by Chloe Garner
“Wasn’t expecting I could stop you.”
“We both know Merlin could fetch ‘em down for me without any extra effort,” she said. “If I go…”
“It’s to go get your property and make sure it’s well cared for,” Jimmy said, looking at her. “I understand that.”
“Should be any day, really,” she said. “They’re going to start dropping calves up there, if we don’t go up after them soon.”
“I’m coming,” he said, and she frowned harder.
“You don’t have time.”
“I have time if I say I have time,” he said. “Thomas and Petey need to pick up more of the administration, anyway, and that’s the only way I’m going to get them to do it. Rich and Wade are going to trade off up here for a while.”
“Why would you want to ride up to the mountains up north with me to get my little herd?” she asked.
He laughed.
Looked at her.
“You really don’t know?”
She shook her head.
“Because that’s when we’re happy together.”
She looked forward again, not sure what to think of that.
It was true.
The idea of a trip up north with him, just the two of them and Dog, riding horseback and without any of the absenta politics weighing on them, it… it made her happy, which was an unexpected feeling.
“You want me to hunt something up for dinner?” she asked.
“I’m fine with jerky,” he said. “Even when hardtack tastes like heaven, I don’t really like the wild game.”
She smiled.
“An acquired taste.”
“Not that interested.”
“Says the one that eats sea bugs,” Sarah said, and he laughed.
“Granger found a chef from Preston who’s interested in working with Gremlin. I talked to him, and he said that anything that you used as a salad green, a grain, a tea, and a smoke was something he wanted to get his hands on.”
“Boy is he gonna be disappointed,” Sarah said, hearing Jimmy grin again.
“You think Clarence is going to get the reservoir done in time?” Sarah asked.
“I was going to ask you how long we had until the next flood this year,” Jimmy answered.
“Bad sand storms,” Sarah said. “Usually means an early flood. I think some of the homesteads are going to hold off on putting gremlin in the ground this season and see if the water doesn’t come early.”
“I remember the year we had three,” Jimmy said. Sarah nodded, looking at the sky.
“Feels like the kind of year we’re going to get hit hard,” she said. “We could end up with a little one and then another one worse than last year after that.”
“Somebody ought to be able to predict those, you’d think,” Jimmy observed, and Sarah shrugged.
“Not sure anybody would listen to them, even if they could.”
Jimmy smiled.
“That’s Lawrence for you.”
Sarah spotted an opening in the forest ahead where nothing grew below tall trees.
“Dry enough for me,” she said, turning Gremlin off his line and heading over.
“We could keep going,” Jimmy said.
“No reason to,” Sarah answered. “We’ll get to Hansen tomorrow with enough time to set a camp a ways away, and then we’ll get back to Lawrence the next day. I’d rather be closer to Thor and Apex than Hansen, anyway. Know they aren’t going to shoot me in the back when I’m not looking.”
“You still don’t trust him,” Jimmy said. Sarah shrugged, dismounting.
“Just don’t know him. Takes me a while.”
Jimmy leaned way out over his horse’s neck to swing his leg up and over, then slid down to the ground. Sarah tipped her head.
“Expected more of you than that.”
He leaned his forehead against the horse’s shoulder for a long moment, and she actually started to get concerned.
“I’m not sleeping,” he said. “Too much going on and everything has to come together before the mines get going, or else…”
“Or else someone’s going to turn up with more resources and kill us all,” Sarah said unflinchingly. He nodded and turned, leaning his back against his saddle. His horse stepped away and he neatly regained his balance with a sigh.
“Can’t say I agree that a giant reservoir is the right use of your time,” Sarah said. “Not when the investors can’t get men up into the mountains and start paying them.”
“Have you thought about renting your house?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s a death-trap,” Sarah answered. “We both know it.”
“Only if someone’s in there for a flood,” Jimmy said. “I’m serious about only employing men who consider themselves residents, but Granger only has a couple dozen who have managed to find a place to live.”
“And them without any income,” Sarah said.
“Hansen hired three,” he said.
“Hadn’t heard,” Sarah answered, waving Jimmy after her as she started off into the woods to look for downed lumber to burn.
“What’s it going to take to get your Lawrence men up into the mountains and digging?” Jimmy asked. Sarah shook her head.
“They’ve got headings for their claims. Told ‘em not to share, on fear of someone sneaking up while they were sleeping and shooting ‘em, but they can go up on their own any time they like.”
“They know what they’re doing?” Jimmy asked.
Sarah looked around the skyline of mountains with a sigh.
“No more than I do,” she said. “What do you know about mining, Jimmy? Really?”
He looked at her with a quick frown, stooping to pick up a fallen limb and crack it across his knee.
“We know more than most anyone on the planet,” he said. “And you, in particular. You know how to find absenta.”
“No one’s proved that yet.”
“I think Hansen did,” Jimmy said. “And the rest of the investors think the same.”
“I thought you said word hadn’t gotten out yet.”
