Renegade Man

by Parris Afton Bonds

  A moment later Magnum began to bark outside the tent. Abruptly her hands ceased their delicate work. Obviously C. B. Kingsley didn’t like her digging on what he considered his land, and apparently Buck Dillard wasn’t finished paying his boss’s respects.

  Her mouth set in a defiant line, she pushed back the tent flap and stepped outside. Immediately Magnum trotted to her side. What she spotted wasn’t Buck’s pinto but a tall man striding across the creek meadow toward her camp. A cowboy hat shadowed his features, but one glance at the set of those shoulders and she knew that her latest visitor was Jonah Jones. Just one more person who didn’t want her digging here.

  He made his way carefully across the crisscrossing network of twine, skirting the grids where the topsoil had already been removed. She remained where she was, her hands on her hips, her expression unyield¬ng, as he drew nearer. He walked with what was almost a swagger, a man steeped in his own self- confidence.

  As much as she resented his presence at Tomahawk Flats, she couldn’t help the way her stomach bottomed out and her breathing rushed as rapidly as Renegade Creek. He was so tall in a pair of scuffed boots that he dwarfed her five-foot-three-inch frame, making her feel terribly vulnerable.

  Apparently he had changed his wet suit for western attire for the call. When he was close enough, she said, “Well, if it isn’t the old salt. You paying a neighborly visit, too?”

  His brows, straight as rulers, rose over sea-green eyes with saltwater-and-wind lines at the corners. “Too?”

  “I was just treated to a visit by Meat Processor, making his morning rounds for C.B.”

  Thoughtfully, he ran a finger along the line of his mustache. “I would think, as an occupant of this part of the valley, that I’d also be on C.B.’s schedule of ‘morning rounds.’ ”

  Beside her, Magnum remained in a guarded stance, but the snarl with which he had greeted Buck Dillard was absent, at least for the present. “Well, if this isn’t a neighborly visit,” she asked, “then what is it?”

  His clenched jaw eased with his wry smile. “Coming across the flat there, I felt like I should be waving a white flag. Hey, listen. This is ridiculous. We’re camped less than a quarter mile apart. If we’re going to be working within hailing range of one another for the rest of the summer, I think we should be on sociable terms, at least.”

  She resented his easy charm. Or maybe she resented how easily he had gotten over her. Vanity, vanity! “Just what does ‘sociable terms’ mean?”

  “Well, for one thing, it’s a little silly for both of us to make that long trip into town every time we need to buy supplies or run an errand. It seems like we could correlate our trips, doesn’t it?”

  She folded her arms and examined Jonah, really examined him. He had changed so much over the years, become so thoroughly masculine. The face alone was overpowering: strong, sexy mouth framed by that raffish mustache; deep tan; deeply cleft chin. The easy friendship they had shared—and later the hand-holding, followed eventually by the chaste kisses of adolescence—was wiped out by the overwhelming presence of the boy become man.

  For courage, she injected skepticism into her voice. “What’s the second thing?”

  He grunted, jamming his hands in his pockets. His gaze drifted to the distant Burro Mountains. His nostrils flared, as if scenting something. When he glanced back at her, he was frowning. “Ah, hell. I want to apologize about the other afternoon. At the laundry. What went on between you and Chap was none of my business.”

  “You’re wrong about that. What went on between me and Chap was everybody’s business. No soap opera could hold a candle to the drama that took place in Silver City twenty years ago.”

  She inflected her voice with the sharp edge of sing¬song mimickry: “Girl from wrong side of tracks goes to work for cattle baron’s household. Cattle baron’s heir falls for her. She turns up pregnant. They go to his father for permission to marry. Father refuses, then offers her money to leave town. She refuses. Heir comes to her, announcing he has realized his obligation to his heritage and to the Split P and has changed his mind. Girl from wrong side of tracks leaves town.”

  The lines beside his eyes deepened. “That’s how the story goes. Is that what really happened?”

  “Just what do you mean?”

  “Word went that you accepted C.B.’s bribe. That that’s why Chap changed his mind about marrying you.” His glance flickered over her camp. “You have done quite well for yourself.”

