Chapter 14
Lucy hadn’t expected the cave to be beautiful. She’d come this far on hard sense and harder grief, ready for a damp hole in the rock and a few flecks of color a fool had murdered three people over. What the torchlight showed her stopped the breath in her throat.
The passage opened past the low mouth into a chamber the size of her mother’s parlor; the floor sloping down and back into a blackness the torch couldn’t reach, cold air sliding against her face from somewhere deeper still.
The place smelled of wet stone and old iron and the faint pitch reek of the torch, but the only sound was the drip of water far back in the dark and the hiss of the flame. And the walls.
Where Nate lifted the pine knot, the rock ran with threads and ropes and pockets of dull yellow metal, veined through the gray stone like salt lines through a side of cured pork, catching the firelight and throwing it back, not the hard glitter of fool’s mica she’d been braced for but a low gleam that came up out of the rock itself like coals seen through a skin of ash.
The gasp tore out of her, past holding back.
She had grown up on a hardscrabble ranch where a good year meant the bank waited another season, where her mother turned collars and saved candle ends, where money was a thing you owed and rarely a thing you held.
And here was more of it than her mind could rightly count, lying loose in the rock of a forgotten canyon, asking nothing of anyone.
It didn’t look like riches. It looked like a wound in the mountain that had never stopped bleeding gold.
“Lord above,” Josh said softly behind her and let out a low whistle that ran around the stone and came back doubled. “He weren’t lying. Fourteen years I half thought Eldon dreamed it. He weren’t lying about a word of it.”
She stepped close to the wall and put her bare fingers against a rope of metal, and it was cold and smooth and faintly greasy under her touch, realer than anything had been in six months of secrets.
This was the thing. The why behind all of it.
The reason her steers had died at the water and the Halloran boy would never fiddle again and two good people lay in a weed-grown grave with their son shipped off to strangers.
It had been here the whole time, gleaming patiently in the dark while the man who killed for it tore the county to pieces twenty miles east and never came within a hard day’s ride of finding it.
The waste of it made her want to weep and spit at once.
“Is it real?” she asked herself. “Could a man be fooled, this much of it?”
“It’s real.” Nate had his knife out, working the point into a seam where the metal ran as thick as her thumb.
“Gold’s soft. See how it takes the blade.
Rock wouldn’t.” He pried and worked the steel, and a nugget the size of a walnut came free into his palm, dull and dense and heavier than its size had any right to be when he passed it to her.
“There’s your proof the whole thing turns on.
That’s a man’s motive for murder, sitting in your hand. ”
She turned the nugget in the torchlight and watched the firelight slide over it then stole a glance at the man beside her. Most men she’d known would have stood here drunk on the find, already spending it, already grown three sizes.
Nate hadn’t so much as smiled. He’d called it proof and a motive and put his knife straight to the seam. His parents had died for this metal, and he looked at it like a murder weapon and nothing finer.
She closed her fist on it and felt the cold weight, and under the wonder, her wits came back to her, the practical ranch-girl sense her father had drilled in deeper than fear.
“Then it’s no good to us as a story,” she said.
“A marshal won’t ride two days on our say-so that there’s gold in a cave.
He’ll want to see it with his own eyes, or near enough. ”
She was already digging in her coat for the stub of a pencil and the folded paper she carried for tallying stock.
“I’m drawing it. The mouth, the steeple rock, the chamber, where the vein runs.
So, a man who’s never set foot in this canyon can find it again and know we didn’t paint the picture out of air. ”
“That’s good thinking,” Nate said. “Mark how far back the gold starts, and which wall.”
She braced the paper against the stone and drew quickly and plainly, no artist but exact, the steeple-shaped boulder, the brush-hung mouth, the slope of the floor, the rich north wall hatched dark where the metal ran heaviest. She kept her hand level.
A line that shook was a line a clever lawyer could laugh out of a courtroom, and she had spent her whole life being the person men laughed out of the room before she opened her mouth.
Not this time. This drawing would speak for her in a place she’d never be allowed to stand. She put down every measurement she could pace or guess: the height of the mouth, the count of her own steps from brush to vein, how the chamber dropped off into deeper dark behind them.
