Chapter 2
Unity, Texas
Ethan Lewis shifted his weight from foot to foot.
Gosh, how he hated waiting when he had urgent business that needed to be taken care of.
However, he wasn’t the only person who needed to speak to Andrew Carter.
As the head of the mine, Andrew’s time was valuable, and trying to get his attention could be difficult.
Ethan found an open seat in the waiting area outside Andrew’s office and plonked himself down in it.
Troy was there. He was the top engineer in the place, a real out-of-the-box thinker. He looked up from a folder he was holding and shot Ethan an unhappy look. “How are things in your department?”
“Backlogged,” Ethan said tiredly. He’d been working eighteen-hour days for the last week. It was starting to wear him to the bone. “How are things with you?”
Troy sighed and then sneezed. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. “Half my team has the flu, and I think I’m coming down with it too.”
Ethan eased himself a little away from Troy. The influenza that was running rife through Unity was threatening to wipe out the workforce. More than half of Ethan’s men were down with it, and the rest were working so hard they might collapse from exhaustion any day now.
“You should go to Julie and get something for that,” Ethan said.
Troy nodded. “Sure. I plan to. But it’s a three-hour wait to see her.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, you got that kind of time?”
Ethan shook his head. “Not at all. I’m not even sure I have the time to sit here now.”
Troy agreed. “We’re just not rebuilding at the same pace, between the flu and the weather. It looks like winter is planning to stay a while longer, doesn’t it?”
“That it does,” Ethan agreed.
In a sudden cold snap, the clouds had rolled in, and for the last couple of days, it had been sleeting and occasionally snowing. There wasn’t enough snow for it to accumulate on the ground, but it was wet and cold enough for ice to form and for everyone to be utterly miserable.
Where folks had been looking forward to some warmer weather, they’d been hit with a freeze that some were saying would rival Chicago or Boston in its severity.
Ethan hadn’t been back east in a long time.
He’d been born in Delaware and then moved to Utah and on to Arizona.
His father had been a salesman, moving from place to place and taking the family with him.
The most permanent home that Ethan had ever had was when he went to university in Massachusetts.
After all of that, and despite living in Texas for quite a while now, he still wasn’t sure what to expect here in winter. It seemed to range wildly between mild winters he wrote off as nothing and times like this, where he was constantly freezing.
The door to Andrew’s office opened, and the man himself peered out. His blond hair was mussed as though he’d been running his fingers through it, and his blue eyes were tired and red.
“Come on in, Troy. This won’t take long, Ethan. Sorry for keeping you.”
Troy got up and went into the office. The door closed behind him, and Ethan was alone once more.
Ten minutes later, Troy came back out, looking relieved and exhausted.
He gave Ethan a thumbs-up and hurried out. A blast of cold air swept through the place when he opened the door.
“Come on in,” Andrew called.
As Ethan was the only one left waiting, he got up and went in. Andrew sat slumped behind his desk. He looked thinner and older than Ethan thought he had a week earlier.
“How is Christopher?” Ethan asked. Andrew and his wife Julie had a little boy.
“He’s teething,” Andrew said flatly. “Which means that his stomach is upset all the time, and he cries almost constantly, no matter what his mother and I do. I can’t wait until he has all his teeth and we can get some sleep.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Ethan said sympathetically.
“It is, and yet I love him more than ever,” Andrew said with a weary chuckle. “Go figure.”
Ethan smiled. With the pleasantries out of the way, it was time for the reason for his visit. It was an awkward one.
“What can I do for you?” Andrew asked, rubbing his temples with his fingers. He probably had a headache, and it was only ten in the morning. Well, that was kind of the way things were going around Unity at the moment, Ethan thought.
“I kind of need a favor,” Ethan said. “I need to take the buckboard or the cart and head into San Antonio today.”
“I thought you were headed out anyway with the shipment,” Andrew said, looking confused.
This was the part that Ethan had been dreading. He didn’t want to do this. It felt like he was letting Andrew down. He was letting all of Unity down, but he just couldn’t think of a way to make it better.
“It’s the flu,” Ethan said, knowing it sounded like a ridiculous excuse.
