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Chapter Five

Annabel watched Clay walk away and felt a pang of regret. Why had he suddenly turned so morose? Why was he so unfriendly? While she’d been sitting on his knee, his attention on her hands, she’d taken the opportunity to study his face. She’d seen concern in his eyes, concern and protectiveness, but he’d covered them up with a brusque, efficient manner, as if resenting his kindness.

How could anyone keep such a tight rein on his emotions? Her own feelings ran close to the surface, impossible to hide. A moment ago, sitting on Clay’s lap, cocooned in the heat of his body and his fingers gently sliding over her palms, the physical proximity had made her tremble with strange new yearnings.

She longed for his company, his companionship. She’d never been to a dance, had never had a chance to learn about flirting, test her powers of attraction on a man, and now those feminine instincts were surging inside her with a force she found difficult to control.

Annabel sighed in frustration. Of course, Clay thought she was a boy. A scrawny kid. She’d be a fool to endanger her disguise by acting on those new and untested feminine impulses that were suddenly buffeting her, as if she were a boat adrift in the ocean.

A few minutes later, Mr. Hicks banged a wooden spoon against a saucepan lid to announce the midday meal, and Clay strode back up the slope. He must be angry at her for some reason, Annabel decided, for he avoided looking at her while the three of them sat down to steaming plates and ate in silence.

Clay finished first. He dropped the spoon with a clatter on his empty plate and got up without a word and marched off to his task of hacking ore at the mine. A few minutes later, Annabel could hear the dull reverberations in the mountainside.

She remained seated at the table, idly spooning the thick stew of stringy meat and tough, tasteless vegetables. Mr. Hicks was leaning back on his log stump, tamping tobacco into his pipe. Annabel speeded up her eating. A gentleman would wait for her to finish her meal, but it was clear to her that the big, burly, bearded Mr. Hicks was no gentleman.

“Where are you from, Mr. Hicks?”

He took the unlit pipe from his mouth. “In the West, you don’t ask a man such questions, kid.”

Annabel lowered her gaze, chewed and swallowed another unpalatable mouthful. She heard the rasp of a match, heard puffing sounds and smelled the smoke. It was not the usual smell of tobacco, but the pleasant scent of fragrant herbs.

“I’m from Kansas,” Mr. Hicks said, contradicting his command not to pry. “My ma was from a good family, but my pa was a good-for-nothing wastrel. She ran off with him and lived to regret it.”

Annabel had no idea how to reply to such a blunt revelation, so she kept eating. Sometimes silence worked better as a prompt than bombarding someone with questions.

“Kid, sometimes you might think I’m two different people,” Mr. Hicks went on. “When the mood strikes, I can talk like my ma, all educated, with fancy turns of phrase. At other times, I hit the bottle and curse like a trooper.

“You’ll find men like that all around the West. They might be a college professor, or a duke’s son, but they all try to sound like a cowboy, for a man feels more comfortable if he blends in with his surroundings. It’s no good being a tiger in the desert, or a camel in the jungle.”

“How long have you known Clay?”

“Clay?” Mr. Hicks puffed on his pipe. “Five years ago he rode up on a flea-bit pony to my claim in northern Californy. I was just about to pack up and leave that worthless ditch in the mud. There was something stark about Clay, but he was a good, strong lad, so I let him tag along.

“For a while, we worked for a big outfit in Nevada. Clay seemed to have some kind of a death wish. When there was blasting to be done, he volunteered for the job. When a mine tunnel was unsound, he chose to work there. Then he settled down, became more sensible. I never figured out what had been eating him up. He never talks much about his past. All I knew is that he grew up in an orphanage.”

Empathy tugged at Annabel. He was an orphan, too! She recalled the grief, the emptiness, the terrible sense of being alone after Mama and Papa died. At what age had Clay lost his parents? Or could it be that he’d never known them, had been abandoned at birth. She longed to find out more, but Mr. Hicks had already declared he’d shared the sum of his knowledge, so she chose another line of questioning.

“How long have you been at this claim?”

“Since April. If we want to stay on when the winter comes, we’ll have to build a cabin, or at least a wall to enclose the front of the cavern. Winters are fierce this high up in the mountains.”

“Is there much gold in the mine?”

“Some. Might be more, but we ain’t found it yet.”

“Are there other claims nearby? Is the area rich with strikes?”

“This here country is called the Mimbres Mountains, after an Apache tribe with the same name. There’re still a few Indians around, but they haven’t bothered us none.” Mr. Hicks paused to inspect his pipe. “There was a big strike in Hillsboro some years back. That’s ten miles north of here. They have a town there, with stores and everything.”

“Why don’t you get your provisions there?”

“Don’t get on with the storekeepers in Hillsboro.”

