Heart of the West (65 page)

"I need a bath," he said. "I'm not exactly smelling as sweet as the last rose of summer right now."

"I thought you might want to stay the night—'cause of your brother, you know, in case he needs you." She waved a hand at the peacock screen, behind which was a galvanized tub already filled. "I've a bath all drawn, and one of the girls is going to be fetching us some supper over from the hotel restaurant later."

He hesitated, then shrugged. "Aye, sure. Why not, then?" She let out a low, shaky breath. "Want a jolt first?" He turned and shut the door behind him, leaning against it. "Aye. Why not that as well?"

She went to a table that held a decanter of aged Kentucky bourbon and two glasses. The table was already set with white linen and silver. She wished she hadn't done it now. It made her look too anxious.

She poured the drinks and then turned with one in her hand, nearly slamming into him. "My, you startled me!"

He slipped the glass from her hand, their fingers brushing. He stroked the glass along her jaw, back and forth, back and forth, and the feel of it was smooth and warm and sent a tremor low and deep into her belly. "Here's to wives and sweethearts," he said, the old Cornish sailor's toast that he made every time. But instead of lifting the whiskey to his lips, he lowered his mouth to hers.

He kissed her long and deep, wet and lazy. And it was such sweet, sweet pain.

He released her mouth, and she turned quickly away from him. She snatched up her glass and drank deeply. The bite of the whiskey was strong, but not as strong as his kiss had been.

"There's been talk that you've been stepping out with Miss Luly Maine," she said and immediately wanted to curse herself. Lord, despite all her good intentions, here she was sounding just like a nagging wife. Like all those smothering, carping wives whose men had come to her for a little fun and comfort during her whoring days.

She turned back to look at him. His eyes and face were empty.

"She asked me to go with her to the church dance," he said, and she heard the care he was taking to sound nonchalant. "It would've been rude of me to refuse."

She was losing him. She had let herself fall in love again, and she was losing him. So many times she had told herself that when this moment came she would accept it. But it was happening too soon.

She tried to talk around the knot in her throat. "You've a fine nerve, Drew Scully, showing your face anywhere near a church."

"Now, there's where you're wrong, Hannah m'girl," he said with a sudden unholy smile. "When I was a lad I had it in my mind to be a vicar."

She actually managed a credible laugh. "Land, how the angels must've wept when the devil changed your mind."

He took the two steps necessary to bring himself up next to her. For a moment he just looked at her. Then slowly he lifted his hand and brought it to her mouth. He rubbed his fingers over her lips. She tightened every muscle in her body to keep those lips from trembling.

"I'm not stepping out with Luly," he said.

Carve that one in marble, she thought. And it didn't matter anyway what he said. She was out there waiting for him—if not Luly Maine, then some other girl. This girl who would be young and pretty, and as sweet as a sugar-tit. This girl he would fall in love with and marry and have babies with, make a family and happily-ever-after with. And he would be happy with this girl. In the way that men could be happy with young and pretty and sweet.

He set his whiskey glass down and began to shed his clothes. He stretched, flexing a back strapped with muscle. The lamplight bronzed his skin with a soft, warm glow. He crossed the room to the tub, his stride long and rangy.

He was so young and strong and beautiful.

And she was a fool.

She followed him behind the peacock screen. She knelt before the tub and took the soap from his scarred hands. She rubbed her palms over the planes of his chest, across the ridges of muscle and the soft dark hair that narrowed down to a flat, taut belly. His skin was soft, yet the muscle beneath was so hard. If she balled up her fists and beat against the muscle that encased his heart, she would only end up breaking her hands.

She hadn't even realized she was crying until her tears began to pock the soapsuds. They kept coming one after the other, and she couldn't stop them from falling any more than she could have stopped breathing.

He touched her face, gathering up the tears with his fingers. "What're these for?"

She turned her face away. "They're nothing. Just dismals in the mind is all."

He slid his hand beneath the fall of her hair, pressing the heel of his palm into the side of her neck and forcing her head back around until she was looking into his eyes. His eyes that for once were not flat and hard but soft and deep. Deep as wells, and she felt herself drowning in them, losing her will and her pride, being washed away by the tears that wouldn't stop. "Drew... don't leave me."