  She felt the way she had when she fell from the apple tree—when she had been unable to breath for several long, painful seconds. “That’s a lie! I wouldn’t touch his filthy money. I hitchhiked to Houston. Hitchhiked! And I waited tables to support myself and Trace for five years while I went back to school. Only after my late husband came into our lives did we have a life-style that could be considered comfortable.” She dusted her hands and started toward her tent. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain Outrageous, my lunch is probably burnt by now.”

  “So that’s what I was smelling?”

  She paused and looked over her shoulder. He had been magnanimous enough to apologize. Could she be any less civil? “Would you care for some lunch?”

  He stared at her with wary amusement. “You sure?”

  “Leftover stew and chicken salad sandwiches.”

  “I’ll stay. I’ve run out of everything but bologna.”

  She lifted a brow. “Is such a heavy lunch wise for a diver?”

  “Gotta run into Silver City this afternoon to pick up my mail. That’s what got me thinking I oughta stop by and see if you wanted anything while I was in town.”

  Perhaps she had been too generous in her assessment of him. She eyed him suspiciously. “You wouldn’t by any chance be thinking of sweet-talking me out of excavating this site, would you?”

  His thumbs hooked in his belt loops, he regarded her steadily. “Ritz, if I thought I could get away with it, I would. But I remember you from the old days, from the first grade—when you refused to take naps.”

  “You weren’t so biddable either, Jonah.” In fact, he had been a real rebel, an intractable boy who lived life on his terms. “Are you forgetting the third-grade Christmas play?”

  His abashed grin was all too charming. “I guess I was. Whoever heard of an elf being taller than Santa?”

  When he had refused—and continued to refuse—to play an elf, the principal had sworn to keep Jonah in his office until he relented. He never did. Day after day passed, the Christmas play passed, and he continued to sit silently in the principal’s office. Finally the holidays arrived. Come January, when he went back to school, nothing was ever said about returning to the principal’s office.

  He narrowed his eyes on her. “If I remember rightly, you were a reindeer, and you didn’t even show up the night of the play.”

  She started toward the tent. “I was sick with a stomachache.” She could have told him how terribly shy she had been. But that wasn’t the complete truth. She settled for the nearest to it she could come. “Besides, I didn’t believe in Santa or Christmas.”

  Ducking his head, he followed her inside the tent. His keen gaze swept over her personal belongings: the sleeping bag atop an air mattress; her field journal open on the table; a pair of white long johns draped over the back of a folding chair.

  “Did you?” she asked, trying to make light conversation to cover her unease. He was standing so close that she could barely move without touching him. “Did you believe in Christmas?”

  He laughed sharply, his gaze sliding from her rumpled bedroll to her. “Never. But I desperately wanted to.” He removed his sweat-stained Stetson and sailed it onto her pillow, as if staking his claim to her bed. “Pa would come home drunk on Christmas Eve and pass out. He’d come home drunk practically every day, so why would Christmas be any different?”

  She dished out two plates of stew and made a couple of chicken salad sandwiches. “Your father might not have been a good provider, but that doesn’t mean he
wasn’t a good man.”

  “My mother wouldn’t have argued that.”

  His mother had died of some “female disease,” as Mrs. McLeod had put it at the time, and Jonah had rarely mentioned her after that. Feeling awkward, Rita-lou set the plates rather unceremoniously on the card table. “Lunch.”

  He wedged himself into one unsubstantial chair. “Forks?”

  With his hair rumpled from the Stetson, and that disreputable mustache, she decided that all he needed was an eyepatch and he’d look like a buccaneer. “In the grub box.” She set out two glasses and poured milk without asking his preference.

  After she seated herself, he began to eat, almost wolfing down the stew. He caught her watching him and grinned. “Great stew, Ritz. Your ma teach you how to cook?”

  “She hated coming home to cook after cooking all day for the Kingsleys. Grandpops taught me.”

  “You still miss him, don’t you?”

  “Very much.” Her grandfather had worked at the mile-wide, mile-deep open-pit Kennecott copper mine until an accident had confined him to a wheelchair thirty years earlier.

