Page 92 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
Within a few minutes, he’d kicked out the men, asking Owen to put away the cart and mules for him. He stood awkwardly by the door as Pearl examined his modest house.
“This is very cozy and— Is that my portrait?” She moved into the small bedroom. “Marigold found a frame for it.”
“Papa did,” Nettie said helpfully. “So she would feel at home here.”
“Oh?”
Virgil didn’t try to interpret her tone.
“Have you children eaten?” he asked as he poked his nose into the stew pot on the stove. He and Pearl hadn’t eaten since midday.
“At the cookhouse, Pa. Ira brought that for you and M—Miss Martin.”
“Please call me Pearl, Levi.” She emerged without her gloves and coat. “It smells good. Shall I serve it?”
After they ate and washed up, Pearl helped the children ready themselves for bed.
“I’m bushed,” she said as the children filed up to the loft. “I’ll turn in, too, if you don’t mind. Good night, Virgil.”
“Good night, Pearl.” He stepped outside to walk the bucket to the stream, filling it for morning. He was also bushed, but restless. Tense. Not in the way that Marigold made him tense, either. This was the tension of having screwed up. Of wanting to walk off his mistakes while knowing he couldn’t walk far enough to get away from them. This was the kind that couldn’t be fixed.
Which didn’t make sense because things were actually fine. Pearl was exactly what he had wanted when he had advertised for a wife. She was kind and the children were taking to her. Marigold didn’t want him, but Pearl did.
Accept it.
As he undressed for bed, he heard Nettie upstairs in the loft, sniffling as she told Harley, “M-meego isn’t h-here.”
Ah, shit.
He stepped outside his door and whispered, “Nettie!”
Her teary face peered over the rail.
“Do you want to sleep in here with me tonight?”
She nodded, and Harley said, “Me.”
“Yes, bring him, too.”
Levi poked his head over the rail.
Virgil was really fucking standing in it, wasn’t he?
“You, too.” He jerked his head.
Minutes later, his children were arranged around him like a litter of puppies, all drifting off while he lay awake, throat hot and eyes salty behind his closed lids.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“What did you do?” Stoney demanded.
“Nothing. Her sister showed up, and Marigold said I ought to at least bring Pearl back here with me to see if it will work.” Virgil shoveled gravel into the sluice box as he spoke.
He was standing ankle deep in bitterly cold water, trying to freeze out the ache that had taken hold in his chest. He was working alongside Emmett and Stoney and Owen, just like their days in California. If they’d still been working for someone else, Virgil would have driven a pickaxe through his own skull, but they were doing this for themselves. It didn’t make it any easier, but it made it less an exercise in resentment.
The part where his partners got their noses into his business was deeply unwelcome, though. He was plenty twisted up in recriminations and questions without their mining for more.
He put his back into his work, trying to drown them out with the scrape and slough of the shovel into wet gravel.
