Blaze (51 page)

BY THE time a subdued and shaken Blaze was helped into the hired carriage early in the morning of the third day after the blast, Hazard had been working already for five hours. In his best estimate, the east drift at its high point was eight feet underground. He'd chipped away two feet the day before and then had to rig up some scaffolding. He planned on proceeding with as little rest as possible from now on, for he knew he'd become weaker with every day. And at the rate he was progressing, it was moot which would give out first: the greenstone or his strength.

It kept him going through the pain and the agonizing doubts, bolstering the despondency when he didn't think he could raise his arm above his head one more time. It gave him the strength each time he pushed "one more time." It mitigated the pain and breathed fresh life in him when he fell exhausted to the rough scaffold floor. Thoughts of Blaze and their unborn child kept him alive.

wasn't dragged away crying and screaming; she left Diamond City an unsubstantial shadow of herself.

But on the stage to the railhead, she refused to speak to her mother or Yancy, a latent anger dwelling deep below the vivid grief of her loss. And once she was settled in her bed on her father's rail car, she told Hannah very quietly, in a voice that wouldn't have carried two feet on a still night, "They're not going to win."

"That's my girl talking," Hannah said, unconsciously putting out a weathered hand to stroke Blaze's hair. "That's my baby girl." And tears shone in her eyes at the first spark of life she'd seen since Diamond City. "Your dad would'na want that trash holding court in your mother's drawing room to have his money."

"I know," Blaze quietly said. "And he won't. It's all mine, you know." And then Blaze's eyes went lifeless for a brief moment; it could have helped Hazard so. But it was too late now… for him… for them. Tears started welling up.

"She'll be surprised," Hannah quickly declared, attempting to deflect the direction of Blaze's thoughts.

"It doesn't matter, though, does it?" Blaze was morose, defeated, back in the dim, shadowy purgatory of her torment.

Hannah's heart bled to see the life and energy slip away from the young woman she'd known always volatile and gay. She hadn't intended mentioning it, and she hesitated a brief second even now, not wishing to intrude on Blaze's privacy. But when the tears spilled over the pale cheeks and slid down the small face, its expression indicative of retreat from everything but pain, Hannah spoke, "It matters for the wee one, now, don't it?"

Blaze's gaze shot upward.

"You don't want them two in there"—a jerk of her greying head indicated Millicent's drawing room—"taking away your baby's birthright. And they will, child, as sure as I breathe, if you just lay there like you been doing."

"How do you know?" Blaze whispered.

"That's a silly question, child. I've been dressing and undressing you for nineteen years."

"Do you think they know?" Blaze struggled up to a seated position, and a touch of color rose on her cheekbones, too prominent now after ten days of scant appetite.

"Not yet they don't, but nature will tell them soon enough. Now you can lay there and cry your eyes out, or you can get up and make sure your babe has the silver spoon it's entitled to when it's born."

"They'd try, wouldn't they…"

"Sure as the sun rises each day."

Blaze fingered the Irish lace bordering the linen sheet. "I suppose they'd say I wasn't married."

"That for starters and anything else they could think of."

"But I can name anyone I wish my heir." Her back had straightened and a healthy pink suffused her cheeks. "It's my money, after all."

"You're going to have to have your wits about you, child, to see that it stays that way."

Blaze looked point-blank at Hannah and there was fire again in her sapphire glance. "In that case," she said, throwing the covers aside, "I'd better get dressed. And then," she went on, striding toward the small rosewood desk as her old energy returned, "I think I'll rewrite my will. Is there still paper here? There is." And she turned to smile at Hannah. The first smile in ten days. "Find me a dress, a pen, and another witness, Hannah. Bring Cookie. He can be trusted."

The Blaze who stepped off the train in Boston was starkly different from the one who'd boarded it in Nebraska. Millicent and Yancy should have noticed, but they were too deep in their own plans, plans to spend Colonel Braddock's inheritance. They failed to notice the light, determined step of the young woman proceeding them down the platform.

It was their first mistake in the battle about to erupt.

WHEN Hazard's last candle went out for the last time, he leaned against the wall of the narrow shaft he was chipping out of the greenstone and allowed the first wave of fear to subside. Then he opened and shut his eyes twice. No difference. Pitch damp blackness either way. It took him another length of time to beat back the second wave of panic. He forced himself to breathe calmly; he ran through the calculated assessment of the days he'd been entombed; he tallied the number of feet he'd raised the shaft through the ceiling of the east drift and then, pressing down the fiends of alarm, he reckoned the equation again.

There should be fresh air and light and green grass and freedom no more than a foot or two above his head. He was being conservative in his estimate to cushion the possible disappointment. But his gut feeling said more like ten inches.

