “What happened that night?”
Something glittered in Slade’s eyes when he looked up at her. If she hadn’t been so stubborn, they’d have had this talk long ago.
“When I got to Doc Stein’s house, he was passed out drunk. So I went to the hospital to see if they could spare someone. But they were busy with the influx of their own patients. I was told to bring everyone there.”
Slade shook his head slowly, fumbling with the lace. “I’m going to have to cut this off. I know you prize these boots, but there’s no other way.”
“It’s all right. They’re just boots. And they’re ruined anyway.” Annabelle shrugged, then looked at him.
Really looked at him. Pain filled his face, and she realized that all this time, all the hurt she�
�d been feeling over her family’s deaths, Slade had been feeling, too.
Everyone was hurting. But all Annabelle had been able to see was her own pain.
“I want to hear the rest. About the silver.”
He pulled a knife out of his boot as he nodded slowly. “On my way back, I headed to the livery to get a wagon to take everyone to the hospital. I took a shortcut through State Street and got caught in the middle of a gunfight between two men arguing over a poker game. One got away, but the other…”
Pain filled his face, and for a moment, Annabelle forgot that she’d vowed to hate Slade forever. He’d been her brother’s best friend, and until she’d decided to blame him for Peter’s death, a good man.
“I did the best I could for him, but…”
Slade’s hand stilled on her foot. “He pressed a bag of silver in my hand and asked that I send it home to his wife. It was the last thing he said before he died.”
He had been doing a kindness for a stranger. She’d hated him for his selfishness when all he’d been doing was a good deed. Annabelle hadn’t thought it possible to feel more shame over her actions, but it was so strong she thought she might burst of it.
“I didn’t—”
“Don’t.” He looked up at her with watery eyes. “Somehow I thought it would make a difference if I stayed with him until the sheriff came. I was worried about a dead man, when I should have been getting Peter to the doctor. I never imagined he would go so quickly. Your pa has told me over and over that it probably still wouldn’t have saved him, but I can’t help but wonder if I’d done it any differently…”
All this time, she’d been casting stones, when poor Slade had been casting them at himself. He hadn’t needed her to make him feel bad when he was already doing a fine enough job of it himself.
“You did what you could,” she told him quietly. “And I apologize for saying otherwise.”
Slade nodded slowly. “What you saw that night was me giving the silver and information about the dead man to your pa so he could track down the family. Frank was going crazy with grief and I thought that giving him something to do would help. I never realized how much I would hurt you.”
Love Inspired Historical November 2014 Page 83