Laughing, Drew gripped his arm, hauling him down the dirt road in the direction of town. "Come off wi' you, my handsome. There's beer to drink and ladies to seduce, and they won't start the frolicking without us."
The festivities were being held on the north edge of town in a big meadow that bordered the river. The air was sweet with the smell of crushed grass, gunpowder, and chicken with all the fixin's. The Miner's Union Band tooted away at a mournful rendition of "The Girl I Left Behind Me," but the music had to compete with the patriotic flap of dozens of flags, the crackle of firecrackers, the clang of horseshoes, and the shrieks of children dunking for apples in a horse trough.
"Look over yon," Drew said, pointing to a fresh wooden platform with a six-foot-thick block of granite sitting in the middle of it. "They'll be having a double-jack drilling contest later. What do you say we enter it?"
"What—in our Sunday-go-to-meeting suits?"
"If we win, they'll not care how we're dressed."
Jere ran his finger beneath his stiff paper collar. He was already sweating up a swamp. The sun was beginning to bake the open field, but Mrs. Yorke, enterprising woman that she was, had set up a tent beneath a stand of aspens, where Shiloh hawked beer and sarsaparilla to cut down on the heat and dust.
And it seemed that no sooner had Jere thought of the woman than she appeared before his eyes. She, along with a good part of the rest of Rainbow Springs, had gathered to admire the town's new fire wagon on display in the middle of the meadow. A scarlet woman with scarlet hair was Mrs. Hannah Yorke. Today she was dressed in layers of cream lace, all frilly and frothy like a sugared marchpane confection.
Drew had seen her, too, and his face took on a familiar sharp look. It was the look he'd always gotten, even when they were little tackers, when he saw something he wanted and made up his mind to go after it. There was no one as determined as Drew when he set his teeth into something. He stopped at nothing to get what he wanted, did Drew. Nothing.
Jere breathed a silent sigh. His little brother was after a bagful of trouble here, though. That Hannah Yorke was the sort of woman who'd chew up a boy like Drew, spit out the bones and gristle, and not even dull the edge of her appetite.
Jere caught his brother's arm. "I could be using a beer."
Drew's head swung around, his eyes intent and a little wild. "Could you, then?"
Jere's mouth kinked into an easy smile, but his grip tightened on the boy's arm. "Aye. A beer would be good. A nice wet something."
The hard, sharp look clung to Drew's face a moment longer, then he shook his head on a short laugh. "I'll get you your beer, then. 'Twouldn't do to have her thinking I'm too eager, would it?"
While Drew went to fetch the beer, Jere strolled over for a closer look at the new fire wagon. The bright red paint on it still looked wet, and the firemen, volunteers all, were button-busting proud in their matching red shirts. The brass pump had been polished to an eye-dazzling shine down to the hose screws. Jere hovered at the edge of the crowd a moment, then he turned aside, squinting against the glitter of the river between the trees, and he saw her.
He got quite close to her this time before she saw him. Always before, when he'd stopped by the mercantile, she would disappear into a back room and leave Sam Woo to serve him, and so he had been unable to say one word to her since that first day. This time her head jerked up like a startled doe's and she looked around as if she would flee, but in the end she didn't. She stood in trembling stillness, her hands stuffed up the sleeves of her blue high-necked quilted robe, her gaze riveted on the ground.
"G'day to you, Mrs. Woo," he said, softly, so as not to frighten her.
"Good day, Mr. Scully," she said to the grass.
He stared down at her, suddenly unable to speak. His gaze traced the graceful curve of her back, the small knob of bone at the nape of her neck. The sharp white part in her hair, which was so dense a black it was the absence of all light. He remembered seeing an etching in a book once of a wild black swan swimming on a lake in front of some fairy-tale castle. She reminded him of that swan, a delicate creature not of his world. A strange feeling clutched at his chest, a need to cherish and protect.
He took another step to bring himself closer to her. She smelled like a spring apple, crisp and green. "Mrs. Woo..."
She lifted her head. Her eyes were as dark and impenetrable as lampblack. "Yes, Mr. Scully?"
He swept off his hat, almost crushing the brim. Her eyes widened at the sight of the wilted wood lilies lying like a clown's orange rag wig on top of his head. She started to smile, smothering it at the last moment with her hand.
