The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely

  coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Howell, Troy.

  The dragon of Cripple Creek / by Troy Howell.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When Kat, her father, and brother visit an old gold mine that has been turned into

  an amusement park, she falls down a shaft where she meets an ancient dragon, the last of his

  kind, and inadvertently triggers a twenty-first century gold rush.

  ISBN 978-0-8109-9713-4 (alk. paper)

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Gold—Fiction. 3. Greed—Fiction. 4. Colorado—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.H83844Dr 2011

  [Fic]—dc22

  2010034362

  Text copyright © 2011 Troy Howell

  “You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmie Davis. Copyright © 1940 by Peer International

  Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved.

  Book design by Maria T. Middleton

  The text in this book is set in 12-point Horley Old Style. The display typefaces are Halcyon,

  Rough Riders, and Roulette Caps. The ornaments are from the Adobe Woodtype family.

  Published in 2011 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion

  of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form

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  To my angel mom, in memory of Dad

  And to the girl with the pearl

  CONTENTS

  MOLLIE, ME, AND YE

  WARREN PEACE

  EMPIRE MIRE

  IN MEDIAS REX

  DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT

  KANSAS ANYMORE

  HELLO, GOODBYE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CALL ME CALAMITY CAT.

  That’s what the news media called me. My name’s actually spelled with a K, and Kat is for Katlin.

  Calamity is for calamity. An event causing great damage or distress. If you look it up in the dictionary, which is something I often do—look up words—you’ll notice it’s a noun.

  I’ve made it a verb.

  Kat’s calamiting again.

  I suppose I was calamitous before I ever showed up in a little sky-high town in the Colorado Rockies—but that’s when my calamiting reached world status.

  • • •

  Friday night in Cripple Creek is a two-step back in time, with honky-tonk and colored lights and mobscenities—as my brother, Dillon, puts it—spilling into the streets. It’s the Wild West all lit up.

  That’s when we checked in. The Empire Hotel had vacancies, though you wouldn’t know it by the human logjam in the lobby. We’d been on the road since glory knows what inglorious hour, after slouching in the car (as opposed to sleeping) at a restless stop (as opposed to rest), right in the middle of truckers’ night out.

  While Dillon and Dad were waiting in line, I was crouched behind a couch in the lounge, shaking a pair of dice. They were my own dice and came in handy at times like these.

  Handy, as in small cash gain.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” I said. I said it seriously enough for it to sound real, as if the roll would be strictly chance. “Seven! Seven … c’mon …” I tossed the dice across the red-and-gold carpet … they hit the base trim of the wall …

  One was a six. I expected that. The other—

  Yes! A one.

  I grinned at the kid next to me, who was down on his knees by my side. And down on his luck. So far, I’d collected three dollars from him—two ones, two quarters, four dimes, and six pennies—OK, he was four cents short, but I had let it slide.

  I stuck out my hand, palm up.

  “I only have a five,” he said. “I’m not giving you that.”

  “You will.”

  It was his turn to roll. But first, he popped up to peer over the couch he’d been sitting on, moments before, fidgety and bored. Not one to miss an opportunity, I had approached him and grinned, flashing my gold-capped tooth. “Got any money?”

  “What’s it to you?” he’d said, his eyes round as nickels.

  I showed him my dice and explained the rules. “I call and roll—if I call it right, you pay me a dollar. You call and roll—if you call it wrong, you pay me a dollar.”

  “So, whatever it is,” he said, protruding his lower lip, “I pay you a dollar.”

  “Let me finish. If I call it wrong, you keep your dollar. If you call it right—”

  “You give me a dollar!”

  I shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  The game was going well.

  “All clear,” he said, dropping back behind the couch. He cupped the dice. “C’mon! Twelve … twelve …” He rolled … there was the six—

  There was another six.

  “Twelve!” he said

  Was he catching on? I reluctantly pulled out the coins he’d given me and let them fall through my fingers.

  “Hey,” he whined, scrambling to pick them up.

  “This is what you gave me for a dollar,” I said. “Ninety-six cents.”

  He blinked at me.

  “I’m being generous,” I went on. “You still owe me a dollar. A whole dollar.”

  He surrendered with a grunt.

  My turn. So far, it was working better than I’d thought. I could always, or nearly always, count on one die coming up six. All I had to do was guess on the other one. More often than not, I got it right. How long it took my opponent to suspect was the only risk involved.

  That and Dad catching me.

  “Nine,” I said, and rolled.

  Eight. A six and a two.

  “Ha!” said the kid, and stuck out his hand.

  “Nope. You keep your dollar, remember?”

  He frowned, tilting his head.

  “Hurry,” I said. “We don’t have all night.”

  He snatched up the dice, pretended to spit on them, and said, “Four!”

  I smiled to myself: So he wasn’t catching on after all.

  He rolled. Four it was: two twos. Leaning over, I adjusted my glasses and inspected the dice.