He would never accept something like that from one of his men, and why should Andrew accept it from him?
Except it was the truth. “I’ve had to send more and more men home to bed when their fevers spiked so high I was afraid they would pass out and hurt themselves.
The smelter isn’t the kind of place you can work in when you’re feeling like that. ”
Andrew sighed tiredly. “So, no shipment today?”
Ethan shook his head.
“Then why do you have to go to town?”
“Because the woman I’ve been corresponding with by mail is supposed to arrive on the train today,” Ethan said.
There was a note of excitement in his voice.
After months of writing letters, Diane was almost there.
He couldn’t wait to meet her in person. “She’s a nurse, you know.
She’ll be of great help to us with this whole flu mess.
” Maybe that would help sway Andrew’s decision in his favor.
Andrew leaned forward. “What about the smelter? Will someone keep it going while you’re away?
You know, we still have to keep up the quota.
It’s part of the agreement with Mac for the extra security.
We keep delivering copper to the market, and we keep paying back the loan like clockwork.
They protect us from El Aguila’s goons. Then everyone is happy. ”
“I don’t know, Andrew,” he admitted. “I’ve lost a lot of my top fellows to this illness. We might have another delay.”
“Another?” Andrew asked.
He looked down at some papers on his desk and seemed to be doing several calculations in his head.
Ethan could imagine what he was working on.
How would this delay affect the mine? How would that affect the town?
And so on. There was a lot to think about when the primary source of income for the town was being put under pressure.
“I can’t think of any other way to get Diane here and still have the smelter running as it should,” Ethan said. “The smelter isn’t going anywhere, but I have no way to communicate with Diane to tell her there’s been a delay.”
“And we can’t have her waiting around in San Antonio with no idea what’s going on,” Andrew said. “I understand that.” He sighed. “What’s the latest time you can leave?”
Ethan consulted his pocket watch. “If I take the buckboard and ride hard, I can leave here at one and be there in time to meet her train. It should come around three … three thirty.”
“That sounds fair,” Andrew said. “Just get done as much work as you can between now and then.”
Ethan nodded. “Thanks, Andrew,” he said. “I know this isn’t ideal.”
Andrew smiled. “Nothing is ideal at the moment. Anyway, I think we need a nurse right now … badly. Julie and her volunteers can’t handle it all.”
“That’s true,” Ethan conceded.
For a brief moment, he wondered what Andrew’s answer would have been if Diane wasn’t a nurse. Would he have said that Ethan couldn’t go?
However, there was no doubt about it—the town needed Diane’s skills badly, and perhaps that was worth letting Ethan take the buckboard and grind the smelter to a halt for the afternoon. The only way to get things back up and running properly would be to cure everyone who was sick.
Ethan hurried from Andrew’s office across the open ground to where the smelter stood, smoke trailing on the cold air above the building. The sky was gray, and the smoke seemed to disappear into it without a trace.
Inside the smelter, it was hot, noisy, and smelled of hot metal and chemicals.
That was the point of the place though, wasn’t it?
It existed to mix chemicals into the molten metal and extract the copper, discarding the tin, the sulfur, and sometimes, silver that came with it.
The tin and silver would be separated too, and often he would take a few bars of each to the market to sell.
But mostly what they took to sell was copper.
When his eyes adjusted to the lighting of the place, dim in some areas and bright from the furnaces and windows in others, Ethan spotted someone at his desk. His office was separated from the working area by a low wall and a large glass window.
Through the pane of glass, he saw Darren Watts sitting at the desk, looking tired. He was chewing the back of a pencil, some papers in front of him. Darren was a wonder at working out percentages of metal purity and could almost rival Warren, the town’s accountant, for his computational brilliance.
As Ethan entered his office, Darren looked up. “Oh, I thought you were heading to San Antonio. I figured I could use your desk while you were gone.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Ethan said with a smile. “I know you’re working hard.” He flopped into the visitor’s seat next to the desk. “I’m fine on this side.”
Darren frowned. “So, does this mean Andrew won’t let you go?”