His grip on the pickaxe began slipping as his palm sweated from fear and apprehension—the dreaded possibility of being wrong in his calculations. He hadn't eaten in five days, and he needed more rest between work spells now. He'd hallucinated the last time he'd dozed off and thought he was on the Blue Mountains until he woke to the dank underground smell and the brief touch of fear. He counted now when he chipped away, forcing himself to swing thirty times before resting. He made it to thirty each time though a clenching of teeth accompanied the last few strokes. And once, when he'd missed the rock and his ax had slipped onto his broken arm, the scream had echoed for endless moments down the underground tunnels.

He'd had to rest then, and the arm throbbed in a steady, undiminished agony after that. He was only able to swing ten times now before the pain forced him to stop. He almost sobbed in frustration. It would take even longer with his slowed pace; time he didn't have. Time was his enemy as much as Yancy Strahan had been. And where Yancy had failed, sheer attrition might not.

He didn't dare breathe when he felt the faint, thin waver of sweet air. If he was hallucinating again, he thought… and held his breath waiting, hoping that if it was a hallucination, it would quickly pass before hope became too vivid. So he was holding his breath when he felt the second whisper of air. Exhaling slowly, he murmured, "Blaze," very, very softly.

The pickax swung up a second later and he didn't count this time, didn't count and didn't stop, his body and mind energized by the breath of freedom, the breath of life a few scant inches away. The dense greenstone gave way reluctantly, but once he broke through it, the layer of sand and topsoil poured in.

He'd been working above his head, so there was still the problem of pulling himself up four feet of shaft, but it was a problem he was more than pleased to confront. His left arm was useless, his left shoulder too painful to put any weight on, so he cautiously inched his way upward in a pressure climb, his right shoulder taking the entire antipodal force of his legs buckled almost double in the narrow shaft. He ascended by millimeters rather than inches, keeping even pressure on his feet and good right shoulder. He rose laboriously, ever conscious of the damp rock walls. He didn't move one foot until the other was securely placed. If he fell, he might tumble on his broken arm and it could be hours again until he was able to move. He couldn't afford the fall, not only in terms of time lost, but also because he was running on sheer adrenaline, and if he had to reclimb the shaft, he might not have the strength. To die within sight of freedom would be a torture too painful to bear. Go slowly, his mind cautioned. Don't slide, his inner voice directed. Two more feet, his brain deliberately noted. Do not rush. When his shoulders broke the surface, his heart was beating so thunderously he could taste the drumming in his mouth. But he forced his feet to continue their slow climb up the shaft sides until his right arm was free. And then he hauled himself up and out of the shaft in one superhuman surge of power and lay panting on the buffalo grass, a faint breeze cooling the perspiration covering his body. Placing the palm of his good right hand on the cool ground, he talked to the earth spirits, could feel their presence, thanked them for his release. Then softly he sang his spirit song, his deep rich voice drifting like the silvery night air over the mountain. When his song was finished, he rose, slowly, painfully, turned toward the cabin, and began the long descent.

HE STOOD in the open doorway, silhouetted against the moonlight. The door had been wrenched from its hinges and lay half in and half out of the cabin. Everything had been vandalized. Hired thugs operated that way; they had an urgent need to break and crush and maim and kill—a hostility Hazard had never understood. He'd been hoping his Navy Colts or Henry repeater would still be there. They weren't. Nothing remained in one piece. What was too large to cart away had been broken. The table was smashed along with the chairs. Even the heavy stove had been tipped over and the chimney pipe hung like a weary stalactite from the ceiling into nothingness.

A melancholy sadness overwhelmed him. He and

Blaze had lived the first days of their love in this room, now open to the weather and animals and moonlight streaming undisturbed through the broken window openings. Stepping over food and broken glass strewn across the floor, he searched the rubble for some clue that might tell him of Blaze.

He walked by it twice before a beam of moonlight caught a corner of the envelope, lying flat on the man-tlepiece.

He took it down, with a gunpowder- and dirt-blackened hand, leaving dark smudges on the paper, and brought it over to the open doorway. It wasn't sealed. He pulled out the single sheet of paper with his teeth and dropped the envelope. Unfolding the note he read:

Hazard,

I don't make a good hostage. I told you that. I'm going back to Boston.

//right Blaze

From his moon-gilded hair to the bloodied wound at his throat, Hazard went pale. Stupefied, he read it again. And again. He read each word individually as though somehow the message would alter with a change of rhythm. But the pitiless words were callously fixed on the page, mocking him, revealing all as counterfeit between himself and the beautiful society lady from Boston. He felt cold, chilled to the marrow by an icy rage and then a great boiling tide of anger, surging slowly at first, built in momentum to uncurbed violence at the thought of his entombment. So the millionaire's daughter had gotten tired of playing the noble savage in the wilderness. He'd somehow always thought she would—the bitch. She'd gotten tired and decided to go back to Boston. Not very decent of her to try to kill him in the bargain.

