Page 39 of Tormented Hearts

She sucked in a sharp breath. “My great-great-grandfather,” she whispered.

He nodded, unsurprised. “I thought so.” He seemed to mull that over before going on. “Eli Winthrop. Amos McCrae. Levi Callahan. The three of them went out together. The route changes according to who tells the story, but one includes a secret spring.”

She sucked in a sharp breath.

“And,” he continued in a low voice, “depending on who is retelling the legend, they found something worth finding.”

“What happened?”

“They were attacked. According to the version my grandfather told me, a native party raided the cabin. I don’t know how accurate it is to history, or what got exaggerated over a hundred fifty years of campfire retellings. But two of the three were killed in the raid.”

Her stomach tightened. “And the third?”

“Narrowly escaped. He made it out alive and ran. Story is he hid in the woods for a day and a night until he knew the natives had gone. Then he went looking for his friends, to see if there was any way to take their bodies home to their families.”

She clenched her fingers in her lap, drawn into the easy rhythm of Hawk’s voice and the meaning behind the tale. “And?”

“McCrae was still alive. Hurt bad, but alive. Your great-great-grandfather carried him out himself—hauled him for miles and miles, over this rough terrain—and got him to the nearest village that happened to have a doctor.”

A cold sensation moved through her, close to vertigo, like the ground was unstable the closer the ripples got to her own family. “Did he make it?”

“No.” Hawk’s voice dipped low, gentle. “I know that because the doctor who treated him was my forefather.”

She blinked.

“Family legend on my side is that he did everything he could to save McCrae. But it wasn’t enough.”

The weight of the story settled over her. Not only the horror of her great-great grandfather surviving a brutal attack, or that he’d carried his friend countless miles trying to save him.

What she never could have guessed was that her and Hawk’s family histories had become tangled together more than a century before either of them were born. And now they were walking the same mountains their ancestors once had.

“So Eli was the only one who made it back.” Her voice wavered, almost quieter than the music of the stream.

“He was the only one who made it back,” he repeated, punching the point home. “Which meant he was the only one who knew about the gold. Story goes that the three prospectors vowed the only people they would ever tell about the mine were their sons.”

Her breath caught. “So there was gold?”

He nodded. “Winthrop couldn’t bear to ever return to the area after what happened and what he’d seen. But he wasn’t going to let his friends die for nothing. He couldn’t carry all of the gold on his own in addition to getting McCrae out. But what he could carry, he split three ways. Gave a share to each of the dead men’s families. And he kept the rest for himself.”

“That sounds fair.” A surge of pride rose inside her, an odd emotion when the story was so thick with tragedy. But knowing that her ancestor was honest, just as her own father had been, touched her.

“It was fair. But it didn’t stop some people from being angry about it.” Hawk picked up a small stone from the ground beside him. He turned it over in his fingers but didn’t look at it. “Eli invested what he kept. He did it well too—built it into a fortune that could span generations.”

He gave her a direct look.

She bowed her head.

“That’s your family’s fortune. A hundred and some years of good decisions built on top of one man’s share of gold.”

Her chest burned with more pride. “And the McCraes and Callahans?”

“Didn’t do the same. Some say they mismanaged it. Or they had worse luck.” Green eyes met hers. “Or never got a fair share to begin with.”

She swallowed a sudden lump in her throat, already shaking her head, rejecting that possibility.

He dropped the stone into the stream with a soft plop. “Whatever the truth, those families didn’t end up wealthy. And watching the Winthrops build an empire while their own families struggled…well, people started saying Eli knew more than he ever let on. That he’d found the main vein and never told anyone. That there was a mine out here somewhere he’d kept for himself, and the gold he split three ways was just a fraction of what he actually found.”

The water rippled by, sparking with sunlight and shimmering around the rocks.