Page 66 of The Prospector's Only Prospect
Virgil grunted, thinking there wasn’t anything to be done now.
“Is she going with them?” Stoney asked.
“Who? Marigold? No. She’s staying here to mind my children.” He hoped. It was sitting heavy in his mind that if he trusted her with his children, he ought to trust her not to steal a gold nugget.
“She can’t sell it here,” Stoney noted. “What are the men going to do? Buy gold with gold? It’s no use to her, so why would she take it unless she’s planning to leave?”
“I know. All right? I know.” Virgil’s mind had been going around and around, trying to absolve her.
He didn’t want to believe she would steal from him, he really didn’t, but he’d been around long enough, encountered the dark side of humanity enough, to know there wasn’t one person alive who wouldn’t jump on an opportunity if the right one presented itself. That’s why he was here, tearing up a pretty little valley for his own gain, giving a perfectly healthy boy like Rufus a chance to lose his hand.
Marigold had been struck some low blows herself. She had arrived here with a pair of drawers and a hairbrush. He didn’t blame her for taking the gifts the men offered her, but that nugget wasn’t a gift. And hell if losing it wasn’t causing him to have all manner of shit luck.
Yesterday, on his way to getting the horse back to Owen, the animal had thrown a shoe. Not long after, there’d been a small brush fire that had forced all the men to leave their posts while they put it out. Now there’d been an injury that was taking three men.
Virgil wasn’t a superstitious man, and God knew he hadn’t prayed since he was a child, but he couldn’t help thinking the missing nugget was bringing him bad luck.
Sure enough, by nightfall, two men had been fired for throwing fists, Levi had been sprayed by a skunk, and a cracking great thunderstorm rolled in to scare the shit out of all of them before it dumped a year’s worth of rain in an hour.
Levi washed himself top to toe in the rain, trying not to cry because he was so cold and frustrated. Marigold set his clothes to boil with vinegar, but the stench filled the cabin once they all went to bed, making for a restless, noxious sleep.
They all woke grumpy and cold. Marigold hadn’t finished the children’s winter wear, so they all wore something half stitched. She was shivering, but damned if she would put on the warm bonnet or the apron he’d given her. She did loop a lopsided scarf around her neck that Nettie had made.
The laundry she’d washed had been caught in the deluge, so Virgil had to wear his muddy ones to work. He slipped on his way back from the stream and spilled all the water, so he had to go back again.
He returned in time to find her trying to start a fire with wet wood in a wet pit.
“I’ll do it,” he said, starting to crouch down beside her.
“I can do it,” she hissed. If she’d been a cat, he would have had four more claw marks to go along with the scar on his cheek.
He decided right then and there that he would give up the goddamned nugget if it meant they could go back to the way things had been, but he was pretty sure that would never happen. He stalked away.
There were washouts all through the diverted stream, sluice boxes knocked over, and men trying to dry out their clothes and tents and whatever else had been soaked in the downpour.
“Could have been worse. Could have been snow,” Owen said.
True, but it was a reminder that cold weather was on its way and they would soon be trapped indoors.
Virgil didn’t want to think about being trapped in a cabin with three restless children and a woman he couldn’t trust, so he did what always cleared his mind. He waded into the cold stream and put his back into shoveling gravel into the sluice box.
…
This was her life now, Marigold kept thinking. She could handle hardship. Wringing out clothes and trying to put up with the musk of skunk in Levi’s bedding and discovering a roof leak that threatened all her drying herbs was one thing. The coldness of her employer was another.
She and Virgil hadn’t spoken at all yesterday. Maybe she should have let him light the fire this morning, because it had taken her until the little ones were up to get it going, but she was still somad. Not just that Virgil had accused her and that they were no longer friends, but because she felt as though she no longer had any friends at all. The ones she’d thought she had were his partners and employees. They would all side with him.
She couldn’t summon the courage to go see Yeller or Gristle, worried they would ask her uncomfortable questions or look at her with mistrust.
“Oh, that skunk,” she groaned as she came in from setting Levi’s bedding in the come-and-go sunshine and hit a fresh wall of stink.
Nettie giggled. “Harley pooped.”
“Oh. Thank goodness. That can go down the john.” Marigold set aside the board with the hole in it and picked up the chamber pot.
If there hadn’t been a soft clink of tin on tin as his little turds rolled, she might have thrown the works down the hole and forever lived with her reputation as a thief.
As it was, she gave the contents another jiggle and the turd rolled over. There was a gleaming spot of gold.
