Of course, maybe she was just talking, or maybe she had folks there, or maybe she was staying in town and hiring the work done.
He didn’t know. But there was one way to find out.
Fairplay wasn’t exactly on the way back to Georgia, but it would be easy enough to ride that way, steer clear of town, and just have a little look before they headed east as fast as their horses would carry them.
“Get up, Toby,” he said. “I got a new plan.”
40
Church bells chimed merrily in the crisp autumn morning, calling Salida to worship.
Conn stumbled toward the sound, looking like a dead man who’d clawed his way out of the grave to answer the call of the tolling bells.
Which wasn’t far from the truth.
He had, indeed, escaped a grave.
Sheffield’s grave and almost his own.
It had taken an eternity.
Now, his clothes were ragged and bloody and impossibly filthy. He’d lost his hat. His hands were torn and bloody, the nails split from hours of digging.
His eyes were leaden with fatigue and loss and determination, like the eyes of a revenant risen from the grave to wreak its terrible vengeance.
Which, again, was not far from the truth.
Because that’s what had driven Conn through the brutal, endless night, through the pain, through the frustration, through the seeming hopelessness when there didn’t seem to be a way out: the need for vengeance.
He lived to avenge his brother and Sheffield and the farmer whose wife and boy he’d helped.
He lived to keep those promises and the promises he’d made Mary and his parents.
That’s what drove him now.
But thirst for revenge hadn’t saved him.
Beaten, bitter, and lost in the darkness of the collapsed mine, he had prayed for his own survival and success, a thing he had never done before.
And while he didn’t consider himself important enough to warrant God’s favor, he would be a fool not to admit that his escape from certain death had been more than uncanny.
There had been no way out.
Then, just as the lantern started sputtering, he noticed the tug of its dwindling flame, noticed that weak light tilting toward a dead end in the deeper darkness… where, following the leaning flame, he discovered a crack in the seemingly impenetrable wall, a crack that drew and strengthened the flame briefly before it winked out, the lantern’s fuel exhausted at last.
Conn felt something then. Hope. And gratitude.
He’d said another prayer, a prayer of thanks, then asked God again to save him.
Then he’d gone to work on the seemingly impenetrable wall, working in the dark, sinking his fingers into the insignificant crack and laboring on faith as he could see nothing, could only guess at any progress.
But he did make progress.
Eventually, the crack widened. And then, suddenly, his efforts yielded larger chunks of stone and dirt.
He understood that he might at any second tug on the wrong rock and bring down tons of material on top of himself, but he was out of options and besides, a new flame now burned in the darkness, the flame of hope.
Much later, a large section of ceiling broke away and revealed a shaft that ran up and up, opening twenty or thirty feet higher up to reveal a thin strip of starry sky.
