her vision.
Don did not wait for Jack to disappear before confronting her. “Just what kind of a partnership was this exactly?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Lily, I’m not blind. I saw the way you looked at him.”
Had Jack seen?
Don clasped Lily’s upper arm and tugged her forward, causing her to stumble against him.
Lily saw Jack retrace his steps toward her. His smile was gone and his gaze was fixed on the place where Don clenched her forearm.
Nala was quicker. The dog shot forward, teeth bared, and leapt on Don, taking him to the ground.
Lily swiftly grabbed her dog’s collar and pulled her off. Don aimed his pistol at Nala. She stepped between them and glared.
“You’d best go, Don.”
Trost stood, mud now clinging to his back and fine trousers. His face was pink as the inside of a prize-winning watermelon and his expression had turned murderous. He kept his eyes on Jack as he lowered the pistol.
Lily placed a hand on his wrist. “Take yourself off or tomorrow you will find yourself a new singer.”
That seemed to break his concentration.
His eyes flicked to her for an instant and then back to Jack.
She squeezed his wrist. “I mean it.”
He shook her off and her hand came away muddy.
“We’ve a contract.”
“That says I leave when I want.”
He spun and stormed down the boardwalk, his heels pounding an angry rhythm on the planking.
Lily’s shoulders sagged and she turned back to Jack to find him glaring at her.
“Does he have some claim on you?”
“No.”
Jack nodded, but his expression stormed like a rain cloud.
“If he bothers you, you let me know.”
Lily smiled. He cared enough to defend her and that counted for something.
Lily smiled. “He’s just protecting his investment.”
“And what is he to you?”
“My boss, of course.”
“Is that all?”
“For now.” Oh, he didn’t like that answer, not judging from the lowering of his brows and the thinning of his lips. Lily felt happier than she had in days. “I’ll see you at breakfast, Jack.”
Chapter Fourteen
Lily met Luritz in the parlor of the boardinghouse to deliver instructions to eat at the hotel without her, then buy the yardage for her garments and meet her tomorrow morning at the Pavilion. She was excited to show him the little storeroom in which he could set up shop and knew there was much potential business here repairing clothing and producing new garments. With luck, he’d be headed home to his beautiful daughters before the snow began to fly.
Jack arrived shortly thereafter and they set out, reaching his claim at mid-morning. The day had a crispness to it that she liked. It felt good to be out of town again and back on the river. Her high spirits fell when they reached his property.
Lily did not like the rough, windowless cabin Jack inhabited. If this was how the men lived when they were not in the bars, it was no wonder they were willing to throw bags of gold at her.
Next he took her to his digging site and together they entered the tunnel he had somehow carved from the permanently frozen ground. She knew from listening to the miners that only the top few inches ever thawed this far north. So the ground had to be melted by setting fires, waiting for them to burn down and then scraping off a few inches of thawed gravel before beginning the process again. Permafrost, they called it.
Jack’s tunnel looked larger than the others she had seen from the river, large enough to use a wheelbarrow instead of a bucket to clear the material and high enough to stand in. Lily had feared she’d have to crawl.
“You must have been lighting fires day and night.”
Jack smiled. “Not exactly.”
He led her by lantern into his mine shaft.
“Is it safe?” she asked.
“The walls are frozen solid. See the ice?” He brought the light close to the side of the tunnel, pointing out the white crystals scattered through the gravel. “Can’t collapse,” he assured, pounding on the solid wall.
As they descended, Jack indicated different layers of sand and gravel, rock and strata, whatever that was. It all looked like dirt to her, but he seemed greatly excited by the tiny differences in color and consistency. He’d kept a record of how many dollars per pan he’d extracted from the various levels and the numbers kept going up as they went down. They were up to sixteen dollars a pan when they hit the end of his tunnel.
“How much farther down can you go?” she asked.
“All the way