Page 18 of Inventions of the Heart

CHAPTER

FIVE

LET’S NOT LEAVE THE HORSES IN THE CORRAL.”Michelle looked around at the sad little remnants of their mission field. The corral was one of the few things still standing in Purgatory.

They walked into the woods, Michelle leading. The woods swallowed them up. Tall oaks and spreading firs. The ground heavy with scrub brush and centuries of fallen limbs.

“The ground is dry up here, too,” Zane said.

They’d ridden miles today, and signs of dried-up ponds and withered grass were everywhere. She had some ideas about that, but she hadn’t had time to work them out, let alone convince Zane to try them. That should have probably come before gold mining.

She’d talk with him about it on their ride home.

Michelle tethered her mare. She’d brought a halter along so the horse could graze without the bit in its mouth. She stripped the saddle off and plunked it and the saddlebags on the ground.

Zane rode his big buckskin stallion and got him settled infor a day of grazing just like Michelle had done. Michelle knew he saw her handling the heavy saddle as men’s work. But if he wanted to take over, he was going to have to move faster.

Michelle unpacked a pickax, hammer, and chisel. She should have added more tools once he decided to come along.

She handed the pickax to him and pointed to a spot a few paces away from her. The better not to accidentally ax her.

“Get to work, cowboy. We don’t want to spend all day on this.”

She set her chisel in place and struck it. A rock the size of her fist flew off. She picked it up and hammered on it.

Zane swung his ax.

The quartz seemed eager to shatter. When it did, Michelle saw gold. Rich and heavy. Wonderful and worrisome.

Zane didn’t seem too interested in cleaning up the gold he chopped loose. Instead, he just kept hacking.

A couple of hours later, Michelle looked at the mountain of rocks Zane had scattered all around. All veined with gold.

“Time for a break.”

Zane, ready for another swing, relaxed and straightened away. He looked at the pile he’d made. “I just wanted to see how deep the gold goes.”

He met her eyes.

She grinned. “It goes really deep.”

She got bread and cheese out of her saddlebags. She’d brought apples and cookies, too. When Zane announced his plans to come along, she’d gone back and doubled the food. She’d thrown in a good supply of beef jerky, too, which they kept on hand at Zane’s house. There was enough to feed them both a meal right now and one later if they worked through supper.

She set it out as he came over with his canteen.

“What are we going to do, Zane?” Michelle sat on a downed log with her back to the gold they’d dug.

Zane settled in beside her and began eating. He chewed thoughtfully, and she didn’t rush him. She liked when people were thoughtful.

He finished a whole slice of bread and half the slice of cheese she’d handed him. After a long drink from his canteen, he said, “I want you to understand that I respect your ability to run this for me. My objection to it is that I think the men who come to work this gold will be dangerous. Even if they don’t run mad and turn thieves and killers, you’d be subjected to foul language and unsavory approaches by men with no decent thoughts in their minds. I can hire the best men I can find. But you remember that man from Caleb’s mission group who hit his wife when he was drunk?”

“I saw that happen to a couple of women.” It still shocked her, and she wished she’d never seen such a thing. She suspected Edgar had struck her mother in private, but it was a different experience to actually see it happen.

“Well, I talked with him later. So did Caleb. He seemed like a decent enough man. When his head was clear, he was nice to his wife, and he spent time paying attention to his children.” Zane shrugged one shoulder. “That man, behaving as he was when I talked to him, was one I’d’ve hired. Between gold and whiskey, add in poverty and stress when you’ve come home with no food for your family and your paycheck drunk away ... you can’t just look at a man, talk to him, and judge how he’ll behave once he’s faced hard times or when he’s got gold within his grasp.”

Michelle twisted around to stare at the rock pile they’dmade. Michelle had hammered hers up and stripped the gold from the quartz. She had a pile of nuggets that might equal two or three pounds of gold. Zane had a knee-deep pile of gold-veined quartz around him but had yet to hammer out the gold.

“Assuming the quantity of rock you’ve loosened contains an amount of gold equal to what I’ve been knocking away, I’d say we have nearly seven pounds of gold. Possibly ten. That’s one hundred and sixty ounces of gold at twenty dollars an ounce. That’s three thousand two hundred dollars’ worth of gold.”

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