Miner's Daughter (2 page)

“You said it.”

Although he didn’t want to leave the
fan-cooled room of the Mojave Inn and walk out into the blistering
desert air, Tony knew where his duty lay, and he intended to do it.
He was damned well going to do it in shirtsleeves, though. This
weather was enough to drive a man out of his mind.

Mari Pottersby sat at the one table in her
cabin and idly stroked Tiny’s gigantic head as she went through a
stack of unpaid bills for the umpteenth time. She couldn’t pay
them. Her heart felt heavy

“Shoot, Tiny, it’s going to kill me to lose
Dad’s dream. Maybe I ought to rent the Marigold to those stupid
picture people. It would help to pay a few of these.” She flipped a
couple of the bills. She felt like such a failure.

“Dad was sure there was silver in there,
Tiny.” A tear crept past the rigid guard she endeavored to keep on
her too-emotional nature and slid down her cheek. She wiped it away
angrily. She considered her tendency to be soft-hearted a
tremendous handicap to her ambitions. Rich people could afford to
be mushy. She couldn’t.

Tiny wagged his tail, bumping a chair and
sending it toppling over with a crash. He jumped, gave what, for
him, was a yip of alarm, but which sounded like thunder, and laid
his head in Mari’s lap with .a whimper.

“Don’t be scared, Tiny. It’ll all be okay.”
She sighed heavily and wished she believed it.

A knock came at the door. Mari frowned. Tiny
leaped to his feet, almost tipping the table over, bounded to the
door, and commenced emitting a series of cavernous barks. Mari
heard a man’s voice say, “Good God,” and would have smiled if she
hadn’t been so down in the dumps. It was probably those blasted
Peerless people again.

She felt a little guilty about having treated
that nice Martin Tafft so uncivilly, but his assumption about her
mine had offended her. After he’d left, she’d taken a critical look
at it, however, and realized he’d had some justification for the
conclusion he’d reached. The place was shabby and ugly, and it
appeared every ounce as unprofitable as it was.

The entrance into the mine itself looked like
nothing more than a hole in the side of a: smallish hill. It had
been built by her father in the late 1880s. The Marigold Mine had
been his baby. His dream. His silver-edged hope for wealth and
security.

He’d never achieved either. Mari’s mother, a
longsuffering woman who hadn’t lasted long after Mari’s birth, had
agreed to name their daughter after the mine, but Mari imagined her
heart wasn’t in it. She’d been worn down by the hardships she’d
agreed to endure in this hellhole of a desert for love of Mari’s
father. Mari guessed she had inherited her father’s grit. Or maybe
she’d just learned to adapt since she’d never known anything else.
Mari didn’t mind the desert at all.

She’d sure not benefitted in any other way
from her father’s obsession with the Marigold Mine. He’d never once
struck anything worth mentioning, and he’d refused to sell out to
the borax barons when the borax craze hit the Mojave. He was out
for silver, and he wasn’t flexible enough to alter his dream to
suit reality. Mari had found his attitude frustrating, especially
when the two of them had been forced to exist on nothing but beans
and salt pork for months at a time.

And now she was being as pigheaded as her
father. Feeling even more gloomy than usual, she held Tiny’s collar
and opened the door of the rough-hewn, one-room cabin in which
she’d lived for every one of her nineteen years.

Her mouth fell open. Tiny lunged forward, and
she managed to keep a grip on his collar, but she did it
automatically. Her brain had suffered too great a shock allow her
to think.

She’d expected Mr. Tafft again. Maybe another
guy from the pictures.

She hadn’t expected Adonis to show up at her
door, sweating and looking cross. She jumped when she heard
Martin’s voice, since she hadn’t noticed him standing beside the
god.

“Miss Pottersby, please allow me to introduce
you Mr. Anthony Ewing. Mr. Ewing is one of the primary investors in
Lucky Strike
.”

“How do you do,” the god said. He sounded as
if he didn’t really want to know and had only said the words by
rote. His brow was furrowed, his tanned face dripped perspiration,
and he was obviously uncomfortable. “It’s my father who’s the
investor, Miss Pottersby. I’m only his agent here on the West
Coast. He’s in New York.”

She swallowed and managed to say, “Oh.”

