At her soft-spoken words, he paused again. “Of course, we will. Cole will come looking for us. My truck and trailer are sitting in the yard and neither of us is there. They’ll find us eventually if we don’t get out of here before then. I just hope your horse is smart enough to go back to the ranch.” He’d been surprised to see the black and white paint eating grasses nearby, its reins dragging on the ground.
“Oh, Domino is smart, but she won’t go back. She’ll stay outside as long as I’m in here. There’s no water out there.” The concern for her horse came through in her voice.
“All horses return home at feeding time.”
She sighed, the soft sound floating up to him in utter defeat. “No, she won’t. I told her to wait. She won’t leave. She may wander to eat, but she’s very well trained.”
She may think her horse would stay, but he knew from experience, survival would trump training every time. Except when stubbornness got in the way, which just proved he was dumber than a horse.
Shaking off the thought, he focused on his movements, striking the spikes deep into the loose gravel and pulling them toward himself and over to the side. But the quiet didn’t help. She was obviously perfectly happy sitting in pitch blackness with no sound whatsoever. He’d never met a woman like her.
“I rode Black Jack to look for you. I thought you’d be at Cole’s.” He waited to move the dirt, anxious to hear her voice. Not only did it keep his directional focus in place, it also assured him she was still in the present.
“That’s where I would have been if not for Dog here.”
He could almost hear her stroke the dog, but it had to be his imagination. He shoved dirt aside. “If I’d known you were at this old mine, I wouldn’t have saddled Black Jack.”
A soft chuckle came from the darkness below. “He threw you.”
“Not exactly, but he sure as hell tried.” He’d been so focused on the paint standing in the light shade of the Palo Verde tree that he hadn’t seen the entrance to the mine before the horse. Black Jack had reared, almost unseating him. He had to jump off the horse as it came down. “Then he hightailed it back to the ranch.”
“I’ll bet he’s shaking. Whisper will have your head if she discovers you rode him out to the Take a Chance mine.”
He crawled forward about a foot and stabbed the dirt with the spikes. “I’m sure once she knows I came out here to find you, she’ll get over it.”
A snort floated up behind him. “Not likely. If it comes to a decision between a person and an animal, Whisper will choose the animal every time.”
And he always chose lives over homes…until he didn’t and paid for it. “That sounds like her values are a bit mixed up.”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t had the best experience with humans. She’s even friends with a mountain lion.”
The two unrelated statements told him two things. One, the darkness may be getting to her as well, and two, Last Chance may do more than rescue horses. It sounded like it had rescued people, too.
“Are you making progress up there? Is the sand filling in as soon as you move it?”
Sand? “No, the gravel must be staying because I’ve been able to move forward.” Though it was true, he wasn’t sure it was actually progress. “Why don’t you shine the light up here so I can make sure I’m headed in the right direction.”
The sound of her boots scrapping on the dirt was a clear indication she’d been sitting on the ground. When the light came on, she had it facing away from him. Still, it seemed bright after the pitch blackness. If he had turned on the light, he would have had it shining directly on where he was working and probably blinded himself. Had she done that on purpose or just happened to face it that way?
She directed the light toward the ceiling, brightening the area where he was working without directly shining it on the spot. He’d been right. He had made progress, staying in the right direction, but it was minimal. He’d cleared a space about two feet wide and two feet high and only a foot deep.
She stepped out from directly behind him to view his handwork. “That’s better than I expected. I thought for sure the ceiling would fill in the space you’re creating. The entrance to the mine is so soft, which must be why they used beams for support. Back there,” she pointed back into the mine. “If it caved in, we’d probably just have to remove the rubble and crawl out.”
“Lucky us.” He thought his progress was pitiful, but without a shovel, it was the best he could do.
Almost as if she read his mind, she spoke. “It’s going to be really slow. I can search the mine further to see if there’s anything else we can use.”
That would be a good use of time, since they both would be doing something to get themselves out, but then he wouldn’t have her voice to anchor his direction. Or, they could both explore, but would that be wasting time? Based on the depth of most mines, there should be plenty of air for them, as long as there weren’t multiple cave-ins. And he was still positive Cole would get them out of there before they starved to death.
The light left as she turned. “Come on, Dog. There’s got to be more tools in here somewhere.”
“Wait.” He scrambled down as a new thought occurred. What if she slipped into her past again or became lost? He’d only been inside one old mine, but if he hadn’t had a guide with him, he would have never found his way out. “We’re not following your father’s advice.”
At her confused look, he reminded her. “Your father said after we find what we need, we should make a plan. We didn’t do that.”
“And if it fails to create a new plan until achieving success.”
As she rattled off the end of the litany, he relaxed. Keeping her grounded should help. “When I was digging, your voice kept me going in the right direction. So if we continue to dig with these,” he held up the two spikes, “then one of us should remain here and keep talking while the other moves the dirt. If our plan is to gather more tools then we should both search, but this plan hasn’t failed yet. I don’t think I’ve been at this thirty minutes yet.”
