She paled. “Was that true?”
“Yeah, two mines can’t be placed that close together unless the owner of one buys out the other or the two miners partner up. Your father should have known that. Then I took a good look at him. He was already sweating and the sun hadn’t even come over the range yet. It was cold as hell that early—”
She interrupted, “You realize that ‘cold as hell’ is an oxymoron?”
“You realize you got my drift anyway?”
She blushed a little. “Continue, please.”
“It was obvious he wasn’t going to last more than a few hours, if even that, so I went back to the house to make coffee and sat on the porch to wait until he figured out he was no miner. He might not have been too old to mine, but he was certainly in no condition to do hard labor. And I was right. Within the hour, he collapsed.”
Her eyes flared. “What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. Charley grabbed his chest and fell over. By the time I got down there, he wasn’t conscious. So I carried him inside the house and put him on my bed and waited for him to wake up and explain.”
“What was there to explain? He had a bad heart. Dr. Cantry mentioned that when I spoke with him.”
“I didn’t know that—yet. And there are other reasons why someone might pass out like that. Some people can’t tolerate the altitude up here, have trouble breathing. But, yeah, Charley mentioned his heart problem when he woke up. He’d only just found out about it himself, and that it was bad. But he assured me that he had no choice, that he had to mine even if it killed him, and he explained why. Your mentioning that loan that he left your brothers with was my first clue that you might be telling the truth. He told me the same thing that morning, and that his boys were depending on him to make the family rich again.”
She winced. It sounded so fanciful when he said it, a lost cause. And yet her father had a mine that now belonged to her and her brothers. An invalid mine? Obviously not, since it was dug, staked, and recorded in town—with Morgan’s permission. He’d allowed it. Why would he do that when he’d admitted how angry he was at her father that day?
But she still had so many things to worry about: how to get her silver out of here, how to pay off the loan immediately, claim jumpers, how to hire workers to mine for her. Or she and her brothers could sell it. Morgan had told her Mr. Sullivan was interested in buying it, but she had a feeling Morgan might raise hell about that option, so she decided not to mention it yet.
Instead she asked, “Do I need to worry about those claim jumpers? Did they ever bother you again?”
“There were signs of someone stealing my silver ore last year while I was in town, leaving picked-out pockets in the walls. After that, I ordered the steel door when I bought the building materials for the house. And there was one other time, end of last winter, when I saw evidence of trespassers in my camp, but I can’t say for sure if it was those two claim jumpers who shot at me.”
“Do the claim jumpers work for Mr. Sullivan?”
“That’s a dumb question. I’d probably be dead by now if they did. No, they showed up early on, when the people in town thought I was a trapper selling hides every so often. They were either already roaming these hills and happened upon me, or they followed me up here before I grew cautious after learning how cutthroat mining can be around here, even this far out.”
She felt a twinge of unease now that she knew for sure she was a mine owner. Morgan had already told her about the sheriff investigating small miners’ complaints that big mine owners had threatened them, and he’d just implied again that Sullivan wanted to harm him. Having met Shawn Sullivan and his daughter, she just couldn’t imagine him doing anything like that. Morgan was wrong about Mr. Sullivan, but she wasn’t about to try to convince him of that when that particular subject was what he’d call a “can of worms.”
So she moved on to the question that confused her most. “Why did you let my father stay?”
“He said I’d have to shoot him to get him to stop mining here.”
“No, he didn’t,” she replied indignantly on her father’s behalf.
“Yeah, he did. But I was already feeling sorry for him after hearing why he was so desperate. He was willing to die to help his family. Caring about kin that much is something I can understand.” He suddenly stood up. “More dessert?”
“After a visit to the mine.”
“You don’t want to wait until morning?”
“Does daylight reach into the mine?”
“Not very far,” he admitted. “Grab a lantern, then.”
She picked up the one on the table and he reached for one on the wall, then led the way across the yard to the large hole in the cliff.
Inside the tunnel, she noticed that the support beams were as tall as Morgan. Anyone taller than him would have to duck.
“Why is the floor so smooth?” she asked.
“Because I chiseled it smooth.”
She gasped. Lowering her lantern and looking at the floor more closely, she saw brighter streaks in the rock. “Is that silver we’re walking on?”
“The tunnel runs straight through the lode, which was reached after six days of digging. It’s not pure silver, it never is. It needs to be processed, which is what the smelter outside is for. But it’s a rich lode, eighty percent silver with a sprinkling of copper and gold.”
Eyes wide, she realized all her problems were solved! Those bright streaks in the rock weren’t just on the floor, but on the walls and the ceiling, too.
“Your pa’s stuff is here,” Morgan said when he stopped, not quite at the end of the tunnel, though close enough for her to see the back wall in the lantern light. “I used his horse to carry him to the doctor and I didn’t bother to retrieve it after I was told he died, so the stable has probably sold it by now. This is everything else Charley had with him when he came up here.”
She moved around him and saw a bedroll, a rifle, two saddlebags filled with mining tools and cooking gear, everything he would need to survive up here alone. But he hadn’t ended up alone, he’d ended up making friends with a bear. Her father’s valise was there, too. She dropped to her knees to open it.
Behind her, Morgan said, “He never talked much about home. He seemed ashamed to admit that he’d been rich at some point and wasn’t now, but it was obvious from his manners and the way he talked that he was a gentleman. I would have got around to hiring someone to take this stuff to his boys—he never mentioned their names—I just didn’t see any reason to hurry when there’s nothing of value here.”
“My brothers are Daniel and Evan. You could at least have let them know he’d died.”
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before I want to deliver news like that. They’ll hear from me soon. I was taking their address to Doc Cantry this trip so he could send them a telegram, but I found you there instead.”
Violet was only half-listening to Morgan as she looked inside her father’s valise. The lantern she’d set down didn’t offer much light in the dark tunnel, so she couldn’t see much of what was in it, but she reached in to pull out a few things. A small handful of letters rested atop the pile of clothes, letters tied with twine, all of them from her brothers, which was where Morgan must have found their address.
She pulled out one of her father’s jackets and held it up to her face. The smell of it brought tears to her eyes. She was surprised she even remembered that scent after all these years, but it had been his favorite cologne. Oh, Papa, why were you so careless with your inheritance that you had to resort to these drastic measures?
“Are you crying?”
She dabbed the cuff of the jacket against her eyes before saying, “Of course not. Thank you for leading me to Papa’s belongings. It’s incredible that he was able to dig all this out at his age.”
“He didn’t—I did.”
She glanced around. “I don’t understand. This is his mine, correct?”