Her suddenly closed expression told him that she hadn’t expected him to ride in with her. “Just give me a moment to change,” he said easily.
He wasn’t inside his camper more than five minutes, but when he reappeared in jeans and a shirt she was pacing back and forth underneath an old elm, her dog padding patiently behind her.
Jonah clapped on his battered Stetson. “Ready.”
She eyed his shirt, the sleeves of which had been cut off at the frayed shoulder seams. “I suppose.”
Cupping her cheek, he wiped away the smudge of dirt with his thumb. “You haven’t changed a bit, Ritz. Still sporting a dirty face, aren’t you?”
Her voice was stony. “Let’s go.”
While she drove, she kept her mouth closed and her eyes on the road, and he in turn was able to take his secret fill of her. Once she flicked a nervous glance at him. He only smiled, but afterward he regretfully focused his attention elsewhere. From his side of the Chevy, he could see a red-tailed hawk circling lazily on the thermals that spiraled upward from the heated ground.
“Every time I see old Mangas Coloradas,” she said, nodding toward the rocky profile of Cooke’s Peak, “I have to wonder what he thinks about all the interlopers in his valley. And how it’s changed.”
He had the feeling she had spoken only to break the silence. Simply for the sake of argument, to capture her attention, he said, “No, that’s not Mangas Coloradas. It’s the Kneeling Nun.”
“No, no,” she said, turning serious. “You’ve forgotten. The Kneeling Nun overlooks the Santa Rita copper mines. Over there, that’s Mangas Coloradas. The Apache warrior is looking southward to see if Spaniards are coming again.”
He kept his expression sober. “You’re wrong. It’s the Kneeling Nun.” According to the most widely accepted version of the Kneeling Nun legend, an order of nuns had arrived from Mexico to work with the families of Santa Rita Del Cobre in the early 1800s. “Don’t you remember the tale,” he asked now. “That among the nuns was one who was very beautiful? And that a contingent of soldiers was stationed in Santa Rita to protect the copper mines and the settlers from Indian raids?”
“It’s Mangas Coloradas.” She compressed her mouth in irritation.
He was enjoying himself immensely. “And the beautiful nun attracted a handsome sergeant’s attention—which, you understand, quickly turned into devotion and love,” he drawled. “Finally the nun yielded to the soldier’s ardor and, as a result of her broken vows, was changed into a stone pillar, condemned to forever read penance as that monolith.”
“My, my, aren’t we articulate?” she snapped. “Leave it to you to see the nun’s love as something evil. You got the ending all wrong, however. It was because of her broken heart that she was transformed into an everlasting monument to prayer and purity.”
He grinned triumphantly. “Then you admit that’s the Kneeling Nun?”
“I did no such thing. I was merely arguing the point.”
He saw the shadows in her eyes and regretted his ruse. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t really remember the story that well, anyway.” Nevertheless, he knew that she—and yes, himself, too—had been talking about a much more crucial issue, a twenty-year-old issue.
Once more they lapsed into silence, and this time it lasted for forty-five minutes, until they entered Silver City. With unspoken relief on both their parts, they agreed to go their own ways, meeting back at the car in three hours, at six.
Feeling as if he had shed an old burden, he sauntered off. All she was to him now, he thought, was a snag in the way of his mining claim. Unless he wanted her to be something more. Which he didn’t. He didn’t need a spiderwoman weaving a silken web around him to trap him. He had a dream to keep.
Before the railroad had been built in 1881, fourteen-horse teams had hauled ore and bullion into Silver City from the mining camps, and bricks of gold and silver had been stacked on sidewalks outside shipping offices. Silver City had been a flourishing shipping point ever since.
One business that still acted as a shipping and receiving point for the local mining industry was Southwest Mining Supplies. Now a husky red-haired man who somehow managed to appear dapper in a three- piece pin-striped business suit waited at the counter while the female clerk searched through a catalogue. “I can order that electrolytic amalgamation unit for you,” she called over her shoulder to him.
Since she was busy, Jonah picked up another catalogue and began leafing through it for compressors.