But come to think of it, his death would neatly tie the bow on Buhl Mining Company's package of Montana wealth. It would be easy enough to settle his claims on his child. No messy transfers of title, no complicated litigation over scraps of paper like the one Yancy had tried to make him sign. Just a neatly inherited parcel of gold-rich land. He'd never imagined, of course, how premeditated the child's conception was. It was staggering even to contemplate. Was it possible Blaze would go to such lengths to secure the land? He didn't like to contemplate such base deception. But he'd seen such corruption over gold—usually other people's gold—so he knew the possibility existed, however inconceivable.

It was too bad, he malevolently thought, dropping the note on the floor and grinding it into the rubble with his heel, their program wouldn't be so easily implemented. As soon as his arm healed, he intended reopening the mine. And this time, no one would catch him unaware.

The forty-minute trip into Diamond City took him four hours, his body remaining erect through sheer force of will. No guards were posted around Rose's anymore, he noted. With all the loose ends neatly tied, Yancy had called off the dogs.

How convenient.

When he walked into Rose's parlor a few minutes later, he had only enough strength to cover the distance to the nearest chair. Falling into it, he fainted, and Rose found him that way a moment later. Bloody, dirty, his arm in a makeshift sling, thinner than she'd ever seen him, his head lolling back so awkwardly that for a terrifying moment she thought him dead. But she saw him breathe at last and her frightened heart slowed its racing.

So Yancy Strahan had been wrong. Even a hundred armed ruffians hadn't been able to kill Hazard. And then her heart sank.

What was he going to do when he regained consciousness and discovered Blaze Braddock had gone back to Boston?

But when he did wake late the next morning, bathed, bandaged, and lying between crisp clean sheets, Rose told him; he only said, his voice cooled to its usual irony, "I know. I only wish the pampered princess had left with less fanfare."

BUT in the early days of Hazard's recuperation, when he still slept a lot and started putting back the weight he'd lost during the days without food, Rose would come upon him unaware at times and always glimpse the same brooding look.

When he saw her, his expression would instantly alter and he'd become the same Jon Hazard she'd always known. But Rose felt he wasn't indifferent to Blaze— hadn't been, at least—and the dark, brooding look was persistent in his solitude.

She finally said, the day he stood outside on the balcony for the first time, "Do you want to talk about it?" He'd been looking toward the mountains, his profile stony. He turned to her when she spoke, his eyes startled, as if he'd forgotten she was there, and after a short silence replied, "It's going to take a lot of work to open up the mine again."

"I didn't mean that."

The harshness in his features eased. "I owe you a lot, Rose: You've taken me in twice now."

"You don't owe me anything, Hazard. If I didn't want to, I wouldn't. Are you going after her?"

There was a short silence again as his brain assessed possible answers; then one dark brow rose. "Are you going to give in," he asked pleasantly, "to that young clerk who's had moon eyes for you so long?"

"Don't change the subject, Hazard."

He shrugged and ignored her with a mocking, tantalizing smile. "He's been giving me threatening looks for days now. I expect to be called out any time by the pup."

"The pup, as you call him, is only four years younger than you."

Hazard's eyes opened a fraction, and while his voice was light, his dark eyes held the fragments of melancholy. He was simply smiling and talking to forestall her questions. "He seems young."

"He is young, but so are you."

At that he snorted, with a delicacy that reminded her nostalgically of all the other sensual delicacies in his nature. With half-ironic tenderness he said, "So you've taken pity on him?"

"Not that way."

"What other way is there? In my experience—"

"He's led a sheltered life, Hazard."

"And you and I haven't." It was both mocking query and pressing statement.

"No."

Hazard smiled—an ironic, leisurely smile—when he thought of all the living and all the dying he'd seen in his own short life: careless, coarse, brutal. Next to that even Rose's experience paled. "You're very sweet, Rose," he said like a gentle uncle, although they were of an equal age. "You should be nice to that young clerk."

"Like you should be to your woman. Why don't you go and bring her back?"

Hazard's eyes met her violet scrutiny and held it for a considered moment. When he answered, his voice was controlled and mild. "She was a pawn in the game. Only a pawn in a game they lost, for I'm still alive. That makes the pawn forfeit now—to me, to them, to everyone. No, I won't be needing her."

"I'm not talking about the mine or a game, Hazard."

His mouth lifted in what should have been a smile, but his eyes were fatalistically cold. "You're too romantic, Rose. That's all it ever was… only the mine and the game—Buhl versus Jon Hazard Black. Why would I be interested in going after her anymore? I have my mine and Buhl's got her back."

"You're sure?"

"Well, if I'm lucky," he said, smiling, "they won't give my address to the next female hired to deliver their sales pitch. The last one was more trouble than she was worth."

"Forget the mine, Hazard. Are you sure about Blaze Braddock?" Rose wanted to believe more than she didn't that Hazard had no interest in going after Blaze, for selfish reasons of her own. But she'd been dealing in human emotions too long to accept Hazard's answer at face value.