  “It was a four!” he challenged. “Like I said!”

  “I know.” I spun one die around—the black spot was still intact. I fingered the other one …

  “Hand it over,” he said, his nostrils flaring.

  “Now we’re even,” I explained. “You owed me one.”

  His frown returned. Doubt was ticking away in his head. Maybe I’d underestimated him. Maybe it was time to quit. I picked up the dice and plunged them into my pocket. I felt the money there. I’d never make godzillions at this game, but two dollars were better than nothing.

  And I knew what nothing was.

  The kid finally said, “How do the rules go?”

  As luck would have it, Dad called out my name.

  “Katlin!”

  I jumped up. He and Dillon were
standing beyond a spittoon and some potted ferns. Dad hadn’t seen me yet, but Dillon, good brother, had. He doesn’t miss a thing.

  “Kat,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  The kid said to me, “Wait!”

  “Here, Dad!” I said, crawling over the couch.

  “Wait! It’s not fair!” The kid started pulling my shoe, the one with the floppy sole.

  Dad looked in our direction. Hotel guests looked in our direction. A walrus of a woman draped in fur and holding a little dog looked in our direction.

  “Lucas!” she bellowed.

  Lucas—no wonder he hadn’t told me his name—let go of my shoe. I tumbled off the couch, got to my feet, and, with Lucas trotting behind, went to Dillon and Dad.

  Lucas went to the woman, who apparently was his mom, and said, “I gave her some money to fix her old shoe.”

  “What!” I blurted.

  The woman patted his head. “Good boy!” To us she said proudly, “He’ll make a great philanthropist.”

  “He’ll make a great liar,” I muttered, tugging Dad’s arm for us to go.

  The woman blinked at me from behind her tortoiseshell glasses, while her silky little dog, who wore a gold-and-jeweled collar that read duchess, yip-yipped.

  “Katlin,” said Dad, as he headed us toward the stairs, “what were you doing behind that couch?”

  “I know what she was doing,” said Dillon.

  I glared arrows and other projectiles at him.

  “Did he give you money?” asked Dad.

  “Um … not exactly.”

  “Kat, we’re not beggars. We’re not subject to charity—”

  “Somebody’s got to make money in this family, haven’t they?” I said it loud enough to put Dad on the spot, which wasn’t difficult, considering he’d been developing this guilt fret for a long time, and considering several ears were aimed our direction.

  “Hush!” he said.

  Up the stairs we went.

  I’M REALLY NOT THAT KIND OF PERSON, TO embarrass my dad in public. But I didn’t want to give the money back, or part with my dice, and I could see it was coming to that.

  We hadn’t always been poor.

  We used to have two cars that were nice and new.

  We used to live in a nice big house. I called it my castle.

  I used to go to a private school, where I had the best teachers, best books, computers, programs, even the best schoolmates. Anyway, they acted as if they were the best.

  I used to have a horse. He wasn’t a purebred, but that didn’t matter to me, as long as he had a pure heart. He did, and I named him Angel. All my friends liked to ride him.

  I used to have friends.

  I used to invite one along when we went on vacations.

  Now it was Dillon and Dad and me. But this wasn’t a vacation—I was just trying to make it one.

  We were outside Colorado Springs when Dillon fanned his fingers in front of my face, saying, “Don’t look, Kat.”

  But I’d already seen the sign.

  No apologies, I had this craze for gold.

  As a kid, once I figured that gold wasn’t just the color of my hair, I wanted everything gold. Gold bed, gold walls, gold shoes. Gold-rimmed glasses, gold jewelry. I got a golden-haired pony on my golden birthday—I had turned four on the fourth of April—and named her Goldie.

  In the fifth grade, I saw the Tutankhamen exhibit, and it sent me soaring. All that molten wealth, formed into bugs and beasts and figures and faces. While we studied economics, I tracked the price of gold, and if you don’t think reading tiny numbers is exciting to a twelve-year-old, you haven’t done it yourself. When those numbers inch up, inch up, almost double, then sink like a stone, it does something to your pulse.

  There was only one exception to my total gold thing: Mom’s pearl ring. I’d worn it night and day from the moment she pressed it into my hands. Some things mean the world to you, no matter what.

  • • •

  So there we were rolling west—south actually, because Dad had got sleepy and taken the wrong interstate—and here was a real gold mine. I wouldn’t miss it for a year’s worth of fine-free weeks at the library.

  I begged Dad to go.

  He said his new employer wouldn’t pay for frivolities. That had become a pet word with him, “frivolities,” ever since we’d turned poor. It kept us from asking for too much.

  “I’ll pay with my lawn-mowing cash,” I said. The very last of my savings, but—

  “We don’t have the time,” he said. “We just lost half an hour.”

  “Don’t we have one extra day?” I said. We had to be in San Francisco by Wednesday, but—

  “That’s pushing it,” he said.

  “Can’t we do one fun thing?”