“Jonah Jones!”
He did a double take when he saw the man next to him, then grinned. “Soren Gunnerson.”
Soren pumped Jonah’s hand in a genial handshake. He had a broad, intelligent forehead and a smile that was pure sunshine. “I’d heard you were back in town, old buddy! Been doing any fishing?”
As boys, Jonah and Soren, who was two years older, had fished in the streams and walked in the forests, quieter than any Indian, they were sure. But then Soren’s father had been promoted at Kennecott Copper, and the family had moved out of Chihuahua Hills to the more affluent Black’s Addition. While Soren might be only part Swede, his Swedish great- grandparents had been among the area’s first settlers, having worked turquoise in the Tyrone Mountains for the famed Tiffany Company way back in the 1870s.
“Not lately, Soren. All my time’s spent prospecting for gold. How about you?”
Soren grinned ruefully. “No time to fish these days. A British company, Rolistof, keeps me busy underground mining lead zinc. One thing about my job— the weather’s always the same down there.”
Jonah’s glance moved upward from the tassled leather loafers to the tailored suit and the royal-blue silk tie. “These duds don’t look like rubber boots and a yellow slicker, good buddy.”
A sheepish smile tugged at Soren’s mouth. “What can I say? I’m a company man.”
“A company man” meant a professional geologist: closemouthed types working for the big boys. Nine-to-fivers. Such a routine made Jonah mentally shudder.
In his book, there were four other personality types in the mining industry. The indies—independents— openly hustling small mining companies. The young ones, fresh out of the Southern School of Mines and inexperienced, but because they didn’t know any better they sometimes made major strikes where gold and silver weren’t supposed to be. Then there were the old, self-taught miners, usually retirees from Ohio or Maine chasing the sun. Last came the young treasure hunters with no education.
Jonah wasn’t sure just where he fit. His was a wild¬catter’s dream. And he had lived in Silver City long enough that he should have known the futility of such dreams.
“How about a drink at the Border Cowboy?” So ren asked.
“After five?” Jonah said.
“Don’t needle me, buddy,” Soren said. “Of course after five.”
After a stop at his post office box, which contained only a month-old SEALs magazine, Jonah headed for the Border Cowboy. It was only four-thirty, but he had nothing better to do. Along with most western mining towns, Silver City had had its share of modest tent saloons, as well as magnificent booze emporiums where soft-handed gamblers in wide-brimmed black hats and diamond-studded cravats presided at the gaming tables, and where cowboys strode up to a long bar, demanding shots of red-eye or mescal.
These days, Silver City had only three beer halls that could claim any relation to the saloons of old. One was a biker bar, Gold Gulch. Another was the Watering Hole, a hangout for the town’s artsy element.
The Border Cowboy was something else. Twenty- five years ago the place had been a honky-tonk, but the two-story clapboard building had since evolved into an atmospheric gathering place for a wide array of customers: cowboys, of course, but also Western New Mexico University students, white-collar Kenne cott office workers, loggers, survey crews and a few local artists who were careful not to sashay when they entered.
Since it was Friday afternoon, the booths and bar on the lower floor, where dinner was
served, were filling up rapidly. The lone pool table was surrounded by men who looked as if they had just come off a three- month trail ride. An electronic keyboard system provided the music, but a country-and-western band would be arriving later. In the old days there had been no strobe lights to add glamour to a place that by daylight had been rather dingy.
There was another dance floor upstairs. Jonah sought the relative peace of the second floor and sequestered himself in a comer booth whose plank walls were festooned with pickaxes and placer mining pans.
Over a foam-topped beer, he observed the jocular customers beginning to drift up from below. Several giggling female miners, their occupations betrayed by the hard hats and yellow rubber boots they still wore, slid into a booth across from his. Every so often they flashed flirtatious glances his way.
Where had they been when he was fifteen and in desperate need of encouragement, too shy to ask a girl out on the dance floor? In those days he had remained in a dark comer. If Ritz had attended the ninth-grade prom. . . but she had been too poor to dress appropriately, and too proud to go dressed as she was. And he—he had been too proud not to go, but he had worn faded jeans and tennis shoes instead of loafers and a T-shirt in place of a button-down.
