Page 1 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
Chapter One
Denver City, Territory of Kansas, July 13, 1859
After eight days of steady travel, every bone in Marigold Davis’s body creaked when she stepped down from the stagecoach. She was rattled and rumpled and no doubt smelled of her fellow travelers’ cigars, which at least disguised her lack of a recent bath.
The Leavenworth City & Pike’s Peak Express Company had touted itself as “tremendously comfortable,” but that was a gross overstatement. Perhaps it wasn’t their fault that any carriage ride longer than an hour made her sick, but the drunken mule driver, the windstorm that had left her blowing into her gloves to warm her hands, and the mosquito swarms that had pocked her face with bites hadn’t helped.
The few hours she’d been offered a bed, she hadn’t dared fall asleep, not with only a muslin wall to protect her from the soldiers and waystation handlers who’d never taken their eyes off her. And the little food she’d managed to eat at those places had been difficult to choke down andkeepdown.
She was unfit for a coffin, let alone an introduction to her prospective bridegroom.
For a time, she had thought she might be dead. The first days of limitless nothing had had her edging toward prairie fever. She’d been saved by her glimpse of bison, but soon the land had begun to roll even more than her stomach. She had finally arrived in Denver, and a fresh knot of anxiety formed in her belly over what might await her. Based on recent experience, resounding disappointment, most likely.
As men hurried to help with unloading, she stepped out of the way, hugging her carpetbag as much for comfort as from fear of losing it. It was third-hand and threadbare, but all she possessed.
Her only family, her sister and uncle, had been left behind. The sheer isolation of this new place hit like a kick to the face.
Marigold pressed her back to the exterior wall of the Express office while she got her bearings.
Dear Pearl, she mentally composed to her sister.The frontier optimism continues unabated in Denver “City.”
What a joke that word was. She couldn’t see one cobbled street or painted storefront or even a single cherry tree, despite her research telling her Denver had been founded on the banks of Cherry Creek. All she saw was chaos and wagons and a sawmill at the river that seemed to have started more structures than it had finished. If roads were laid out, the buildings were placed too sparsely on the trampled, muddy ground to tell.
Across the creek lay the slightly more robust settlement of Auraria, but it was also a hodgepodge of shops, shanty shacks, sod huts, tents, wagons, and teepees. Like this side, some of the homes were in proper rows with fences marking the borders of the homestead. One had several lines of denim trousers and gray shirts, so she supposed it was a laundry service. She could hear the faint ring of a blacksmith’s hammer and the bark of a dog, but otherwise, she was surrounded by men and horses and the funk of manure.
She didn’t see women of any description.
And there, beyond the South Platte that Cherry Creek flowed into, rose the muscled peaks of the Rocky Mountains. They were so imposing, they seemed to compress the breath out of her.
She had longed to see mountains again. It had been the one glimmer of anticipation that had kept her spirits up while she’d endured this journey. The Rockies weren’t like the Appalachians, though. There were no soft green wrinkles and folds that had bunched around her like a comforting blanket when she’d been a child in Bedford, Pennsylvania.
These were sharp, broken teeth, craggy and hewn and forbidding as they shot upward above the tree line and attempted to tear holes in the silk-blue sky.
I should have stayed in Topeka.
She’d had nowhere to stay there, though. No place that was safe. No place that wanted her. It was the story of her life to hear the words,You can’t stay here.
“Lady, are you waiting for mail? If not, move away from the window.”
She glanced at the wiry man wearing filthy clothes and muddy boots. His eyes were bright beads in a face of scraggly gray whiskers and brows. Men who looked equally disreputable were gathering behind him.
She moved to enter the Express office, but an employee barred her.
“We close while we sort the mail,” he told her.
“I only want to—”
He closed the door in her face.
“—wait for my party out of the wind.” Marigold bit back a huff. She wasn’t a timid woman, but after four years of her uncle’s politics getting them into confrontations of ever more serious natures, she’d learned that even the battles worth fighting could leave you standing in the rain at midnight while your home went up in flames.
Turning from the door, she looked for a place to sit. Not here. Danger scented the air. The line of men continued to grow, and she knew it was only a matter of time before—
“Hey, lady. Are you married? You want a husband?”
“Looking for the cathouse? I’ll show you where it is.”
“What’s that you’re wearing?”