He'd forgotten about the flowers. A tide of color flooded his face, but he couldn't help laughing at himself. He plucked the posy off his head and folded his body into a bow. "These are for you. Pretty flowers for a pretty lady." And then he wanted to curse himself. He'd sounded daft, like a moonstruck schoolboy.
She took the flowers, her fingers brushing his. A strange, quivery feeling rippled down his spine. He thought she might have felt it too, for she trembled and her lips parted on a sharp expulsion of breath. "They are lovely flowers," she said in her sweet, lilting voice. Her gaze slid away from his, and her lips moved slightly, as if she were smiling to herself. "Thank you, my anjing juren."
He tried to say the Chinese words after her, mangling them badly. He laughed again. "And what was that you be calling me? 'Twasn't a slur on my mother's good name, was it?"
Her gaze flew back up to his, and a tiny crease appeared between her brows. "Oh, no, you must not think... It is an address of great respect. Truly."
"Hunh. So you say." He took another step, bringing himself closer still. She tensed, but did not back away. He pitched his voice low, touching her with his words in the way he wanted to touch her with his hands, with his mouth. "And what is something I can be calling you, then? An address, for instance, of deep affection."
She appeared to consider the matter seriously, the crease between her brows deepening. He imagined pressing his lips to it, kissing it away. "I shall allow you to call me Mei Mei, if you wish. It means Little Sister."
A firecracker popped nearby, and the smell of burned powder wafted between them. He drew in a deep breath, trying to ease the pressure growing in his chest.
The band suddenly struck up a loud martial song, and they both jerked around, relieved to have something to look at besides each other. Sunlight bounced off the brass wind instruments. The musicians' faces had turned scarlet from all that puffing in the heat.
Yet against his will his gaze slid back to her. Her skin was the pale cream color of antique ivory. Her eyes met his; he wished he could tell what she was thinking. He knew that what he was feeling for her showed on his face, but he didn't care. He wanted her to know.
"Little Sister... 'Tes not the kind of affection I have for you," he said, thinking how the words belied the depth of what he felt. He was in gut-love.
"In China a man does not look thus upon another's wife," she said, and for the first time he heard a strain in her voice. "Or speak to her so. Indeed, he would not speak to her at all."
He pushed a harsh breath out his tight throat. "And what are we supposed to do, then? Be forgetting about this thing that's between us simply because we met at the wrong time and in the wrong place? You shouldn't have married him, m' love, but 'tesn't a thing that can't be undone."
A taut silence stretched between them. A boy ran by, carrying a sparkler in his hand like a torch. The lighted stick hissed and crackled, shooting off miniature stars.
Her chest lifted in a silent sigh. "Where I come from, in Foochow," she said, "there is a pagoda that is one thousand years old, and it is only just beginning its sojourn upon this earth. Perhaps there will be another time and another place for us, my anjing juren. But not in this lifetime."
"To hell with that—"
She pressed her fingers against his mouth, stopping his protest. He grasped her wrist, holding her hand in place to kiss it. When he let
her go, her hand fell to her side and her fingers curled as if she would capture his kiss and keep it forever.
But something flashed in her eyes. Anger perhaps. Or fear. "You don't understand," she said. "You do not understand me. A Chinese does not seek to undo her fate. She does not sacrifice her honor for the sake of her heart." Her hand started to come up and he thought she would touch him again, but then she let it fall. "It was not by chance the gods put a great sea between our peoples, a sea too wide for any bridge to cross. We are too different, you and I. No bridge can ever link us."
She turned then and walked away from him. She moved on her tiny feet as if she were treading on cinders, her hips swaying, her back straight, her head still. He looked down and saw the posy of orange flowers lying in the grass. He knew she hadn't dropped it accidentally. By rejecting even so simple and innocent a gift, she was rejecting him.
Jere's hands tightened into fists. He wasn't going to give up, not on her, not on what he felt for her and what he hoped she could someday feel for him. He didn't care how bloody wide a sea there was between them, he would find a way to build a bridge. And then he'd cross it, even if he had to do it on his knees.
The miner slammed his sixteen-pound sledgehammer onto the head of the drill with such force the wooden platform trembled, granite dust puffed into the air, and the clang of steel against steel bounced off the distant hills.
