Only My Love

by Jo Goodman

  "I can do whatever you want," she said quietly.

  "And I'll remember that." Ethan helped her to her feet. "Are you oriented at all? Do you know the approximate direction of the entrance?"

  Michael's eyes darted around. It was the same no matter where she looked. Blackness seemed to penetrate her very soul. She found Ethan's hand and cautiously led him a few feet to her left. "I think this is where you were lying." She searched with her foot. "Yes, here's the beam I moved. When Jake hit you your head was toward the entrance. This should be about right. I suppose you were at least ten feet back from it then."

  "Stay here," Ethan said. "Facing just the way you are now. I'm going to climb over the rocks and see if I can't reach the entrance."

  She was reluctant to give up his hand. "Don't forget to talk."

  "I won't." Ethan waited for her fingers to drift away from his. He began to examine the face of the obstruction, feeling for the smaller rocks and pushing them out of his way. "I can talk about most anything," he said. "What do you want to hear?"

  "Tell me about growing up. Where you lived, what you did. You've never told me more than a few sketchy details."

  "That's because I knew you'd never be asked. People aren't generally as curious as you."

  "It's not a bad thing for a reporter to be."

  Ethan wrestled with another beam, pushing it out of his way. Rocks slid. The debris shifted and Ethan heard the groaning of some of the support timber. He stopped, listened.

  "You're not saying anything, Ethan."

  "Oh." There were no more sounds that would predict another collapse. He proceeded carefully. "I told you my parents died of typhus when I was ten. I'd always lived in Nevada until then. My father had followed the rush for gold to California then the silver strike to Nevada. Friends of my parents wrote to my father's brother in Texas. He lived in a hide-hut encampment in the northern panhandle and he took me in. He didn't feel any particular responsibility to me. I didn't eat much and I could shoot straight. Mostly I skinned buffalo for five years. Are you certain you want to hear this?"

  "I'm certain. Not about the skinning. I don't think I'd like to know about that. What did you do at the end of five years?"

  "I answered an advertisement I saw in Amarillo. Someone was looking for brave young men." His laugh was self-mocking. "I fancied I was one back then. There was a preference for orphans. I knew I was qualified on that count. I could ride and shoot and didn't mind hard work or long hours in the saddle. At fifteen the adventure seemed everything I could want."

  "I don't think I understand what the job was."

  Ethan was crawling along the top of the debris. There was very little room between him and the roof of the mine. He was only able to go a few feet before he realized his way was blocked again. There was no chance they could dig through all the rubble to reach the entrance. The support timbers groaned again. It was too easy for Ethan to imagine the structure collapsing on him and burying him under hundreds of feet of mountain this time. He began to push himself out again. "Mail carrier," he told her. "Nothing special. I just carried the mail."

  "Just carried the mail," she said softly to herself. Some quick calculations gave her the answer she needed. "You were fifteen, you say?"

  "Mm-hmm."

  "That would have been 1860."

  "That's right."

  "Carried the mail," she said again, shaking her head at his modest description of his job. "You were a Pony Express rider."

  Ethan slipped on some rocks. The smaller ones scattered and rolled. The clatter seemed like a series of cannon shots in the absolute darkness and the danger was magnified in his own mind and Michael's. He paused, waiting for everything to be quiet again. "Yes," he said evenly. "I rode for the Express."

  Michael's fingers curled and uncurled in the folds of her gown. It would have been easy, even comforting, to give into hysteria. Instead, she forced herself to match Ethan's calm. "It must have been terribly exciting."

  "It was damn hard work," he muttered. Then he remembered what it had been like at fifteen. "But you're right, it was exciting too. Every young man then wanted to ride. I was lucky."

  "Where was your run?"

  "In the Sierra Nevadas, through Carson Pass to Sacramento. That was the last leg. I handed over the letters to a steamship captain and they were taken to San Francisco by water. The 85 miles through the mountains was the hardest part of the journey. I've heard other riders say it was the worst stretch on the entire route. I don't know about that. At least I wasn't chased by the Paiutes across Utah and Nevada." Ethan reached solid ground again and waved an outstretched arm in front of him to find Michael. He took her hand. "We may as well sit down," he said. "It's no good trying to get out that way. I need to think."

  Michael let him guide her to a natural seat in the fallen rock. She sat beside him, not giving up her grip on his hand even when his fingers loosened around hers. "What made Carson Pass so difficult?" she asked, needing the reassurance of his voice.

  Ethan leaned carefully against the rocks behind him. He put an arm around Michael's shoulders and let her shift closer to him. "Winter," he said. "Drifts could reach twenty feet. The winds lashed at you like a water soaked whip. The cold was numbing. To body and mind. Thank God my mustang generally had more sense than I did. Somehow I always got through with my mochila."

  "Mochila?"

  "Spanish for knapsack. It was a leather rectangle with four cantinas—pouches—for holding the mail. The mochila slipped over the special lightweight saddle we used and could be changed quickly when we traded mounts. We were only allowed two minutes for the exchange. Usually it didn't take that long."