"Ah, Hannah love, I'll not be leaving you. I love you."

She squeezed her eyes shut. In the silence of the room, she could hear the soft tick of the ormolu mantel clock. The sound of time passing between them. He would leave her, tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. But he
would
leave her one day, she knew.

There was talk that year in the RainDance country, as summer ended and the days grew shorter and the nights got colder-talk of how the beavers were piling up huge quantities of willow saplings for their winter food. Of how the muskrats were building their lodges twice as thick as usual. And how the snow-shoe rabbits had all turned white weeks before time. Talk about how it was fixing to be a long, cold winter.

The first big snowstorm arrived before October did, a regular blue norther.

It had already been snowing for ten hours when the Scully brothers took the elevator cage down into the Four Jacks for the afternoon shift. Drew stepped out into the drift and shuddered. But it was only his body's reaction to the blast-furnace intensity of the heat. He could tell within the first few moments that the smooth, thick, smothering blackness of the earth wouldn't swallow up his manhood this day. It would be a day when he wouldn't spew up his food or sweat through his shirt before he'd even stepped off the cage.

Oh, the fear was there, of course, as always, but it was only a dull ache beneath the surface of his thoughts, and he could control it. It was an odd thing, but ever since Hannah had given him the polished claw of a grizzly bear as a safekeeper, he'd mostly been able to keep the terror at bay.

He thought of her during most of every shift, although he didn't always go to her afterward. Sometimes what he felt for her was so intense he made himself stay away. Some nights, after they made love, the words would push up against his lips, words of marriage. But he always let them die unspoken. He had nothing to offer her. She was rich and a property owner, and he made three dollars a day digging holes in the ground like a bloody mole. It was true she had a tarnished past, but he knew her to be all that was fine in a woman. Generous and loving, honorable and true. And she was the bravest person he'd ever met. Whereas Drew himself... he wasn't even half of a man. A bloody coward, scared of the dark.

"Still snowing up there?" The voice came at them from the edge of the lantern light. It was one of the muckers just coming off shift. The man tossed his stick into a toolbox and stretched, reaching for air and cracking his knuckles.

"Coming down thick enough to smother a duck," Jere said, laughter in his voice, and Drew smiled. His brother had been a happy man ever since fate had removed poor Sam Woo from his beloved Lily's life. At least she smiled at him now and traded words with him from time to time. But he hadn't gotten any closer to her bed than the coyote was to the moon it bayed at every night. She had given Jere a good-luck talisman, though, a jade disk with Chinese chicken scratches carved into it.

"Shit, I'd almost rather stay down here," the mucker said as he stepped into the cage. "A man can get pneumonia coming up from the broiling hot shafts into a fucking blizzard."

The cage was snatched up into the blackness of the shaft with a clang of bells and a clatter of metal. The drift was filled with the roar of ore sliding down the chutes and the crank of the windlass, the air heavy with the too-sweet smoke from the morning shift's blasting.

They walked bow-backed like gnomes down a narrow winze that after fifty yards spilled into a big cavern. A half-dozen muckers were already at work there, shoveling freshly blasted rubble into a short train of hopper cars.

Drew lifted a hand in greeting to an Irishman and fellow blaster by the name of Collins, who sat high on a scaffold in the cavern, drilling into the rock face up near the ceiling. The rim of the man's head lamp shone above them like a new moon in a black night. Most of the bigger mines had brought in compressed-air drills, machines that made blasting holes at a prodigious rate, faster than any double-jack drilling team could ever manage. Such progress hadn't reached the Four Jacks yet, but when those drills did arrive, Drew thought he would hate the mine even more. At least there was some pride in being a faceman and master blaster. There was none in being a mucker or car pusher.

The man on the scaffold called something down to them, but Drew couldn't hear it over the din made by the muckers.

