Page 18 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
“There is no law, and there’s no one to do the arresting even if there was.” Virgil answered the question she’d forgotten she had asked.
She snapped him a look. “What exactly do you mean, ‘there is no law’?”
“Thousands of men—fifty, maybe a hundred thousand—have poured through these mountains since we arrived a year and a half ago. That’s not counting the Cheyenne and Arapahoe and Ute, who’ve all been squeezed into these parts by settlers pushing from all sides. You think a handful of politicians five hundred miles away have any control over what goes on here? Hell, they can barely keep from killing each other over where to put the capitol, let alone worrying about what we’re doing.”
Marigold gripped the edge of her seat while fighting back a hysterical laugh. “No wonder everyone is so worried which way the miners would vote on statehood.” These men were outlaws and transients with no stake in what happened at the border with Missouri.
As if to prove her right, a shrill whistle pierced the air. It came from one of the miners down in a trench. Most of them wore heavy hobnail boots and filthy denim trousers. Some had removed their shirts, exposing their tanned, hairy chests crisscrossed by suspenders. They held pickaxes and wide, flat shovels and seemed to be moving gravel from the stream bed into a long wooden box.
“Blow us a kiss, sweetheart!” one of them cajoled. He sent her one with a touch of his fingertips to his lips and an expansive wave of his arm.
Virgil was on his feet so fast, the wagon rocked under the stamp of his weight. “Get back to work!” he snarled.
All the men jolted and turned away. One cuffed the catcaller on the back of his head.
Marigold blinked, stunned. The man had been fresh, but back in Topeka she’d had spittle land on her from men who had stuck their face into hers while they berated and shoved her. She had been called “whore” and “harlot” by her husband and his lawyer.
Through it all, no one had defended her like that. Her sister had saidignore it,and her uncle had saidwe can’t let that stop us.
A hot ball of mixed emotions formed in her throat. She kept her eyes down to hide it.
“If anything happens with any of the men here,anything, you let them know they’ll have me to deal with.” Virgil planted his butt on the bench again. “Then youtell me. That’s not just for your safety, but for the children and the rest of the worksite. One step out of line by any of these lunkheads can be a fuse on a powder keg. Understand?”
“Yes.” She bit her lips to keep them from quivering.
She knew she was being stared at as they continued along. Men went quiet as their wagon rolled past, stopping work, but Virgil’s mood seemed to have traveled ahead. No one else called out until a booming voice shouted, “Boss!”
Virgil drew hard on the reins to stop the wagon in front of the biggest of the few buildings she could see. A wiry man stood in the open door. He had a small chin and a sunken chest and an angelic halo of silver-black curls.
“Marigold, this is Yeller.”
“Because I yell, not because I’m yellah,” Yeller informed her. “I ain’t afraid of nothin’.” He didn’t so much shout as possess a deep voice that carried like the ring of a church bell.
“Yeller runs the storehouse and will keep an account of anything you take. You and I will settle up at home.”
“You must be Miss Martin. Or Mrs. Gardner, should I say?” He tipped an imaginary hat. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if things worked out the way they were supposed to?” Virgil spoke with a facetious congeniality as he climbed from the wagon. “This is Mrs. Davis, Miss Martin’s sister. She’s here to mind my children and keep house for me. Do me the favor of telling all and sundry so I don’t have to repeat myself.”
“Tell ’em what? That you’re calling it a house now? Pah. I guess it’s better than what I sleep in, huh, Mrs. Davis? You’re widowed? My condolences.”
“Divorced,” she corrected as she climbed from the wagon, not taking her usual care in relaying that information because she was falling into a state of shock, heart sinking faster than a stone in a river, chest growing tight.
“Dee-vorced,” Yeller repeated loud enough to turn heads down the way. “You want a husband, you come see me first, hear me? I’m offering myself, o’ course. I don’t keep a stock o’ husbands. Although most days maybe I do.”
She supposed these were jokes and she was expected to laugh, but… “Am I to, um, understand that, um…”
Dear Pearl. If you can picture rows of unwashed sheets on a line, you have the substance of Quail’s Creek. A town it is not.
Tents. That’s all there were. Rows of gray, muddy tents set out the way she’d once seen an army troop encamped on a field.
“Have we, um,arrived?” She might as well be called Squeak, her voice had dwindled to such a pale version of itself.
Virgil nodded, making no apologies or excuses. “I’ll walk you up to thecabin—” He threw a sour look at Yeller. “So you can get settled.”
He reached into the wagon for her carpetbag and cushion and started up what seemed to pass for a main street, but it was really only a pair of ruts worn into the grass.
She never should have come, never should have interfered in Pearl’s life. She should have turned a blind eye to her husband’s adultery and become one of those long-suffering, stuck-up society matrons she had always pitied and judged as lacking a spine. At least those women lived in real towns with bakeries and book shops and gas-powered streetlamps.
