swallowed another unpalatable mouthful. She heard the rasp of a match, heard puffing sounds and smelled the smoke. It was not the usual smell of tobacco, but the pleasant scent of fragrant herbs.
“I’m from Kansas,” Mr. Hicks said, contradicting his command not to pry. “My ma was from a good family, but my pa was a good-for-nothing wastrel. She ran off with him and lived to regret it.”
Annabel had no idea how to reply to such a blunt revelation, so she kept eating. Sometimes silence worked better as a prompt than bombarding someone with questions.
“Kid, sometimes you might think I’m two different people,” Mr. Hicks went on. “When the mood strikes, I can talk like my ma, all educated, with fancy turns of phrase. At other times, I hit the bottle and curse like a trooper.
“You’ll find men like that all around the West. They might be a college professor, or a duke’s son, but they all try to sound like a cowboy, for a man feels more comfortable if he blends in with his surroundings. It’s no good being a tiger in the desert, or a camel in the jungle.”
“How long have you known Clay?”
“Clay?” Mr. Hicks puffed on his pipe. “Five years ago he rode up on a flea-bit pony to my claim in northern Californy. I was just about to pack up and leave that worthless ditch in the mud. There was something stark about Clay, but he was a good, strong lad, so I let him tag along.
“For a while, we worked for a big outfit in Nevada. Clay seemed to have some kind of a death wish. When there was blasting to be done, he volunteered for the job. When a mine tunnel was unsound, he chose to work there. Then he settled down, became more sensible. I never figured out what had been eating him up. He never talks much about his past. All I knew is that he grew up in an orphanage.”
Empathy tugged at Annabel. He was an orphan, too! She recalled the grief, the emptiness, the terrible sense of being alone after Mama and Papa died. At what age had Clay lost his parents? Or could it be that he’d never known them, had been abandoned at birth. She longed to find out more, but Mr. Hicks had already declared he’d shared the sum of his knowledge, so she chose another line of questioning.
“How long have you been at this claim?”
“Since April. If we want to stay on when the winter comes, we’ll have to build a cabin, or at least a wall to enclose the front of the cavern. Winters are fierce this high up in the mountains.”
“Is there much gold in the mine?”
“Some. Might be more, but we ain’t found it yet.”
“Are there other claims nearby? Is the area rich with strikes?”
“This here country is called the Mimbres Mountains, after an Apache tribe with the same name. There’re still a few Indians around, but they haven’t bothered us none.” Mr. Hicks paused to inspect his pipe. “There was a big strike in Hillsboro some years back. That’s ten miles north of here. They have a town there, with stores and everything.”
“Why don’t you get your provisions there?”
“Don’t get on with the storekeepers in Hillsboro.”
Mr. Hicks spoke in a tone of bitterness. Annabel suspected there were lots of people in the world with whom the gruff old man did not get on. She pushed her empty plate aside. “Can I help with anything?”
“Give your hands a rest, kid. Take a walk around. There’s a creek over yonder.” Mr. Hicks took the pipe out of his mouth and used the stem to point. “And the horse and mule graze in a small meadow a mite down the hill. If you learn your bearings today, you can carry and fetch when your blisters heal.”
He took a few more puffs in silence, then resumed talking. “I have a friend in Valverde, fifty miles north up the rail track. He puts provisions on the train and the conductor leaves the parcels in the mailbox by the water tower. If we run out, we hunt for food, or we go hungry.”
For another ten minutes, they lingered at the table. Annabel learned the mine tunnel was narrow and the men took turns to work in the cramped space. When it was Clay’s turn, Mr. Hicks took care of the chores around the camp. When Mr. Hicks went down the mine, Clay harnessed the mule to the arrastre and crushed the ore. Mr. Hicks did not like the task, for he did not get on with the mule.
“We had another saddle horse and two more pack mules when we came out prospecting,” Mr. Hicks explained. “But we had to sell them to pay for supplies. As soon as we have money to spare, we’ll replace them, or at least the saddle horse. It’s no good for a man to be without transport of his own.”
“What are the horse and mule called?” Annabel asked.
Mr. Hicks frowned. “The horse is called a horse, or the buckskin. The mule is called the mule.” His expression grew bleak. “Better not to treat them as pets. Makes it easier to shoot them if you have to.”
Clay’s warnings about the old man’s temper rang in Annabel’s mind, but she steeled herself against an outburst and asked the question that had been playing on her mind. “Mr. Hicks, what do you have against women?”
He gave her a long look, then fastened his gaze on the line of trees beyond the clearing. “They promise you paradise, but they give you hell. You’re too young, kid, but when you grow up you’ll figure that a woman can be all sweetness on the outside and poison on the inside. They lure a man with honeyed talk but stick the knife of betrayal between your shoulder blades when you turn your back. Mark my words, kid. One day you’ll find out.”
Annabel hung her head, ashamed. What she was doing now, interrogating him about his past while dressed as a boy, was a betrayal, in a way. Uneasy, she got to her feet. “I’ll go and see if I can find my way to the creek.” Casually, she added, “Do you ever bathe in the stream?” Her scalp was starting to itch, from the way her hair was coiled tight inside the bowler hat.
“Sure, kid. There’s a good spot for bathing.” Benign again, Mr. Hicks gestured at her bandaged hands. “Take your time, kid. If you peel off the dressings, the cold water will soothe your skin. I have some mending to do. There’s a hole in my boots the size of Alaska. When you get back, you can help me prepare supper.”
* * *
Clay lowered the pickaxe and blinked against the dust in his eyes. A lantern hanging from an iron peg hammered into the rock cast a dull sphere of light. Normally, Clay didn’t mind the sense of being trapped inside the earth. There was peace in being underground, surrounded by silence, and the hard physical labor of a miner cleared a man’s troubles from his mind.
But today his mind found no comfort in the steady clink of the pickaxe against the seam of ore. Clay told himself it was because the thin vein of gold was petering away, threatening the future of the mine, but he knew it was a lie.
The cause of his unease was the kid. The scrawny kid who filled his thoughts in the way no scrawny kid should be allowed to do. With a grunt of frustration, Clay lowered the pickaxe and bent to pick up the canteen by his feet. He uncapped the lid, tipped his head back to drink. Not a drop of water left inside. Clay sighed, reached to the rock ceiling to take down the lantern and used it to guide his way out. At the mouth of the tunnel, the bright sunshine made him squint.
As he waited for his eyes to adjust, Clay spotted the kid emerging from the cavern. There was something stealthy about the kid’s movements, the way he glanced all around, as if to make sure