Mr. Hicks spoke in a tone of bitterness. Annabel suspected there were lots of people in the world with whom the gruff old man did not get on. She pushed her empty plate aside. “Can I help with anything?”

“Give your hands a rest, kid. Take a walk around. There’s a creek over yonder.” Mr. Hicks took the pipe out of his mouth and used the stem to point. “And the horse and mule graze in a small meadow a mite down the hill. If you learn your bearings today, you can carry and fetch when your blisters heal.”

He took a few more puffs in silence, then resumed talking. “I have a friend in Valverde, fifty miles north up the rail track. He puts provisions on the train and the conductor leaves the parcels in the mailbox by the water tower. If we run out, we hunt for food, or we go hungry.”

For another ten minutes, they lingered at the table. Annabel learned the mine tunnel was narrow and the men took turns to work in the cramped space. When it was Clay’s turn, Mr. Hicks took care of the chores around the camp. When Mr. Hicks went down the mine, Clay harnessed the mule to the arrastre and crushed the ore. Mr. Hicks did not like the task, for he did not get on with the mule.

“We had another saddle horse and two more pack mules when we came out prospecting,” Mr. Hicks explained. “But we had to sell them to pay for supplies. As soon as we have money to spare, we’ll replace them, or at least the saddle horse. It’s no good for a man to be without transport of his own.”

“What are the horse and mule called?” Annabel asked.

Mr. Hicks frowned. “The horse is called a horse, or the buckskin. The mule is called the mule.” His expression grew bleak. “Better not to treat them as pets. Makes it easier to shoot them if you have to.”

Clay’s warnings about the old man’s temper rang in Annabel’s mind, but she steeled herself against an outburst and asked the question that had been playing on her mind. “Mr. Hicks, what do you have against women?”

He gave her a long look, then fastened his gaze on the line of trees beyond the clearing. “They promise you paradise, but they give you hell. You’re too young, kid, but when you grow up you’ll figure that a woman can be all sweetness on the outside and poison on the inside. They lure a man with honeyed talk but stick the knife of betrayal between your shoulder blades when you turn your back. Mark my words, kid. One day you’ll find out.”

Annabel hung her head, ashamed. What she was doing now, interrogating him about his past while dressed as a boy, was a betrayal, in a way. Uneasy, she got to her feet. “I’ll go and see if I can find my way to the creek.” Casually, she added, “Do you ever bathe in the stream?” Her scalp was starting to itch, from the way her hair was coiled tight inside the bowler hat.

“Sure, kid. There’s a good spot for bathing.” Benign again, Mr. Hicks gestured at her bandaged hands. “Take your time, kid. If you peel off the dressings, the cold water will soothe your skin. I have some mending to do. There’s a hole in my boots the size of Alaska. When you get back, you can help me prepare supper.”

* * *

Clay lowered the pickaxe and blinked against the dust in his eyes. A lantern hanging from an iron peg hammered into the rock cast a dull sphere of light. Normally, Clay didn’t mind the sense of being trapped inside the earth. There was peace in being underground, surrounded by silence, and the hard physical labor of a miner cleared a man’s troubles from his mind.

But today his mind found no comfort in the steady clink of the pickaxe against the seam of ore. Clay told himself it was because the thin vein of gold was petering away, threatening the future of the mine, but he knew it was a lie.

The cause of his unease was the kid. The scrawny kid who filled his thoughts in the way no scrawny kid should be allowed to do. With a grunt of frustration, Clay lowered the pickaxe and bent to pick up the canteen by his feet. He uncapped the lid, tipped his head back to drink. Not a drop of water left inside. Clay sighed, reached to the rock ceiling to take down the lantern and used it to guide his way out. At the mouth of the tunnel, the bright sunshine made him squint.

As he waited for his eyes to adjust, Clay spotted the kid emerging from the cavern. There was something stealthy about the kid’s movements, the way he glanced all around, as if to make sure no one was watching. Curious, Clay drew back against the sunbaked cliff, hiding behind the dried-up oak that shielded the mine entrance.

He watched as the kid set down the path, heading toward the creek. The kid was not carrying a bucket, so he was not fetching water. An empty flour sack hung draped over one skinny forearm, like a towel. In his other hand, the kid carried the bar of soap he’d been so proud about.

Clay hesitated. The kid seemed to relax, sauntering along. He was humming one of those sea shanties, not taking the time to study his surroundings. There could be anything out there in the forest. A bear. A mountain lion. Rattlers liked to coil up on rocks that reflected the heat of the sun.

Clay set off to follow the kid, but he kept his footsteps quiet and hung back, remaining out of sight. His gut seemed all tied up in knots. Guilt and shame and a terrible sense of confusion filled his mind, like a headache pounding at his temples.

