Page 65 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
She had been trying to think all day where she would go, how she would survive. His partners wouldn’t help her, not if Virgil said she was a thief. She would have to walk to Denver, she supposed. Perhaps one of the miners would take her, but no one would leave before payday. Even if one took her, would she be reduced to sharing his tent? At what cost? And she still owed Virgil a hundred and three dollars and twenty-five cents. How would she ever square things with him?
She clenched her hot, dry eyes, then blinked to see through the shadows as she stepped outside and started toward the dying fire. Her leather slippers felt heavy as blocks of ice.
As she lowered onto the log round and looked across at him, she saw only grim shadows in his face, no sign of the man who had held her so tenderly last night. The one who had said they had things to talk about.
She had believed he wanted to talk about their future. Stupid, stupid Marigold. She had started to believe Virgil was different, but he was the same as all men, saying one thing to ply her into granting liberties, then treating her like trash when he no longer had use for her.
Her fingers were so numb where she clasped them, it could have been the frostbitten middle of January. She was terrified of his answer, but she made herself ask the question.
“Are you going to turn me out?”
“I can’t, can I?”
His answer punched the air clean out of her. She sat reeling from the resentment in his tone. The frustration that she was his only option to mind his children when he clearly wanted to be rid of her.
“You really think I stole it?” This ache of false accusation was so familiar, it ought to be something she could bear by now, but it was as fierce and fresh as it had been when she’d heard those ugly things in court while Ben had refused to look at her.
Virgil wasn’t looking at her. He was roughly scratching his hair and grumbling, “I don’t know what to think. You keep taking things from all these men here—”
She stood, so offended she blurted, “And what did you take, Virgil? The little self-respect I had left.”
He lifted his face, and they glared at one another. The memory of last night was sullied and tawdry.Shewas.
“Ask me if that’s why I took it,” she said in a voice that scraped its way up from the depths of her chest. “If that’s what you really think of me, you damned well say it.”
She thought that scar on his cheek might be pulsing and ticking, but her vision was so glazed by her anguish, she couldn’t be sure.
As the silence stretched, the tears pressed behind her eyes and filled her nose and clogged her throat. She whirled and started into the cabin, refusing to let him hear her cry over hurting her this way.
“Are you going to leave?” he asked in a low rumble.
She halted and looked up at the stars, arms shooting straight at her sides as she turned.
“I can’t. Can I?”
…
“Maybe it’s just lost,” Stoney said when Virgil came to see him at the quartz crush.
How did everyone know his business? Emmett had overheard Virgil ask Levi about the nugget yesterday, but somehow it had gotten around that Virgil was suspecting Marigold and everyone seemed to be taking her side.
“Maybe,” Virgil said flatly. He’d searched and searched everywhere he could think, including near the logs where they’d… Fuck. He couldn’t think of it without feeling both horny and remorseful.
What did you take, Virgil? The little self-respect I had left.
He’d heard her crying below him when he came to bed. She’d been trying to keep it quiet, but he’d heard her catching small breaths and sniffling.
He rubbed his hand down his face, trying to erase the jumble of memories and the equally tangled emotions attached to them, wanting none of it reflected on his face.
“I came to ask what happened to Rufus,” he said to Stoney.
“Stuck his hand where he shouldn’t. First thing I tell the boys is, ‘Never put your hand here.’” Stoney pointed at where the pair of granite wheels rolled in the circled track of granite, crushing the gold from the quartz so it could be retrieved with mercury. “How bad is it?”
“His fingertip is crushed. Could be worse, but Ira said he should go to town, see a doctor. Two of the men are going with him, so we’re losing three.”
Stoney swore under his breath, but if those men hadn’t left now, they would have found another reason to leave soon enough.
“Men shouldn’t be in here at the wheel anyway,” Stoney said with a scowl. “Throw the rocks on the pile, I tell them.” He nodded at where a load of boulders had been tumbled from a wooden wheelbarrow off the edge of a gulley onto the pile. “Break them up over there.”