Martin smiled kindly “May we come in, Miss
Pottersby? It’s blazing hot out here.”

She stepped back, suddenly realizing she’d
been gaping. “Sure,” she said. “It’s hot in here, too.”

Martin’s smile didn’t waver. Mr. Ewing looked
even grouchier at her words. Both men entered the bantam cabin.
Fortunately, Mari had acquired chairs over the years, mostly from
kindhearted neighbors who’d felt sorry for her. She didn’t like
people feeling sorry for her, but she’d accepted the chairs since
she needed them. Also, she possessed a sociable nature, and people
sometimes dropped by, so the chairs came in handy.

“You can put your hats on the rack over
there,” she said, regaining some of her composure. It was silly of
her to react this strongly to the presence of a handsome man.
Shoot, Martin himself was a looker, and he hadn’t affected her this
way.

“Thanks,” Martin said in his friendly
tone.

The other man didn’t speak, but both hung
their hats on the rack. It had been fashioned decades earlier from
longhorn cattle horns and was as ugly as the back of a barn, but
her father had brought it with him from Texas, and Mari loved it
for his sake. He’d once told her that encountering furniture made
out of cattle horns was a hazard of the ranching life. He’d been
such a jolly man. Mari always felt as if she were dishonoring him
when she occasionally entertained the notion that it would have
been nice if he’d been practical as well.

“Would you like some water?” she asked the
two men. “It’s cold.”

“Love some,” said Martin. “Thank you.” He
maintained his smile even in the oven-like heat of the cabin.

“Yes. Thank you.” Adonis hadn’t smiled
yet.

For the first time in a long time, Mari felt
puny and embarrassed about her circumstances. She despised herself
for it, and felt an overpowering urge to apologize for the way she
lived—which was idiotic. Silently commanding herself to cheer up,
she said, “I don’t have electricity, but there’s a real good
icebox.”

Neither man spoke, and she felt silly. She
also felt their eyes on her as she went to the part of her home
that passed as the kitchen and got out three old, cracked jelly
glasses from the cupboard (the cupboard had come to her from Mr.
Francis Marion Smith, when he’d built a huge house after he got
rich mining borax). Then she opened the icebox door and retrieved
the pitcher of water she always kept in there.

As she poured the water, she ruthlessly
banished her feelings of inferiority. Blast it, she wasn’t
inferior. She was merely poor, and there was nothing wrong in
that.

Except that it was mighty uncomfortable
sometimes.

Squaring her shoulders, she brought the men
their water and went back for her own. Because she felt edgy, she
leaned against the icebox and sipped at her water from there. She
figured she’d feel stronger if she continued to stand while they
sat.

“What brings you back here, Mr. Tafft?” She
tried not to stare at Mr. Ewing, because she didn’t want to give
him the satisfaction of knowing his looks intrigued her. He was
probably one of those rich, handsome men who were used to women
fainting at their feet.

Martin took another gulp of water, cleared
his throat, and his smile underwent a subtle change. It now looked
apologetic. Mari’s heart went cold in spite of the weather, which
was somewhere in the lower hundreds.

“I’m afraid we went through the court records
on the Marigold Mine, Miss Pottersby.”

Blast. Mari’s own smile slipped sideways.
“You’re afraid of that, are you?” She was the one who ought to be
afraid. And she was.

“Yes. Um, I suppose you know what we found.”
Martin’s glance strayed to Tiny, who had flopped down next to Mari
and laid his head on her left foot. The dog took up almost a third
of the cabin when he sprawled like that.

A stab of guilt struck Mari when she
realized. Martin was worried that she’d turn Tiny on him. She’d
never do such a thing, but he couldn’t know it. Even if she did,
Tiny wouldn’t hurt a fly. He might conceivably knock someone over
from an excess of friendliness and then drown him by licking his
face, but that was all.

“Suppose you tell me,” she said, knowing it
was silly to try to evade the inevitable by verbally sparring with
the man.

“This is ridiculous.” Tony Ewing shoved
himself back from Mari’s raggedy table and stood.

Worried by the sudden movement and the tone
of the man’s voice, Tiny lifted his head and uttered a low rumble.
Tony eyed the dog suspiciously.