The kid came to a halt by the creek. Bright rays of sunshine cut through the canopy of trees, like rich seams of gold. The water made a merry gurgle as it rippled over a boulder, gathering into the tiny pond they had dammed for bathing.

The kid hopped onto a flat rock and ducked to set the flour sack and the cake of soap by his feet. Then he removed the bandages from his hands and took a moment to study his palms. Next, he lifted his hands to the buttons on the front of his threadbare shirt. Peeking between the trees, Clay held his breath.

What was wrong with him?

Why did he want to watch the kid strip down?

Curious. He was curious. And concerned. There had been something odd in the way the kid had glanced about him before setting off to bathe. And those baggy clothes the kid wore, and the way he never took off his hat. Maybe he was covering up some injury—scars from an accident, or some defect he was born with.

Clay kept watching, the turmoil of emotions anchoring his feet to the ground. The kid pushed the cotton shirt down his narrow shoulders. Clay’s brows drew into a frown. He’d guessed right. A wide bandage circled the kid’s torso, covering him from armpit to waist.

With nimble hands, the kid undid the clasps that held the bandage secure and began unraveling it. Loop after loop, the fabric fell away, revealing an expanse of smooth, white skin. His shoulder blades protruded slightly on either side of the narrow groove of the spine. Angel’s wings, Clay had once heard someone describe such a feature, but that had been on a woman.

He could see nothing wrong with the kid, no deformity, if you didn’t count the lack of muscle and the oddly tiny waist. The final loop of the bandage fell away and the kid bent to set the bundle of fabric down on the stone. When he turned to pick up the soap, the curve of a small, rounded breast peeked into view.

Clay’s mind seized up with the shock. He took a step back and sank on the ground, elbows propped on his knees, head cradled in his hands. The vegetation formed a barrier between them, but the sight remained burned in his memory.

The kid was a girl.

A huge wave of relief crashed over Clay. There was nothing wrong with him, no sudden change in his mental makeup. He didn’t think of boys in such a way. It was simply that his body had figured out the truth before his mind knew.

Of course. Of course.

Fragments of recollection ricocheted around his brain. The voice. Mostly, the kid spoke in a low voice, but sometimes he forgot and the pitch climbed high. And that soft skin...those big eyes...the slender shape...and sometimes, when the kid prattled on, there was something downright feminine and coquettish about his manner.

Her manner.

A girl.

As the shock of the discovery faded, Clay’s senses began to function again. He could hear the girl singing, could hear the splashing of water. He felt his body tighten. She was bathing.

Temptation tugged at him like a physical pull. He shouldn’t look. It was not the gentlemanly thing to do. But he was powerless to resist the masculine inclination. Easing up onto his feet, he peered between the leaves of a scrub oak.

She was kneeling on the stone, bending forward, washing her hair. Long and black, it cascaded down in a sleek curtain. Now Clay understood why the kid never took her hat off in front of others. She couldn’t have been pretending to be a boy for very long, for if she had, she would have been forced to cut her hair.

Turn around, Clay urged in his mind. Turn around.

But she did not. His eyes lingered on what he could see—the nape of a slender neck, the narrow span of those angel wing shoulders, an impossibly slender waist and the feminine curve of hips, hidden inside the mended wool pants.

Would she strip completely? Would she take off her pants? Would she turn around, giving him another glimpse of those small, rosy-tipped breasts? Clay felt his heart hammering away in his chest as he watched the girl. She was singing again, in breathless snatches while she soaped and rinsed her hair.

Cape Cod girls ain’t got no combs,

They brush their hair with codfish bones...

Cape Cod kids ain’t got no sleds,

They slide down the hills on codfish heads...

Cape Cod girls ain’t got no frills,

They tie their hair with codfish gills...

As the afternoon sun burned in the sky, the girl straightened in her kneeling position. She canted her head to one side and wrung the water from her hair, taking care not to hurt her blistered hands. And then, turning a little, she reached for the flour sack on the stone, and Clay got the peek he’d been waiting for. The sight of those firm, tip-tilted breasts made his gut clench.

After patting her skin dry, the girl rose to her feet and picked up the long strip of linen and used it to disguise her feminine shape again. Hurrying now, she pulled her cotton shirt back on and leaned down to gather up her soap and the makeshift towel and the bowler hat propped beside her feet.

Without a sound, Clay retreated up the path to the small meadow where the horse and mule stood grazing. While he took a moment to allow the storm of agitation inside him to ease, he stroked the floppy ears of the mule and mulled over the situation.

How long could the girl protect her secret? Should he let her know he’d stumbled upon the truth? And what about Mr. Hicks? The gruff old man hated women. What would happen when he found out? And he would find out, for there was no way the girl could keep up the pretense for a month. No way on earth.