“No, he said I can go later. Andrew asked me to keep an eye on things for as long as possible and head out at the last minute,” Ethan explained. “He still wants to try and get the shipment through.”
“It won’t be today, no matter what we do. It would take a miracle.”
“I know,” Ethan said. “I’m going for a walk around to check on everything.”
Ethan moved out onto the floor, tying a heavy leather apron on and donning leather gloves. There were a lot of hot surfaces here; things tended to spit, and embers flew in the air. Getting burned was the most common accident that occurred in the smelter— that and chemical poisoning.
He made his way around the floor, checking on the kiln, where they started the process of separating the sulfur from the copper.
Then he moved on to the calcining furnace and encountered an unexpected new face.
There were few strangers in town, if any, so this was a surprise. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Oh, hi, I’m Thomas Forster,” the man said. He had a bright smile and looked completely out of place. “You were short-staffed today, and they sent me over from the mine. I’ve done a little work in a forge before, and they thought it might be useful.”
Typical. Someone in the mining office thought that because this man had once battered some metal into a shape in a forge, he would have the vaguest idea of what to do in here. It was insane. Ethan puffed out his cheeks as he wondered what a safe job for this man would be to do.
“Can you man the bello?—”
There was a loud shout, and someone screamed near the smelter. The molten mixture was pouring on the ground, the sluice standing open despite the trough not being there to catch the fluid.
Brian and Darren, two of Ethan’s best workers, were trying to close the sluice, but the lever seemed stuck. They were hauling on it while Austen cradled his hand and moaned in pain.
“What happened?” Ethan demanded.
“I tried to close the sluice when Jason took the trough away,” Austen moaned. “It burned me.”
Ethan stepped around him. There was another way, a wheel that could be turned to close off the flow. He grabbed hold of it and found it was stuck. He hung on and tried to pull it, straining.
Suddenly, Thomas was beside him. He grabbed the other side of the wheel and pulled. The wheel began to shift, giving a little.
“Come on!” Ethan called. “Come on!”
Together, he and Thomas pulled and pulled, and slowly, inch by inch, the wheel began to turn, and the flow of molten copper began to slow.
One final turn and the sluice was finally closed. Ethan was breathing hard and sweating profusely.
Thomas smiled at him from the other side of the wheel. In that moment, Ethan decided he liked the man. Anyone who would jump in when the cards were on the table and the room was burning was okay with him.
“Welcome to the smelter,” he said.
Thomas smiled. “Thanks.”
Ethan turned to Austen and inspected his injury. His hand was red and blistered. “I’ll take you to Julie.”
Austen shook his head. “I can get there on my own.”
“No, you could go into shock and pass out on the way,” Ethan said. “She chewed me out about that the other day when that rock fell on Derrick’s foot and he insisted on hobbling to her office on his own.”
He spoke as he gently steered Austen out of the smelter. Running footsteps came up behind him and he turned to find Thomas.
“Let me take him,” Thomas said. “You’re needed in there.”
“Okay, but take care of him.”
Thomas nodded. “Consider it done.”
Ethan went back into the building and set to work figuring out what had happened.
He spent the better part of two hours inspecting the furnace from top to bottom.
Eventually, he began to poke around in the lever mechanism and pulled out a little shard of metal.
It had gotten stuck in the cog that helped to close the sluice and jammed it.
Once it was removed, the lever worked perfectly.
“Where did this thing come from?” he muttered to himself.
There was the sound of booted feet on the floor again. Ethan looked around and found that Thomas was back.
“Ethan, someone’s here looking for you,” Thomas said.
“What? Who?” Ethan asked, wiping his hands on his apron. What time was it? Surely he had to get going. He couldn’t leave Diane waiting in San Antonio. What kind of first impression would that make?
“What should I do?” Thomas asked. “It’s a pretty lady. She said you’re expecting her. What do you want to do?”
“A lady?” Ethan asked. He looked past Thomas, confused. There was only one lady he was waiting for, and she had no way to get here. “Are you sure? Where is she?”
“I didn’t think I should bring her here,” Thomas said. “I left her at the apothecary store. She said to tell you Diane Hart is here.”
Ethan almost walked into the side of the furnace in his surprise.