He took another deep swallow from his frosty mug. Over its rim, he saw Nelda talking to Soren while the two made their way across the dance floor toward him. The strawberry blonde looked fetching in some kind of yellow polka-dotted sundress.
“Hi, Jonah.” Nelda’s smile still had its impartial cheerleader friendliness, but her eyes glowed with a warm and personal message. '‘Look who I ran into. Do you mind if I join you two?”
“I told her we’d be affronted if she didn’t,” Soren said. “Almost like old times, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jonah agreed. Except in the old days, Ritz had also been there.
“Hey, why don’t we reserve a table downstairs for dinner tonight?” Nelda asked.
“Sorry, but I’m not staying.”
“Oh, come on, Jonah,” she coaxed with a bright smile. “For old times’ sake.”
He began to shake his head, then stopped. “You’ll have to convince Ritz.” He nodded toward the stairs. “I rode into town with her.”
In the strobe's dim light, her khaki pants and brown shirt were a blur, while her hair was almost luminous. Her hair was one of her most astonishing features, he thought. Very blond and generous, like her wide, perfectly formed mouth. She still carried herself with that touch of arrogance, and her brilliant, dark brown eyes surveyed the room with a look that seemed to announce calmly, “I couldn’t care less about your opinion.” In all his travels, he had never met a woman who looked more capable of taking on the whole world than she did.
She, in turn, had seen him, and as she made her way toward his booth he felt irrationally annoyed that the sight of her could arouse heartaches he’d thought he had put to rest—and, yes, a sense of excitement, too.
Soren, Jonah noted, had also become alert. Above his broad Scandinavian cheekbones, his blue eyes flared with renewed interest at the woman who paused before the booth with all the majesty of a queen inspecting her guard. Jonah thought he caught a shadow of wariness in her eyes, a defensive straightening of her shoulders, at the sight of her old classmates.
Soren rose at the same time he did and said, “I don’t believe it. Rita-lou Randall. If you don’t make a mockery of middle age, I don’t know what does.” She offered her cheek for his good-natured kiss. “You’re not doing too badly yourself.” She slid into the empty space beside Jonah, and he smelled again the faint scent of some woodsy perfume he couldn’t identify, except that he remembered smelling it the afternoon she had come up out of the river, struggling in his arms.
“All we need is Chap,” Soren said, “and it’d be ‘Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.’ ”
Jonah spotted the jab Nelda delivered to Soren’s ribs. Soren had already gone off to college when the blowup occurred between Ritz and Chap and C.B., and apparently all the talk had died down by the time he returned.
“It’s all right, Soren,” Rita-lou said. “I took the skeletons out of the closet a long time ago.”
A relieved smile eased Nelda’s worried expression. “I think we all have some skeletons we’d like to bury. In my case, Stan Acton—the polecat!”
“Could we convince you and Jonah to stay for dinner?” Soren asked Rita-lou.
She shook her head. “No, but I’d settle for a light beer.” She glanced at Jonah with a questioning smile. “That is, if you have the time.”
He felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach. It had always been like that, him stumbling all over himself and her not even aware of the effect she had on him. He shrugged. “Why not?”
“But just one,” she qualified. “I’d like to get back to camp before dark.”
“Camp?” Soren’s brow’s lifted in surprise. “Are you backpacking through the Gila Wilderness?”
She smiled, and Jonah thought it was like a rare gift, transforming her face from merely pretty to unsurpassed beauty. “Anthropology, Soren. I’m working on my Ph.D., digging over at Tomahawk Flats.” Soren signaled for a round, then let his curious gaze settle on Jonah. “You’re assisting her?”
Jonah smiled thinly. “Hardly, though you could say we’re both working the same piece of land.”
“That’s right. You’re prospecting.” Soren popped some beer nuts the waitress had brought into his mouth. “You know, a lot of the old guys are still going by old regulations that are no longer valid, and they’re losing their claims. These days, you have to be up on the law.”