“Not publicly,” Jimmy said. “When I got the results from the lab testing, I sent them to the rest of the investors. No one knows whose claim it’s coming off of, but I affirmed that one of the untested claims is showing strong signs that it’s going to produce.”
“Why would you do that?” Sarah asked. “We’re trying to slow this thing down.”
He stood straight to look at her.
“No,” he said. “We’re trying to amass power. If you’re trying to slow everything down, we’re working against each other.”
She gave him a dark look and his eyebrows went up.
“I mean it,” he said. “Everything is about capturing the potential. Everything.”
“We don’t have the infrastructure nor the labor to support all of the claims exploding at once,” she said. “Not to mention the security capacity.”
“I told you I’m not sleeping,” he answered. “But we need the investors to need us. If they decide that their claims are unlikely to produce, they might hear that there’s trouble and walk away from their investments. Write off the whole thing.”
“That much money,” Sarah said. “They’d walk away from that much?”
He nodded, his eyes very, very serious.
“Do you understand who we’re working with yet?”
“We can’t support what they need,” Sarah said. “How many of them, if you disappoint them, are going to turn against us?”
“Risk I was willing to take,” Jimmy said. Sarah pulled out her hatchet and dropped to a knee, hacking at a section of dry wood that she piled next to her as it came away from the rotting trunk.
“You ever think to ask if anyone else was willing?” she asked.
“No one but you would have been able to evaluate it,” he said. She stood.
“Then why didn’t you ask me? You just… had this big idea, this big pool of money sitting out there…” She stopped. He was watching h
er figure it out. It was maddening.
“Fine,” she said. “You didn’t have any choice. You came back here, and everything else has been…”
“The best I could do,” he agreed. “And it’s going damn well, if I have to say it myself.”
He helped her carry the fire wood back to the clearing. His mount was standing exactly where Jimmy had left him; Gremlin and Dog were nowhere to be seen. Jimmy looked for a moment, but Sarah didn’t bother. There was a reason she let them run loose, and she wasn’t going to change her mind now.
She lit the pile of tinder Jimmy had collected and let the fire feed for a minute before going to lean against a tree. Jimmy was walking a half-loop around the fire.
She remembered this motion, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen it.
“Talk it out,” she said, crossing her boots.
“You need to get men up in the mountains digging absenta. We need to protect those men and their claims from jumpers and raiders. I need a path out of the mountains that we can use consistently without being targets. We need to keep the absenta from getting pinched on the way out by laborers, and then we need to get it on the train without someone showing up with a whole bunch of guns and taking it. We need to get it from here to Preston and logged at the minerals dealer without someone holding up the train or finding some pinch point to take it.”
“Can’t use a constant path,” Sarah said. “You know that. Soon as you have a consistent path in and out of the mountains, it’s going to get hit.”
“There aren’t enough people with the experience to make up routes,” Jimmy said. “Even if it’s six or eight or fifteen, we have to have consistent routes. Which means we need a better solution.”
“Unless that solution is to bar entry to the range to anyone you don’t know, I don’t see how you’re going to do it,” Sarah said. Jimmy snorted.
“You’re very helpful.”
“Doing my job,” she said. “Can’t go up, can’t go down. Building project is just too big to go overhead, and it’s still just a target, and while I like the picture of using a secret set of caves we dig ourselves, we’ve already established that digging up here is hard. We don’t have the men we need, as it is.”
“Why did you say that?” he asked. “About the caves?”
He stopped walking.
“You should wear your Lawrence clothes when we come out here,” Sarah said. “You fit in better, and you’d be a lot more comfortable.”
“The caves,” he said, tipping his head down and to the side.
“Because I can see you thinking it,” she said. “You come across a problem and your first reaction is to find a way to go around it that they aren’t going to see coming.”
The corner of his mouth wiggled, and he started walking his slow loop again.
“I do that.”
“If you want to bring everything down at once, you need the biggest armed guard Lawrence has ever seen. If you spread it out among a lot more runs, it’s going to be easier to intercept any one of them, but the score gets smaller.”
He scratched the back of his head.
“Still too big,” he said. “My pa was fighting scores a lot smaller than that his entire life. He never saw anything the likes of what we’re about to get.”
“You need more guns,” Sarah said with a shrug.
“Guns I have,” he said. “I need men.”
“Men I’ve got,” Sarah said. “You need trust.”
“Trust can be bought,” he said, stopping flat-footed again.
“If you say so,” Sarah said. He shook his head.
“If you pay a man well enough that he can get whatever he actually wants out of life…”
“He quits,” Sarah said, and Jimmy smiled.
“Yes, but until then…”
“What are you thinking?” Sarah asked.
“A structured contract with all of the payment at the end,” Jimmy said.
“You’re talking indenturedness,” Sarah said wryly. “I’m not a fan.”
“Clear, fair terms,” Jimmy said. “Upfront. I’m asking them to risk their lives, and I’d pay them like it. They steal from me, I take what they stole, and end their contract without payment. Other than that, I provide food, shelter, and the necessary resources to do the job…”
Sarah considered it.