They left the excavation by way of a newly cut drift. The walls were water-slimed here, the air faintly fetid, like a long-empty grave. Cold sweat broke out on Drew's scalp and a flutter of the old familiar panic stirred in his guts, but he beat it down.
Hannah,
he thought, conjuring up her image. He rubbed his finger once lightly over the grizzly's claw that hung from the cord around his neck.

When they reached a split in the drift, Jere bore to the left, saying, "The gaffer told me we're to blast that new crosscut off the west stope today."

Drew touched his brother on the shoulder. "You go on, then, I need to take a piss."

While Jere continued toward the left, Drew went off to the right, beyond the protection of the new shoring timbers. He felt his way to the portal of a freshly blasted shaft, stepping over the muck that had yet to be cleared. As he urinated into the hole, a rank smell came up out of the deep earth, of stagnant air and dead things, and the fear surged into his throat like hot vomit. He swallowed it down, but his head bobbed with the effort and the light from his carbide lamp struck off the quartz crystal in the newly exposed rock, making it glitter.

He noticed a large patch of soft, pale green among the quartz. He turned his head slowly. The rock glowed iridescently as it caught the beam of his lamp.

He went out into the drift and fetched an oil lantern, then came back. He held the lantern close to the face, moving it back and forth over the patch of iridescent green. He leaned closer, his boot knocking an avalanche of gravel into the shaft.

He hung the lantern on a protruding lip of stone and pulled his hammer and drill out of his belt. He set the bit of the drill into the rock face and tapped it with the sledge, using just enough force to knock a piece loose. The rock was hot, but not so hot that it burned his hand, although a stream of steamy water trickled out the fresh scar he'd left in the face.

He heard a step behind him and he whirled, dropping the rock into his gum boot. It was the Irishman Collins, down off his scaffold, and if the man had seen what Drew had done, he didn't let on. More than a few of the miners did a bit of high-grading—bringing up a pound or two of silver ore in their dinner pails and boots every day.

"Where's your brother?" Collins said.

"He's drilling the face of that new crosscut. Why?"

Even in the dim light, Drew saw the miner's eyes suddenly widen. "Didn't you hear what I said, man? There's a sleeper on that face. The last shift left a missed hole that's yet to be picked out."

"Jere!" Drew screamed and began to run.

He scrambled over the rough rock, his shouts of warning bouncing down the drift. His shadow lurched ahead of him as Collins followed behind, so close he could feel the man's hot breath on his neck. The earth began to close in on him, squeezing, crushing, smothering him. He wanted to fall to the ground and curl up into a tight ball to keep the thick and heavy darkness from strangling the life out of him. But he kept running.

At last he saw Jere, the sweating muscles of his brother's bare back glistening in the lantern light. Jere must have heard the noise he was making, for he turned his head just as he pulled back his arm to strike the drill head, and his smile glimmered in the dark oval of his face.

"Jere,
no!"
Drew screamed. He watched with horror as his brother swung his face back around to the rock and the hammer began its downward descent. It seemed to move with a strange slowness, as if it were being pushed through air as thick as treacle. It moved so slowly that Drew thought he could stop it if he could just get there in time, and he tried to lunge across the space that still separated him from his brother. He stumbled over a pile of muck, twisting his knee violently and falling onto his side with a bone-rattling jar.

He saw Collins run past him, and in the next instant he saw Jere's sledge strike home. A tongue of flame shot out of the rock face, followed by a flash of brilliant white light. Shards of rock came hurtling out of a black hole in the earth, and a blast smacked against his ears like a sharp clap of thunder.

He opened his eyes onto a darkness that was as thick and absolute as the darkness on the other side of hell, and he would have screamed if he'd had the breath. He felt a shifting in the piles of shattered rock around him, and then the darkness was pushed away by the spill of a half-dozen carbide lamps and oil lanterns. Smoke clouded the air, and an unearthly stillness smothered his ears. He turned his head and saw a ragged bone thrusting through the bloody flesh of his arm, but strangely he felt no pain. He could feel nothing at all except the wild thumping of his own heart. And a screaming. He could
feel
the screaming, as if it were a fine wire that someone was plucking.