"Oh, my," Hannah Yorke said, as she twirled her white lace parasol and stirred the dusty air before her face with a Stars-and-Stripes paper fan. "I must say, there is something about watching a half-naked man beat up on a rock, the way his muscles bulge and go all shiny wet with sweat and the veins pop out against his skin... it gives me a tingling feeling low in my belly."
A blush spread over Clementine McQueen's cheeks, but she laughed out loud. "Hannah, what a thing to say! You are incorrigible."
"Mama, why is that man hammering a big nail into that rock?"
Clementine shifted her wriggling son from one hip to the other. "That isn't a nail, sweetheart. It's a drill. Now, you must stay back here, well out of the way."
"But I can't see!" Charlie shouted. "I want to see!"
"I think he is like some wild, magnificent animal."
This remark came out of Miss Luly Maine, the town's new schoolteacher. Her eyes were riveted not on the shirtless miner pounding a steel drill into a granite block and racing against the clock, but on Drew Scully, who still had all his clothes on. Indeed, he was all slicked up in the most garish brown plaid suit Hannah had ever laid eyes on. He was waiting, with his brother, for a turn at the double-jack drill contest with its twenty-dollar prize.
Miss Luly Maine was seventeen. She had glossy chestnut hair, lake-blue eyes, and the top of her head came no higher than the middle of a man's chest. Hannah had often wondered how such a little thing handled a classroom full of rowdy boys not much smaller and younger than she. But then schoolmarming was one of the few respectable occupations a spinster could pursue out West. And most folk, Hannah being one of them, figured a gal took it up and came out here for the sole purpose of hooking herself a man.
For a while a betting book had been kept in the Best in the West on how long a sweet little morsel like Miss Luly Maine would remain in the single state in a place where men outnumbered women twenty to one. But when a month passed, then three, and then nine months passed, and twenty-seven proposals had been tendered and refused, folk began to suspect Miss Luly Maine was one of those unnatural females who married themselves to a career.
Right now, though, Hannah would have bet every penny in her account at the Miner's Union Bank that the little school-marm had begun to hear wedding bells after all. She was looking at Drew Scully as if she were imagining the shape of the flesh beneath his shirt, imagining how it would feel beneath her hands.
Hannah whipped her fan through the air with such force the brim of her white leghorn straw hat lifted a good two inches. "Ain't it just like a man," she said, "to spend his holiday away from hammering a drill into a rock hammering a drill into a rock. I reckon they always got to be measuring themselves one against the other, men do. To see which one is the toughest."
"Oh, but I think it is so exciting," Luly said on a sigh. Her eyes were still on Drew Scully and they'd turned all misty. "An exhibition of skill and courage."
An exhibition of muscle and chest hair, and of men's damned foolish ways, more like, thought Hannah. She closed her fan with a loud snap.
Behind them the air popped with the noisy explosion of a giant cracker, but most people in the crowd were too intent on the contest to notice. The miners worked in teams of two, trading places every three minutes. One would swing the hammer, and with every stroke his partner, who was holding the drill upright, would raise and turn it slightly to keep it from sticking in the hole and costing them precious seconds. A slow-running hose attached to a barrel poured water into the hole to flush it out. The team that drilled the deepest hole in the granite slab in fifteen minutes won the contest and received the prize, a double-eagle gold piece.
A man with a big nickel-plated watch cupped in his hand shouted, "Time!" and the miner with the hammer followed through with his last stroke. The ringing echo of steel on steel faded into the noise of popping firecrackers and the brassy din of the band. The timekeeper flushed out the hole with the hose and measured its depth. "Twenty-two inches," he announced.
The crowd applauded politely. Twenty-two inches wouldn't be winning any prizes. Thus far the best measurement stood at just under twenty-seven inches.
As the Scully brothers prepared for their turn at the granite block, Hannah maneuvered herself so that she was between Clementine and Miss Luly Maine. In her white sateen dress garlanded with red and blue ribbons, the little schoolteacher looked as pretty and snappy as the flags flying from the pine poles that encircled the meadow. Pretty and dainty and so very, very young. Beside her Hannah felt as old and hard and used up as a sodbuster's hobnailed boots.
