The Whippoorwill Trilogy - Sharon Sala Page 0,32

salty against his lips. He spat, and teeth fell out in his hand. He fingered them in the dark—mentally counting. There were four to be exact. He shouted out in anger.

“Christ all mighty! Everyone’s a critic. Even this dad-blamed mountain didn’t like my looks.”

Miles tossed the snags into the rubble around his feet. Spitting blood and cursing the pain on his face and in his mouth, he levered himself to an upright position and began feeling around the walls for the lantern, praying it had not been broken.

His luck held. The lantern was still hanging from its peg on the wall. The draft of air from the falling debris had simply snuffed out the light.

Fumbling in the dark, he fished out the sulfur matches that he carried in his vest and relit the wick. Light flared, and for a moment, Miles went blind again, only this time from the light. He looked away, blinking rapidly to readjust his eyes to the sudden change. When he could see, he began to survey the damage. It didn’t take long to ascertain that the tunnel had suffered less than he had. Judging from the blood on his shirt and hands, the mountain had worked him over good.

A new wave of pain wracked his body. His stomach rolled. The cavity inside the mountain began to tilt, and the motion sent Miles to his knees. When the earth had stopped spinning and he could blink without wanting to puke, he looked up.

Instead of the solid wall he expected to see, there was a wide rift in the surface that had not been there before. And something else shown from deep within, revealing itself in the crack like a woman spreading her legs for her man to come in.

Miles thrust his fingers into the crevice, feeling along the crack and testing the differences in texture of the light and dark veins that he was seeing, praying that the blow to his head was not making him see things that weren’t really there.

It wasn’t his imagination. There was a color far different from the dark obsidian and rich chocolate soil that he’d been carrying out by the barrow-full for years. He lifted the lantern from its peg, holding it close—peering into the crack and blinking back tears. Not only was the color still there, but it was brighter—and richer—and it ran long and deep up the wall.

“Thank you, Jesus.” He spit blood and grinned. “Truly, darlin’, if you only knew. Yore days are numbered.”

He hung the lantern back on its peg, his pulse racing as he lifted the pick axe and started to dig. The first strike was solid, with the second coming swift behind the first. Like a man gone mad, he began hammering at the wall with the tip of his pick, shattering chunk after chunk from the vein of gold that the cave-in had revealed.

Hours later, he stopped. But only because the coal oil in his lantern was nearly gone. And because the chunks of color that he’d hammered out of the vein were overflowing in the wheelbarrow at his knees.

His eyes were mere slits in a face swollen beyond belief. Yet if Miles could have seen his appearance, he would have laughed and thumbed his nose at the sight. A rich man could stand to be a little ugly.

It was dark when he exited. Suddenly every tree hid a would-be claim jumper. Every shadow was a Shoshone come to lift his scalp and leave his body for the buzzards. He had a sudden fear that while he had made his find, he would never get out alive to tell the tale. It was strange how instant wealth could change a man’s outlook on life. Getting the ore assayed and putting his money in a safe place became all important, and Dodge City offered everything he would need—an assay office—several banks to transfer money back East—and a dentist.

When he went to Sweetgrass Junction after Truly Fine, he wasn’t giving her any room to back out of her promises. The better he looked, the better his chances.

He looked down at the gold and grinned. It wouldn’t matter what he looked like. If he knew Truly like he thought he knew Truly, she wouldn’t see anything but the money.

But by the time he reached the cabin, he’d come to another conclusion. He had some cleaning up to do before he started off the mountain. If he didn’t get himself healed, he might die from blood poisoning