  After her mother had run off with Kennecott’s corporate pilot, Rita-Iou had dropped out of the tenth grade to support her grandfather by working at the Kingsley mansion. “The one thing that saddens me the most about the whole episode that summer was that Grandpops died before he could find out about his great-grandson.”

  “Is that the Trace you’ve mentioned?”

  “Yes. He’s a marvelous boy, Jonah. He’s tall, with hair just about your color, and warm brown eyes. He’s intelligent and sensitive and concerned about everything and everyone.”

  “Is that what you saw in Chap, Rita-lou, that you didn’t see in me?”

  She forced herself to swallow and raised her eyes to meet Jonah’s hard gaze. “You and I were never serious about each other, Jonah.”

  “Maybe it was the Kingsley money, then.”

  She stiffened. “Maybe it was because Chap was solid and dependable, not a will-o’-the-wisp.”

  His mouth tightened in a hard, unfriendly line. “Dependable? Where was he when you were having labor pains? Where was he when you were having his kid?”

  “And I suppose you’d have been there?”

  “I would never have let it happen to you in the first place.”

  “If you’ve finished eating, Davy Jones, I think you’d better go.”

  “That’s Jonah Jones.” He rose, his body seeming to completely fill the confines of the tent. “I think you’re right. We were at odds twenty years ago, and things haven’t changed, have they?” He grabbed his hat and clamped it low over his forehead, then gazed down at her from beneath its brim. “Just keep any old bones you dig up out of my way.” He paused, and his expression grew even grimmer. “And you with them.”

  Chapter 4

  Jonah spat into his face mask, the best prevention against fogging.

  He had just primed the gold dredger’s engine, and now the dredger made a loud humming noise in the quiet of the hot afternoon. Readjusting his regulator, he checked his air intake valve to see if it was working properly. His years of SEAL experience had taught him too well that it was the one little detail you overlooked that would get you. A SEAL member might get a little cocky, and the next thing you knew he’d get the bends, or incinerate himself trying to dispose of a bomb.

  Looking like some terrifying movie monster, Jonah waded into the river where it broke up against the boulders in a rainbow mist. Without the wet suit and gloves he would have been numbed by the chilly snow runoff. His fins slapped through the water, making slurping, sucking noises. Once he was under the surface, he was captivated by the sheer beauty of the scenery. The water was incredibly clear. Tiny plants pushed through the riverbed, their fronds swaying in the unseen current. Underwater, the drone of the dredger was almost nonexistent. It was a silent, eerily beautiful world.

  He went to work. And it was work. Wearing sturdy gloves, he tediously but carefully sifted through the half foot of gravel and sand that covered the bedrock. With the dredger’s hose braced against his thigh, he tossed away the big rocks that were too large for the nozzle. Sometimes, if you weren’t careful, the rocks accumulated into a small mountain that could tumble down in an avalanche that trapped you underwater.

  Wherever the two layers of the riverbed met, there was always an increased chance of finding gold. He knew what to look for—gold glowed, it didn’t glitter—and he knew where to look. Crevices and irregular formations usually trapped the precious mineral after a flood had moved it down from the mountain mother lodes. Since gold was nine times heavier than water, heavier even than silt and most metals, gravity usually caught it in riverbed pockets.

  He had selected the Silver City area for prospecting, not out of nostalgia but because the Mesa del Oro, a great alluvial fan many square miles in area and composed of gravel and andesite, sloped down from the Animas Mountains and spread out through the Mimbres Valley watershed. During his first exploratory trip back in March, he had tested the sand and gravel and found them to be gold-bearing. But would there be enough gold to provide a rich paystreak? It was a remote, but not impossible, dream.

  He worked more slowly around the bedrock. Little by little he began to come across flour gold, possibly an indication of a paystreak—a broad streak of gold dust that had been laid down by a previous flood. The elusive metal had captured his imagination as a child on his infrequent trips to Pinos Altos. P.A., founded in 1859 by a group of forty-niners drifting home from California, had been a rough-and-tumble town inhabited by the likes of Judge Roy Bean. Now it was a ghost town.