The girl went all stiff as a fence post as she cast a sideways glance at Hannah, and Hannah smiled to herself. Miss Luly Maine didn't know quite what to make of her. She was a saloonkeeper, a true daughter of Eve, the kind of fast and loose woman the reverend back home had probably warned Miss Luly Maine against. But she was also a friend of Clementine McQueen, who was eminently respectable, of course, a rancher's wife, president of the Ladies Social Club, and the daughter of a prominent Boston family. As a result the young schoolteacher couldn't make up her mind from one minute to the next whether to snub Hannah Yorke or invite her over for tea and gingersnaps.
"Do you know Mr. Drew Scully?" Hannah asked casually.
The girl's cheeks turned berry red, and a shy smile softened her mouth. "We haven't been formally introduced, naturally, but I've seen him some. Around town. He smiled at me and tipped his hat."
At the moment the man was taking off more than his hat; he was stripping off his suit jacket, vest, tie, and shirt as well. He stretched out the kinks in his arms, rolling his shoulders and flexing a bare chest strapped with muscle. Miss Luly Maine sighed, and Hannah almost sighed right along with her. It wasn't as if she wanted that boy for herself. Indeed, if anything this poor girl deserved her pity. The little schoolmarm had been bitten by the love bug bad, and now it probably seemed to her that she would go mad if she didn't scratch the itch.
Hannah knew all too well where such feelings could lead.
To a wax posy off a wedding cake now fading beneath a bell jar. To soul-rotting memories of a crib in the badlands of Dead-wood with the name Rosie burned above the door.
Jere Scully carefully selected the spot on the granite block where they would drill, although, since they'd drawn last place, all the best spots had already been taken. Drew Scully unrolled a canvas bundle and took up a newly sharpened bull prick. He glanced up and caught her looking at him. He cast a swift white grin her way, and she tossed a be-damned-to-you-mister glare right back at him. And he... why, he had the audacity to wink at her! A
s if she were some sweet young thing like Miss Luly Maine, who got all chest-fluttery and weak-kneed just because a handsome young man paid her a little attention, when all he was really after was a ride between her legs.
He held Hannah's gaze as he crouched on his heels, his britches pulling taut over his wide-spread thighs. He clasped the drill close around the head. His brother stood over him, hammer in the air. The timekeeper touched Jere on the shoulder, and he slammed the sledge down on the tiny head of the drill. The drill point bit deep into the block of granite with a reverberating clang, and Miss Luly Maine jumped and gasped as if she had taken the blow herself.
After three minutes the timer again touched Jere on the shoulder. He flung his hammer aside, crouched down, and grabbed the drill while Drew seized up his own hammer, sprang to his feet, and brought it down onto the drill head all without missing a beat.
"Put 'er down, boy!" someone bellowed.
Miss Luly Maine heaved another loud and fluttering sigh, and Hannah's jaw tightened. She was back to being irritated with the girl again, although she had to admit the sight of Drew Scully wielding a sixteen-pound sledge was a splendid one. He was not as big and brawny as his brother, his muscles tending more toward sleek leanness. But there was no denying their strength and power as they flexed and bulged beneath his sweat-slick skin. The platform trembled and the very air seemed to vibrate with the fierceness of his blows. The hammer rose and fell, rose and fell, pounding, pounding, pounding the drill head into the unforgiving, unyielding rock. The rhythm of the pounding hammer entered Hannah's blood, and a warm, heavy feeling spread over her. It was the rhythm of a brass bed's headboard banging against the wall, she thought, of a woman being taken again and again and again by a strong, lusty man until she wanted to scream from the agony and the pleasure of it.
The feeling became so intense that Hannah was relieved when the timekeeper touched Drew on the shoulder and once again the brothers changed places.
Jere tossed his head, flicking sweat out of his eyes, and grunted with exertion as he hefted the heavy sledge high in the air. Something or someone down by the river must have caught his attention, for his gaze flashed in that direction for just an instant, but that brief lapse in concentration was enough to affect his swing. The hammer came down without hesitation, but it didn't hit the drill head true. Instead, sixteen pounds of steel slid down the length of the bull prick with a loud scream and smashed into the hand that held it.
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