Beside her, Nate held his father’s map against the wall and made his own small marks on it, fixing the cave’s place against the creek and the canyon bends, the dead man’s lines and the living son’s joining at last on the same sheet.
The gold nugget she knotted into the corner of her kerchief and pushed down deep into the inside pocket of her coat, against her ribs, where no fall from a horse would shake it loose.
Sketch and sample both. The two things that turned a frightened woman’s overheard secret into a case a federal man could carry into a federal court.
“I’ve got it,” she said, and her voice was low and fierce and not quite her own. “Whatever happens up here, I’ve got the proof of it on me. He doesn’t get to bury this one with the rest.”
She’d barely got the words out when Josh hissed from the cave mouth.
He’d posted himself at the brush curtain the whole time, the Sharps laid across a rock, one eye to the gap where the dying daylight came through.
Now he came up off his knee in a crouch, and the easy, weathered calm had gone out of him.
“Riders.” His voice dropped to almost nothing and still sounded too loud. “Coming up the canyon trail. Four of ‘em, walking their horses, picking the way.” A pause while he counted, while the cold air moved and the torch hissed. “Lead man’s tall. Long coat. Rides like he owns the county.”
Cooley.
The name went through Lucy like creek ice.
She had seen that long coat from a hayloft six months ago and heard the voice under it laugh about a murder, and her body remembered the terror of that loft before her mind had even finished the thought: the held breath, the dead legs, the cold knowing that if the hay so much as rustled she would die.
For half a heartbeat, she was back up in the rafters with the rain hammering and her own pulse loud enough to give her away. Then she shoved it down.
She wasn’t a girl hiding in the hay anymore, waiting to be murdered for the crime of having heard.
She had a gun in her coat and proof against her ribs and two men beside her who wouldn’t let her die easily.
Her hand went to the lump of gold as if it could anchor her; her chin came up out of old, stubborn habit, and she made herself breathe slowly.
“How’d they find us?” she whispered. “We came by back trails. Nobody saw.”
“Five hundred dollars buys a lot of eyes,” Nate said grimly. “Or they’ve been watching the canyon mouth for days, knowing it’s the one thing out here worth a watch.” He was already moving, fast and low, no wasted motion. “Josh. Off the skyline. Lucy, the torch.”
She understood him before he had finished. The torch was a beacon, throwing their shadows out the mouth onto the talus for any climbing man to read. She caught it from Nate and ground the flaming head against the cave floor, twisting, and the fire died in a hiss and a stink of pitch smoke.
The dark came down on the three of them, complete and absolute, the gold gone black on the walls, only the gray slot of the mouth showing where the world still held a little light.
They drew back from it together, deeper, feeling the wall with their hands, that cold underground breath at their backs growing stronger as they went, until a shoulder of rock stood between them and the entrance and they could crouch unseen.
Lucy pressed her spine to the stone between Nate and the dark mouth of the deeper cave. The Sharps and the Winchester were both pointed at the pale slot of evening, and she got her father’s old pistol out of her coat and into her fist, distantly proud her hand didn’t shake on it.
Outside, the hoofbeats had stopped. The quiet that followed was worse than any noise.
Lucy crouched with her back to cold stone and her father’s pistol heavy in her two hands and listened to her blood beating in her ears.
Three of them in a stone box with one mouth, and four hard men outside it with the light at their backs and the whole of the law in their pockets.
She thought of her mother asleep at the ranch, not knowing where her only daughter had gone. She thought, absurdly, that she had never told Celia where the spare key to the strongbox was kept. The mind reached for foolish, small things when the big thing was too large to hold.
Boots now. The crunch and slither of unhurried men coming up the talus slope on foot, the small sounds of metal and leather, a low word passed between them and a low laugh. Close. Then closer. Right outside the brush. A man’s shadow crossed the gray slot and blotted it and was still.
Lucy didn’t breathe. Beside her, she felt Nate go to stone, that deep stillness of his, finger laid alongside the trigger guard, waiting. Across the dark, Josh was a shape and a gun barrel, and nothing more.
The voice came into the cave as if it owned the dark, easy and amused, pitched to carry, a voice that had laughed in a hayloft six months ago and laughed now. “I know you’re in there, Ralston.” A pause, savoring it. “Chambers sends his regards.”