“Is it?” Mari asked, trying to sound
cynically amused. There was nothing the least bit amusing about
this situation. She supposed she should save her cynicism for
something not so perilous, but his nasty tone riled her.

“You know it is,” Ewing went on angrily. “You
owe back taxes on this place, and obviously you don’t have a cent
with which to pay them. You’re going to lose the mine pretty soon,
whether there’s silver in it or not. And it’s unmistakable to
everyone, except possibly you, that you’ll never find any silver.
There isn’t any, or you and your father would have found it thirty
years ago. I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn.”

Mari didn’t point out that she couldn’t have
found anything thirty years ago, since she was only nineteen years
old. She also didn’t know why she was being so intractable. Except
that the Marigold Mine had been her father’s whole life. He’d lived
in it. He’d died in it. He’d bequeathed it to her after exacting a
promise that she’d never abandon it. Unfortunately, he hadn’t left
her the wherewithal to keep it.

“Tony,” Martin said in a mollifying
undertone. “Why don’t you let me handle this?”

Tony looked mulish for a second, then chuffed
and sat down again. Mari sensed he was sweltering and
uncomfortable, wasn’t accustomed to feeling like that, and was
reacting badly to it. Since he’d clearly been pampered all his
life, she imagined this weather must be rough on him. Nevertheless,
she didn’t approve of his attitude. “Yes,” she said. “Why don’t you
handle it, Mr. Tafft. Your friend’s too tactless to handle
deal-making.”

Martin gave a little laugh. “Don’t be too
hard on him, Miss. Pottersby. He’s not used to desert life.”

“Yeah. I figured that.” She tried to sound
disdainful.

Tony glared at her. She glared back and
wished she were a meaner person; she’d have Tiny go over there and
give him a good scare. She’d never do it. Besides, he looked like
the type who might carry a revolver, and she’d die if anything
happened to Tiny. He was all she had left, except for the mine, and
the mine was worthless.

Martin cleared his throat. “So, anyhow, we
went to the courthouse today and discovered that you’ve been
experiencing a little financial difficulty.”

All of the tact Mr. Ewing didn’t have, Martin
did, apparently. She was facing ruin, was what she was. She nodded.
“Go on.”

“Peerless has no interest in disturbing your
mining operation, Miss Pottersby. I promise you that we’ll leave
everything as we found it.”

Darn. And here she was hoping they’d improve
the place. She nodded again.

“We’re willing to pay you five thousand
dollars for the rental of the Marigold Mine for five weeks. That’s
a thousand dollars a week, which is . . . well, it’s a lot of
money.”

Five thousand dollars
? Mari barely
stifled a gasp.

It sure was a lot of money. Again, Mari
appreciated Martin’s tact. He’d been about to say it was more than
she could make in that period by working the mine. If he only knew,
it was more than she could make in two or three years by working
the mine.

On the other hand, he probably did know it.
He’d been to the courthouse. She didn’t speak, knowing from
experience that when a person kept quiet, other people felt
compelled to fill the silence.

“I’ll tell you exactly how it is, Miss
Pottersby. The Peerless Studio, which was established several years
ago by Phineas Lovejoy and me, has become a leader in the emerging
motion-picture industry.

“Peerless only makes pictures of the highest
caliber. While we still produce a lot of one-reel and split-reel
shorts, we’ve most recently been concentrating on what we call
featured motion pictures. Featured pictures are longer and have
more complex plots than the shorts. They might be likened to stage
performances in that whole families can go see such a feature and
make a holiday of it, so to speak. Lucky Strike, the picture we
want to make here in Mojave Wells, will be a featured motion
picture.”

He paused. Mari wondered if he expected her
to say something. At this point, she had nothing to say. If she
kept quiet for long enough, maybe he’d increase his offer, and
she’d be able to pay all of her creditors and keep the mine going
for another little while.

Until the money ran out again. She sighed,
knowing that she was always going to need money. And she wouldn’t
always be able to depend on Martin Taft to require a mine for a
motion picture, thereby pulling her out of the soup.

Martin took another drink of his water,
emptying the glass. “I came out here a few weeks ago, searching for
a suitable location to make the picture. Your mine is perfect. I
had thought it was abandoned, but I know better now.” He gave her
another apologetic smile.