  “No!”

  Dillon groaned. He knew as well as I that when Dad yelled “No,” “Yes” soon followed. That was a habit of his, which had only got worse after Mom’s accident. He’d become uncertain of everything, and guilty as a thief he didn’t do more for us.

  Slumping in the front seat, Dillon said, “One fun thing. Cripple says it all.”

  “Gold says it all,” I declared.

  “The tour will be a detour,” squawked Dad, and he took the next exit.

  THE EMPIRE HOTEL WAS BUILT AROUND THE time of the first gold rush, and whoever owned it now was doing a good job keeping it shiny and warm, like gold itself. As we scurried up the stairs, I looked back down at Lucas, who was looking back up at me, tongue fully extended.

  When we came to our rooms—mine at the dead end of a hall, Dillon and Dad’s to the right—Dad said, “Trade.” He held up my room key. It wasn’t a plastic card you slide into a slot, but an honest-to-badness brass one that went into a keyhole, a keyhole you can peek through.

  “For what?” I said. “The kid’s money?”

  “The dice. You were throwing your dice, weren’t you?”

  “Dad—”

  “Gambling.” He said it as if I had robbed a bank.

  “But it’s legal in Colorado.”

  “Legal isn’t always ethical, Kat, or moral.”

  “Dad, we’re straight down-the-hole broke.”

  He looked at me wearily. “Let me deal with that.”

  “I have to deal with it, too.”

  He looked at the carpet.

  It was too true. The calamities that had fallen on us, one after another like dominoes—boulders, rather—troubled us all. But it’s also true that after you’ve shuffled around for a time in your dire straits, as you do in an old pair of shoes, you almost get used to it.

  The cracks don’t pinch until you try to run.

  “I can have a little fun,” I reasoned, “and make a little money.”

  He was looking at me again. “We didn’t come here to gamble.”

  “You ought to try it. You might get us out of the hole.” Playing on his guilt—I was doing it again. “Since I’ll be the one paying for the gold mine tour—”

  “Gambling’s illegal for children, Katlin, even in Colorado.”

  He had me there.

  He was still holding up the key.

  I was tired. We all were. The night before the rest stop, we’d parked along the road. The night before that, it was a Mega Mart lot. This was the first time we’d got a hotel, the first night we’d get to have beds. Dad figured his new boss wouldn’t mind if one hotel charge showed up on the bill. I was ready to cozy between covers and jot in my journal and get more than a few winks’ sleep, and be fresh for the tour tomorrow.

  Reluctantly, I pulled out the dice. I tossed them back and forth in my palms. One came up a six. That was the trick die, the one I had drilled a hole into, in the single black dot, and filled with one of Dillon’s small fishing leads, and plugged with putty and painted black again.

  I gave him the normal one.

  “Both,” he said.

  I stared innocently at him, while he stared knowingly back. I shrugged, and handed it over. What good was the tri
ck die all by itself?

  IN THE CARE HOME WHERE MOM LIES IS AN elevator the size of a small closet. Really small, as in five feet by five. Make that a cage and you have the flimsy contraption they use in the Mollie Kathleen. It’s called a skip. Add nine passengers, one of whom is the guide, and you have instant phobia, if not hysteria.

  For me, anyway.

  Above ground, the cage dangles in kind of an oil rig structure—the hoist house. You stand in line and wait your turn; they pack you in and down you go—clink, rattle, whoosh!—like that.

  There we were, Saturday morning, right where I’d begged for us to be, waiting to take the plunge. I fingered the dice in my pocket, which I’d talked Dad into returning with a promise to keep strictly as lucky charms.

  I was tempted to turn my mom’s ring, a habit of mine when I’m in deep thought.

  Watching group after group squeeze into that cage—innocent, trusting humans, grandmothers, even—I was having my doubts. Why was it called a skip? Was that a subtle hint? Did smart people skip the whole thing, stay in the sunshine, breathe the sweet mountain air, keep their feet on solid ground? Maybe Dillon was right: There’d be nothing fun about this. I could let him and Dad tell me about it later. …

  If they made it back up alive.

  Then it was our turn.

  • • •

  “I feel like we’re in a shark basket they let down in the deep,” I told Dillon, who stood with his back against me. “You stick out your arm and you lose it.”

  “I wouldn’t stick out a finger,” said the man to my left—on my left, literally, his bulk boring into me like a bull against a post.

  I didn’t look at him; you don’t look at strangers who are so close you can inhale their exhale. On my right, the metal mesh pressed into my side, and beyond that …

  I couldn’t stick out my arm—the mesh prevented that—so I poked out a finger. I pulled it back sharp, my fingertip tingling from the force in the shaft we dropped through.

  Five hundred feet. Straight down.

  “It’s insane,” I whispered.

  “Kat?”

  I gripped Dillon’s waist.

  “You OK?” He actually didn’t say, You asked for this, you got it. He must have been getting interested.