  Michael knew that slim wire cables stretching from pole to pole across the country were able to accomplish what harsh weather and Indian raids could not: the end of the Pony Express. But for a year and a half the service and its riders had captured the fancy of America, and Ethan Stone had been one of them. "You would have been just a little over sixteen when the service ended," she said. "What did you do then?"

  "I had saved most of my money—fifty dollars a month was good pay—and I headed east. I had some notion about going to school. Ended up in the war instead."

  "But you were just a child!"

  Her protest, as if she could protect him from what he had already experienced, touched him. "I was closer to seventeen by then," he reminded her gently. "And there were men younger than me who served in the unit."

  "You should have gone to school."

  "You weren't there to boss me around."

  Michael turned her cheek against Ethan's shoulder. Her fingers threaded in his. She wished she could see if he was smiling. "I was only ten. You wouldn't have paid me any attention."

  Ethan wondered how true that was. Her methods of persuasion probably differed in those days. She wouldn't have harangued him with her logic back then. She would have kicked him in the shin. He imagined she had been making people pay attention to her all of her life.

  "What did you do in the army?" she asked.

  "Is it so important that you know everything about my life?" He meant the question as a tease and he asked it with laughter in his voice.

  Michael felt tears prick her eyes. It was a moment before she could answer. "Yes," she whispered gravely. "I want to know everything. I don't want us to be strangers when we... when we..." She tried to move away so he wouldn't feel the shudder of her repressed sob.

  He held her close instead. "All right," he said. His mouth was against her hair. He kissed the crown of her head. "What do you want to know?"

  "What you did," she repeated. "Were you a cook or a scout or a soldier on the front line?"

  "None of those things, though I suppose scout comes closest to describing what I did. Mostly, I just blew things up." He knew he had startled her. "Now, why does that surprise you? You must have wondered where I learned to use explosives. Actually, back then we didn't have dynamite. We used pure nitroglycerine when we needed to get rid of a bridg
e or stop a train. Very unstable, highly explosive. That's when I learned to cultivate patience and a steady hand. None of the men I worked with were ever killed or maimed by enemy fire. They blew themselves up."

  "That's horrible."

  "That's war."

  Michael absorbed the truth of his statement in silence. She imagined the dangers he had faced, the meager rations and living conditions, the constant threat of death with the slightest misstep. Minutes passed before she asked, "Were you blue or gray?"

  "Blue. Not from any particular guiding principle though. It was more a matter of geography. I was in Philadelphia when I enlisted. If I had wanted to attend William and Mary instead of the University of Pennsylvania I probably would have been a reb."

  "What stopped you from going to the university?"

  "I said I had saved some money. Not nearly enough as it turned out. And then there was the problem of my own schooling. Up until then what I knew was what I'd been taught by my mother. It was her dream that I should go to an eastern school someday. I suppose I was just trying to please her. I found out I wasn't rich enough or smart enough. Seemed like riding and fighting was what I knew best. The war was another opportunity to prove it."

  "But eventually you were able to go to school," she said.

  "How do you know that? I never said—"

  "Ethan, I've known all along you were educated. At least more educated than you pretended to be around the others back at the saloon. It's in your speech, in your manner. I know you said that you were self-taught after the eighth grade, and I accepted it because it was clear you wanted me to, but it never fit with the things I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. So where did you go to school?"

  He hesitated. The truth—all of it—couldn't hurt now. At the very least he owed her the truth. "The University of Pennsylvania finally accepted me. I had to get a whole lot smarter and richer first, and I had to survive four years of fighting, but somehow I managed all of it."

  "How?"

  "One of the men I worked with, a Cornishman by birth and a miner by trade, was an expert with explosives. Connell Penwyn was his name. I was his apprentice throughout the war and that's what kept me alive. He was a careful, thoughtful man. He had come to this country with the hope of making a rich strike out west. He said he never found his golden vein and when war came he went east to fight, earn his fare back to Wales, and planned to live out his life on the other side of the Atlantic.

  "That's what he told me, anyway. I never had any reason to doubt him. He was my mentor of sorts, not educated himself, but wise in his own way. Connell encouraged me to read more and since I didn't have anyone to write, and no one wrote me, he thought I should keep a journal. It was rather crude, nothing like your writing, but it forced me to practice skills that had been rotting since my mother died. Connell bought me books to read with his pay and in return I read aloud. He thought it was a fair exchange. I thought he was a trifle touched to be spending his passage money on me, but I was too selfish to protest. Some of the things I read were law books. Connell had great respect for justice. Just laws had leveled kings, he told me, and raised the common man. Laws also had to be enforced, he said, by fair and decent men. I think in his own mind he saw himself as Diogenes in the New World, searching for an honest man."

  "Were you one in those days?"

  "Connell thought so. It helped that he thought I saved his life."

  "Did you?"

