Nothing. He’d found absolutely nothing. And they were dangerously close to running out of time.
He’d set himself a deadline of three o’clock. If he didn’t have the gold by then, he’d have to revert to tracking. Tracking required light. And time. And hopefully help. Mal glanced across the paddock to where the road from Seymour curved past the station house. No one had come. Yet, Mal reminded himself. No one had come, yet. There was still time. Less than two hours, but it was something.
After a preliminary inspection of all the hearths and chimneys had turned up nothing of significance, Mal and Ben Porter had combined their efforts to conduct a deeper investigation. Since Mal was the more slender of the two, he’d had the pleasure of wedging head and shoulders up through the hearths in order to feel around from the inside, while Porter banged a broom handle down each chimney.
Mal had gotten a description of Angus from Flora and was certain the barrel-chested, broad-shouldered man could not have reached up any higher than Mal into the fireplace openings. Unfortunately, nothing had jarred loose from Porter’s thorough poking, either. So they’d moved on to checking all the exterior sections, climbing ladders and meticulously analyzing mortar for degraded places where stones could be loose. They’d found several, but none had yielded the prize they sought. Which meant either Angus’s comment about stone had been a false trail and had nothing to do with his actual hiding place, or they were missing something.
The creak of door hinges pulled Mal out of his troubled thoughts. He turned to find Bertie bustling toward him, a half-wrapped sandwich in her hands.
Mal released his hold on his shirt, letting the damp cotton flutter down to cover his exposed belly. “You’re supposed to be packing, aunt.”
“Yes, dear. I know. But Henry and I have decided to only bother with the irreplaceable things. Papa’s letters. Mama’s tea set. The Chandler family Bible. Things of that nature. We’ll be coming back soon enough. No sense in packing everything up just to unpack it again in a few days.”
“But we’re leaving Harper’s Station unprotected while a thief rummages through the place.” Mal couldn’t quite believe she was making so little of all this. Didn’t she realize that Angus was the type of man who’d be ornery enough to torch the place out of spite?
But the older woman just smiled at him and patted his arm. “You’ll stop him before he gets that far. Don’t worry.” She pulled her hand back, frowned at the gray smudges on her fingers, then shrugged as she wiped them on her apron. “Even if you don’t, there’s nothing here that a man seeking gold will care about. If anyone has cause to worry, it’s Tori at the store, but I’m sure that nice Mr. Porter will help her load up all her more expensive items.”
She held out the sandwich to him, the bottom half wrapped in a napkin. “Here. You should eat something.”
Mal glanced at his hands. His fingernails outlined with black grime, streaks of watered-down soot trailing down the backs, his palms little better.
“Just hold the napkin,” Bertie urged. “The rest will wash out later. You need to keep your strength up if you’re going to bring Emma back to us.”
For the first time, a line of strain appeared across her forehead. She nibbled a bit on her lower lip as Mal took the sandwich from her. “I’ve been packing Emma’s clothes,” she said, her gaze dropping to the ground. “Henry went to the bank to gather up the ledgers. We decided to leave the safe as is. It’s too heavy to move on such short notice, and Emma claimed it’s fireproof. Hopefully, this Angus fellow will be so focused on his gold he won’t want the trouble of trying to break in to a safe. Emma said that without the combination, a thief would have to use dynamite to get it open. And even then, chances are good that the steel construction would hold.”
Mal took a savage bite out of the sandwich, ripping the bread with his teeth and gnashing the thin slices of roast beef with vicious strokes, desperate to obliterate thoughts of Angus touching Emma’s bank vault. Emma’s clothes. Emma’s . . . person.
“Do you think she’s all right, Malachi?” Bertie’s soft-spoken question clawed like eagle talons across his heart.
He met his aunt’s gaze and swallowed what was left of the mangled meat in his mouth. “She should be safe as long as she has value to him,” Mal said, repeating the litany he’d been feeding himself the last several hours. “If he kills her, he loses his leverage.”
“But there are other ways to hurt her besides killing.” Bertie’s chin wobbled just a bit, and the sight nearly shattered Mal’s self-control. “She’s a beautiful girl. Alone with two men.”
“One man and a boy,” Mal forced out through his clenched jaw. “Angus might get a little rough in his treatment of her, he seems to like to knock females around, but I don’t think he’ll do anything more severe with his son looking on.”