  Yesterday he had found what seemed to be a significant amount of gold in the tailings. Now, trying to be pragmatic, he backtracked to where the tail end of the streak should be—a large, low area near the inside of the river’s bend, where the water changed direction. One hundred pounds of lead at his waist kept him from drifting downstream with the rapid current.

  Gold. The word alone evoked images of wealth. The ancient rivers of gold. Immortal, incorruptible gold. Man had been using it for over sixty-six centuries. It permeated the dark world of the medieval alchemists, who labored for decades in their laboratories, futilely seeking to transform base metals into nobler ones. Yet gold fever had never diminished for dreamers like himself.

  Lest he be doomed to the same disappointment as the medieval alchemists, Jonah kept his eye out for valuable minerals other than gold: garnet, silver, tourmaline and platinum, which was even heavier than gold and worth an even bigger fortune. He sifted carefully through the sand and gravel. Then, suddenly, the nozzle’s suctioning power diminished.

  Damn it, he thought. The hose was clogged. He took the rubber hammer from his belt and tapped along the length of hose. When the water intake didn’t increase, he knew he was going to have to check the unit itself. Probably one of the sluice boxes was backed up.

  Surfacing, he pulled aside his regulator, pushed his mask atop his head and looked straight into the direct brown eyes of his childhood sweetheart. He nearly replaced the regulator over his nose and mouth in order to restore the simple but mandatory process of breathing, something he’d suddenly forgotten how to do.

  Ritz—distant, proud Ritz—had always had the power to do that to him. But over the years when she had been absent from his life, he had conveniently forgotten that small, arbitrary fact. The hell of it all was that she was unaware of the power he had long ago delegated to her, however unwillingly. He had gone down fighting against this extraordinary attraction like a sailor beguiled by a singing mermaid.

  “How long have you been watching?”

  “About twenty minutes.” Her arms were wrapped around her sleek legs; her chin was nestled on her knees. A smudge of dirt shadowed her cheek, and tendrils of hair escaped her carelessly gathered ponytail, only to be trapped by the perspiration at her temples. At her side, the Lab was napping, probably dreaming of chasing cats or field mice. "Don’t you get claustrophob
ic or something, under the water all that time?”

  He pulled back his hood and tugged off his gloves. “If you do it enough, it becomes second nature.”

  His ear, attuned to the hum of the dredger’s engine, picked up an out-of-sync noise made by the compressor. Just great, he thought, adding up the amount a new compressor would cost.

  “Why do you do it? Everyone says your chances of finding any sizable amount of gold on a virgin claim are nil.”

  He plopped down on the other side of her, propping his weight on his elbows. “That’s what they said about finding oil in Baghrashi, where every reputable geologist had insisted oil would never be found. Now the country is floating on the largest pool of oil in the world. Like oil, gold is where you find it. But it’s more than that, Ritz. It’s the gold itself. It’s always in the purest state. You can dig it up when it’s been lying under the ocean for four and a half billion years and its luster won’t have dimmed.”

  He realized he was spilling his feelings to her, just as he often had more than twenty years before. One thing he could say about Ritz, she was a damned good listener. His gaze lowered from her attentive eyes to the valley created by her breasts, exposed by the brown chambray shirt she had knotted at her midriff. Sweat sheened her sun-pinkened flesh. Wanting, a phantom pain left over from earlier days, ached insistently inside him and that same old song began playing inside his head.

  How do you forget a memory? he wondered. Now, when he looked back, he could see how his young, carefree, careless love couldn’t have kept her his any longer. Time was merciful enough to diminish pain... yet memory could still tug at the heart when it passed through.

  She shifted uneasily under his regard. “I came by to make my own apology. 1 was pretty rude earlier this week.” She rushed on before he could reply. “I’m on my way into town. Need anything?”

  He couldn’t believe the chance fate had handed him. “Yeah, but I doubt you’ll be able to get it on your own. If you don’t mind, I’ll hitch a ride in with you.” She got to her feet and dusted off the back of her pleated khaki trousers. “I don’t mind.”