  Ethan shrugged. "I killed the rebel sniper that was aiming for Connell's jar of nitro. It was my life, too. Connell never cared about that and he never forgot." Ethan's fingers absently stroked Michael's hair. "When the war was over he told me he wanted to pay for my schooling. It seems Connell had his own ideas about the truth. He hadn't found a gold vein, but a silver one. He'd never told another soul about it because he'd known there'd be another rush west for riches if he did. He figured his claim was perfectly safe as long as he kept his secret. Only another determined Cornishman would have been able to track the black- coated silver ore, or even know what it was. I stayed in the east after the war and Connell went back to the Rockies. Six months, almost to the day he left, I received the first of many money drafts in my name. The amount stunned me. I could have attended the university twenty times over with the money he gave me and kept on giving me."

  "You never thought about taking the money and doing something else with it?"

  "No. I wanted to go to school. Law school. I thought that would please Connell." Ethan chuckled. "I aspired to the bench naturally. I imagined that Connell would like the idea of having a judge in his pocket."

  Michael straightened and pulled away from Ethan. She peered at him in the darkness, frustrated that she couldn't see his face or that he couldn't see hers. Her voice was sharp. "Are you telling me that you have a law degree?" she demanded.

  "Well, yes," he said. "I went to school. I graduated. Four and one half years ago as a matter of fact. 1871. I went to New York afterwards. I thought about setting up a practice there."

  "That's the time you told the others we were supposed to have met."

  "Yes. I told you I was in New York then."

  "You told me you were working in a bank. Houston told me you were robbing them. Who in the hell are you, Ethan Stone?"

  He sighed. "You would have liked this better if we had remained strangers. You're glaring at me, aren't you?"

  She smiled sweetly, gritting her teeth. "You know me so well."

  Ethan found her hand again, thankful that she let him take it. "I was a lawyer. I still am, though I don't practice."

  "That's understandable given the company you keep."

  He ignored her comment. "I was only in New York a few months when I received word that Connell had died. Murdered, actually. Killed because of dispute over his claim. And I decided then that I didn't want to be a lawyer or a judge. I wanted to be the man who made the difference at the lowest rung on the ladder. I went west again and got myself elected sheriff in the mining town where Connell lived. I made it my first order of business to find his killer. As it turned out, there were two, and finding them was the easy part. Gathering enough evidence to bring them in took another year. During that time they were stripping the claim as quickly as they could, thinking I would never be able to do anything about it. They never knew there was any connection between Connell Penwyn and me."

  Ethan's voice was distant, thoughtful. "The day they were sentenced to hang they still thought it was about the money."

  "I don't understand."

  "Connell left the Silver Slipper Mine to me. It was in his will and my connection to him all came out at the trial. There was a bias on my part that their lawyers naturally tried to exploit. They contended I'd manufactured the evidence to end the dispute and take back the claim. It was never about that, not for a moment, and luckily the jury believed me. I would have happily given up the Silver Slipper to have Connell back."

  "You vindicated Connell's belief in justice."

  "Perhaps."

  "Then why," she began imploringly, "why did you throw in with Houston and the others?"

  "It's not what you think, Michael. I know how it's looked to you, how I wanted it to look, but I've never really been one of them. There's been a number of times that I've wondered if I'd gone too far, helped them too much, but it seemed there were no other choices." He could almost feel her confusion and even without being able to see her he knew her head was tilted to one side, her brows drawn together, and her serious, questioning expression had flattened the beautiful shape of her mouth.

  "You made a natural mistake," he said, "on the occasion of our first meeting."

  "On the train?"

  "No, at the Chronicle, when your publisher's secretary told you I was a marshal."

  Michael tried to think what error she could have made. "I don't think—"

  "You assumed I was a relative of Logan's. A very natural assumption if you didn't know my job, and you didn't. Michael, I've been a U.S. Mar
shal since right after the Silver Slipper affair was settled. I threw in with Houston, as you called it, because in order to beat him I had to join him."

  "Marshall," she said softly. "Marshal."

  Ethan had no idea how she managed it in the complete blackness of their surroundings, but the flat of her free hand found his cheek with the accuracy of an eagle swooping down on its prey. She tore the hand he had claimed away and stood. When her voice came to him it was from several feet away.

  "How could you?" she demanded, her voice and body shaking with rage. "How could you let me think, no, how could you want me to think every horrible thing about you?"

  "I admitted I didn't kill Drew." He rubbed the side of his face. It was no lady-like slap she had delivered, but a real blow. His cheek tingled as blood rushed to the area and suffused it with heat and color.

  "You admitted it after I confronted you. Long after. And you went out of your way to make certain I thought the worst of you. You abducted me. You took me away from that train when—"

  Ethan stood himself now. "When Obie would have killed you," he said. "Have you forgotten what you were about to blurt out? Do you think I wanted you tagging along, getting in my way, giving me something else to worry about? Do you think I would be trapped in this goddamn mine right now if it weren't for you?"

  The words spilled out and he was helpless to call them back. In their wake the silence was as absolute as the darkness surrounding them.

  Ethan took a step toward where he thought she might be. Stones scraped beneath his boot. "I didn't mean—"

  "Shut up," she said quietly. "And don't come near me." If it had been daylight Michael's tears would have blinded her. Now they had no effect. She stumbled, groping her way in the dark to put more distance between her and Ethan. Disoriented quickly, she simply dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms around her, rocking slightly, comforting herself as if she were mother to her own child.