Rita-lou shot Jonah a silent look. He knew what she was thinking: that one of them was going to lose claim to Tomahawk Flats. “Yeah,” he said with an indifferent shrug. “There’s a lot of paperwork these days.”
“Unfortunately, more mining gets done in bars than in the hills,” Rita-lou said dryly. She raised her mug. “See, it’s far easier to bend an elbow than to swing a pickax.”
“Dance, Ms. Randall?”
All four of them looked up to find Buck Dillard hulking over them, the lights glinting off the pearl snaps of his leather vest. Jonah felt Rita-lou tense at his side. “She’s with me, Dillard.”
“I don’t see her dancing with you.”
C.B.’s foreman was spoiling for a fight, and Jonah felt more than ready to comply. The tedious underwater work had left his muscles cramped, and weeks of keeping a lid on old emotions had left him ready to explode.
Under the table, Rita-lou laid a calming hand on the bunched muscles of his thigh. “I am now, Buck,” she said.
Jonah let her pull him onto the dance floor, where several other couples were doing a sliding two-step, and damned if the tune wasn’t Orbison’s “Running Scared.” He took her in his arms. The top of her head didn’t even reach his chin, and her hair smelled of fresh air and green grass. He liked the feel of her, soft and pliant, molded against him. “Reminds me of the eighth-grade sock hop, Ritz.”
He felt the merest tremble vibrate through her. “It’s Rita-lou.” Then, more softly, she added, “Don’t let Buck rile you, Jonah. He’d do anything to get you in trouble, to get you run out of Mimbres Valley.”
He looked down at her upturned face. “I’m not going anywhere till I’m ready.”
Her gaze dropped to somewhere near his shoulder. “And when will that be? When you find your gold?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why? Why are you wildcatting like this?”
“You know I was never a nine-to-fiver... Rita-lou. At thirty-five, I’ve reached the point where that childhood dream of mine—sailing the seven seas—has become a now-or-never project. But to do it, I need a forty-foot sailboat, and if I go after it the normal way, I’ll be saving into my golden years. I’m opting for a go-for-broke scheme.” He broke off, feeling uncom-fortable. He had revealed more of himself than he had intended.
“Placer mining!” she said, her voice laced with contempt. “You’
re nothing but a blanket-and-burro prospector. You know what the old-timers called the Assay Office, don’t you? The Office of Heartbreak.”
“A heart can only break once.” Disgusted with his sentimentality, he said, “Let’s get out of here. I’ve still got the sluice boxes to clean before dark.”
She looked dazed, as if she hadn’t realized that the dance was over and they were the only couple still embracing. She stepped quickly out of his arms. “Right.”
They said goodbye to Nelda and Soren, then started back. Rita-lou made no attempt to talk this time. By the time they reached Tomahawk Flats it was almost eight-thirty, and the sun had already sunk out of sight behind the Burro Mountains. The western sky was streaked with brilliant blues and pinks and purples that on canvas would have looked gaudy. Evening’s hush had settled over the valley, a quietness, a serenity, that came only at that particular time of day.
When she halted her Chevy in front of his tent, his hand went to the door handle, but she forestalled him. “Jonah, I’m sorry. I had no right to put a damper on your dream. We’re both entitled to our dreams.” She leaned across and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Friends?”
He half turned toward her and caught her shoulders. “That’s no kiss, Ritz.”
“It’s Rita-lou.”
“For me, it’s Ritz. Always has been.” He lowered his head toward hers.
Her eyes grew wide. “Don’t, Jonah.”
Her voice was a husky, pleading murmur against his lips. But he closed his mouth over hers and kissed her anyway. His lips ground against hers in a swift, no-holds barred kiss. She made no protest this time. Her lips were unexpectedly gentle beneath his and the dimension of the kiss changed.
Softly, slowly, his lips responded to hers. The kiss was achingly sweet. Her mouth felt so warm, so right. Her kisses had been a sacred thing to him, and now he felt himself wanting her all over again. He had loved her with a love that he had never known before or since, but after he had left Silver City he had convinced himself that it never would have lasted.
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