“You’d keep them in individual houses by the main house,” she said. “It would help, defending the house, if we needed to, because their compensation being tied to you means they’re invested in you living.”
“The people who work for me tend to like me, too,” he said, an after-thought.
“Can’t imagine why,” Sarah said, not getting a rise out of him at all.
“It’s not a solution,” Jimmy said. “But it’s an escalation that will work for now.”
Sarah nodded.
“What was the next one on your list?”
--------
Eventually, Jimmy came to sit down next to her. Dog went streaking past in hot pursuit of something small, gray, and furry, and a minute later, Gremlin jogged by the other direction.
“You get the sense that they have a lot of life we’re not privy to?” he asked.
“Wouldn’t take it away from ‘em for anything,” she said. “That’s how they get to be useful.”
And then she remembered the last time she’d watched him walk that endless half-loop, his hands caught behind his back, working out the problems and then the solutions.
“Oxala,” she said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I went to Oxala to learn how to be something different than I already was. You saw it, even all the way back then.”
He nodded with a distant smile, remembering.
“I did. I knew you’d come back different… and you did. You weren’t the person who left.” He bit his lower lip, thinking. “I was afraid.”
“You were not.”
He shrugged.
“You’d been the most important part of my life since I was eight,” he said. “I didn’t know who you’d be when you got back.”
“You didn’t come back the same, either.”
He shook his head.
“No.”
She looked out at the brass toes of her boots, the fire. The flames were out beyond her feet far enough that the heat was only a presence, rather than a force, but the darkness around them had begun falling long enough ago that the light was becoming the dominant idea in the space.
“Wait,” Jimmy said, sitting up and turning his shoulders square to her. “Wait. I’ve been meaning to ask you. You say ‘o-hala’. I’ve always said ‘o-kala’.”
She smiled.
“The locals say it both ways. If you went to Oxala University, you typically say ‘o-hala’, but not everyone does.”
“I’d wondered,” he said.
“So long as you stay away from ‘ocks-ala’, you’re fine,” Sarah said, the memory of her first days in the northern city coming back easily. “They have opinions.”
“Most places do,” Jimmy said, shifting. She turned her head to look at him.
“You don’t get too comfy there, Lawson. You remember what happened the last time you slept against a tree.”
“Which part?” he asked with a sparkle. She shook her head.
“I’m going to make dinner.”
“I’m going with you up to get the herds,” Jimmy said. “I’ve always liked who we are when we’re off by ourselves like this.”
She looked over and nodded.
“It’s just never that simple.”
--------
Hansen had four men with him, one in high-quality mountain clothes and the others in whatever they’d gotten off the train in, but they were starting to dig, by the time Sarah and Jimmy got to them, and it looked like Hansen had a style of work in mind and was well on his way toward implementing it.
“You got the copy of the report, then,” the man said cheerfully, sitting down on
a set of stools while the men continued to work. The well-dressed one waved, but didn’t come to join them.
“My brother,” Hansen said. “Never left Elsewhere, but he jumped at being able to come dig down here where the big scores are.”
“Good to have family you trust,” Jimmy said, and Hansen nodded. “We got the report.”
“It’s not a lot yet, but it’s more than I saw in a career of digging up north, so I’ll take it.”
“I wanted to talk to you about protection for getting the absenta down.”
Hansen shook his head.
“William wants to keep the enterprise small, for the time being. I’ll bring it down myself in small batches and just hand-carry it to Preston. If you’d refrain from pointing me out to anyone interesting, I’d be grateful.”
Jimmy smiled with the side of his mouth and nodded.
“It’s a strategy.”
“He doesn’t tell me a lot,” Hansen said, “but I gather that he has other plans, long-term. Right now, he just wants to know what I can do on my own with a little bit of help.”
“You happy with the men?” Jimmy asked, looking over.
“Good enough for me,” Hansen answered. “They do what they’re told and they seem happy enough to be out of town.”
“Watch their pockets,” Sarah said.
“I know what I would have given for a shot at absenta like this,” Hansen said. “I know to sleep with one eye open until I get to know them.”
“Even then,” Jimmy said. “I’m glad you aren’t up here on your own.”
“You want to tip your hand a bit on how the other claims are going?”
“You’re ahead of most of them,” Jimmy said. “For now, you won’t see anyone but Lawsons up here. I’ll come up myself to tell you when or if you’ll have anyone else checking in on you.”
Hansen nodded.
“It’s as good a system as I can ask for.” He looked over at the short tunnel the men were digging. It was just deep enough that the shadow it cast could engulf them while they worked. “Sometimes I wish it weren’t so damned valuable. Be a lot easier to get to market, that way.”
“But not nearly so profitable,” Jimmy observed, and Hansen smiled.
“That’s the trick of it.”
Jimmy nodded.
“We’ll be back through as we can. You have trouble, you send one of those men. I’ll know them.”
