Chapter Sixteen
THE BURDEN OF MORGAN’Sdisbelief that she was Charles Mitchell’s daughter had been more harrowing than Violet had realized. Now that it was gone, Morgan no longer made her quite so nervous. He might still look like a shaggy bear, but she’d had brief glimpses of his gentle side, and he no longer seemed ferociously unreasonable. He also no longer had any excuse not to answer her questions.
“What did you mean when you said you allowed my father to stay?” she asked first.
“The answer might not be good for the digestion,” he warned.
“I assure you I have an excellent constitution.”
“I meant mine.”
“Oh, the answer makes you angry,” she said, then reminded him, “But I’ve weathered your storms so far, haven’t I?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose you have. Well, I woke up one morning to find your pa picking at the cliff only a few feet from my claim. I wasn’t happy about it.”
“You were furious, weren’t you?” she guessed.
“You could say a little more’n that. I yelled at him to get the hell off my hill. He just waved at me and smiled, as if he didn’t hear me, which just made me angrier. I went down there and saw that he’d hammered in a stake that was literally touching mine. But he hadn’t made a dent in the rock yet. So I told him that his claim was invalid and he had to be gone by the end of the day.”
She paled. “Was that true?”
“Yeah, two mines can’t be placed that close together unless the owner of one buys out the other or the two miners partner up. Your father should have known that. Then I took a good look at him. He was already sweating and the sun hadn’t even come over the range yet. It was cold as hell that early—”
She interrupted, “You realize that ‘cold as hell’ is an oxymoron?”
“You realize you got my drift anyway?”
She blushed a little. “Continue, please.”
“It was obvious he wasn’t going to last more than a few hours, if even that, so I went back to the house to make coffee and sat on the porch to wait until he figured out he was no miner. He might not have been too old to mine, but he was certainly in no condition to do hard labor. And I was right. Within the hour, he collapsed.”
Her eyes flared. “What do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what I said. Charley grabbed his chest and fell over. By the time I got down there, he wasn’t conscious. So I carried him inside the house and put him on my bed and waited for him to wake up and explain.”
“What was there to explain? He had a bad heart. Dr. Cantry mentioned that when I spoke with him.”
“I didn’t know that—yet. And there are other reasons why someone might pass out like that. Some people can’t tolerate the altitude up here, have trouble breathing. But, yeah, Charley mentioned his heart problem when he woke up. He’d only just found out about it himself, and that it was bad. But he assured me that he had no choice, that he had to mine even if it killed him, and he explained why. Your mentioning that loan that he left your brothers with was my first clue that you might be telling the truth. He told me the same thing that morning, and that his boys were depending on him to make the family rich again.”
She winced. It sounded so fanciful when he said it, a lost cause. And yet her father had a mine that now belonged to her and her brothers. An invalid mine? Obviously not, since it was dug, staked, and recorded in town—with Morgan’s permission. He’d allowed it. Why would he do that when he’d admitted how angry he was at her father that day?
But she still had so many things to worry about: how to get her silver out of here, how to pay off the loan immediately, claim jumpers, how to hire workers to mine for her. Or she and her brothers could sell it. Morgan had told her Mr. Sullivan was interested in buying it, but she had a feeling Morgan might raise hell about that option, so she decided not to mention it yet.
Instead she asked, “Do I need to worry about those claim jumpers? Did they ever bother you again?”
“There were signs of someone stealing my silver ore last year while I was in town, leaving picked-out pockets in the walls. After that, I ordered the steel door when I bought the building materials for the house. And there was one other time, end of last winter, when I saw evidence of trespassers in my camp, but I can’t say for sure if it was those two claim jumpers who shot at me.”
“Do the claim jumpers work for Mr. Sullivan?”
“That’s a dumb question. I’d probably be dead by now if they did. No, they showed up early on, when the people in town thought I was a trapper selling hides every so often. They were either already roaming these hills and happened upon me, or they followed me up here before I grew cautious after learning how cutthroat mining can be around here, even this far out.”
She felt a twinge of unease now that she knew for sure she was a mine owner. Morgan had already told her about the sheriff investigating small miners’ complaints that big mine owners had threatened them, and he’d just implied again that Sullivan wanted to harm him. Having met Shawn Sullivan and his daughter, she just couldn’t imagine him doing anything like that. Morgan was wrong about Mr. Sullivan, but she wasn’t about to try to convince him of that when that particular subject was what he’d call a “can of worms.”
So she moved on to the question that confused her most. “Why did you let my father stay?”
“He said I’d have to shoot him to get him to stop mining here.”
“No, he didn’t,” she replied indignantly on her father’s behalf.
