Lover's Gold (2 page)

“I don’t care what you think about me personally, Miss McAllister—as long as you stay out of my affairs.” Morgan watched the color drain from the girl’s flushed face. He hated to frighten her, but he really had no choice. “You just do your job and I’ll do mine. Now, how about that coffee?” When he released her arm, she lifted her chin in a gesture of defiance, and a memory of that same bravado nine years ago flashed through his mind. Settling himself at one of the tables, he watched her stiff-backed figure as she marched toward the kitchen.

He hadn’t expected to see her. Hadn’t been sure she even still lived in the town. He certainly hadn’t expected her to recognize him after all these years.

He smiled to himself. She sure had turned into a pretty little thing, not all gangly and coltish like the child he remembered. He figured she must be somewhere near nineteen, then wondered if she’d married. The notion felt strange. Even with her growth from child to woman—all gentle curves and a tempting bosom—it was hard for him to think of her as more than a little girl. Her eyes were still that tawny golden color, only now they seemed bigger, and softer.

Morgan felt a wave of guilt. God, he hated to lie to her.

He owed the girl his life! It didn’t seem right to deceive her, no matter what the reason. But the less she knew, the better off they’d both be. He thought of the last time he’d seen her, almost nine years ago. The memory burned like a white-hot iron. Little Lainey, he had called her. That was how he’d thought of her that night in the mine. The night he would never forget.

Elaina set the mug down in front of Morgan a little too hard, and several drops of coffee ran over the edge. She didn’t bother to wipe them up. To hell with him and his threats! No wonder Dolph Redmond had hired him. He was just the kind of man Redmond and Dawson admired, the kind who threw his weight around and talked tough.

She helped the kitchen boy finish cleaning up her mess, then retrieved the morning paper, the
Sentinel
, from a stack beside the door. Determined to take a break, she poured herself a mug of coffee, seated herself, opened the paper, and scanned the headlines. But try as she might, her mind refused to decipher the printed words. Though she pretended to read, her look strayed repeatedly to the imposing figure across the room.

He was dressed just as she’d expect: open-neck white shirt, soft black leather vest, snug-fitting breeches that disappeared into shiny black leather boots. A staghom-handled revolver rested menacingly in the leather holster strapped to his muscular thigh.

When the bell above the door signaled the entrance of another customer, Morgan’s dark, finely arched brows narrowed. His angular jaw clenched almost imperceptibly as the man who had entered scrutinized him from a table beside the door. Well-defined cheekbones caught shadows as Morgan sipped his coffee.

The gunman was definitely handsome, Elaina thought— in a ruthless sort of way—and, with that exception, he certainly looked a lot like Ren.

Reynold Lee Daniels. The best looking boy in Carbon County. Every girl in school had been in love with him, and every father had warned his daughter about Ren’s less than honorable intentions. At ten years old, she had watched him from afar. She had not been immune to his charms, but she was younger than the rest, so he’d ignored her completely. Until the night she dug him out of the coal mine—the night she couldn’t forget.

It had been cold that October evening in 1869. She had tom her dress climbing trees, so her mother had sent her to bed early. But voices arguing in the downstairs parlor roused her curiosity. She heard the angry words even through the walls of her room.

“It’s time you shut your mouth, McAllister, and listened,” a deep voice said. “You gave up your say in mine affairs when you borrowed that money from us. Now, Dolph and I say we blow the tunnel at dawn, and we don’t give a damn whether you like it or not!”

Determined to see who it was, Elaina tiptoed to the top of the stairs. In the parlor below, Dolph Redmond and Henry Dawson, her father’s partners, were arguing bitterly with her father.

“Please, Henry, listen to me,” her father was saying. “Those two boys are still alive in there. You know it and so do I. We heard them tapping when we were in the crosscut. Several others did, too. My conscience will not allow me to condone murder—at any price!”

Everyone in Carbon County knew about the cave-in at the Blue Mountain Mine. Henry Dawson said a pocket of methane gas had exploded. That had been four days ago. Since then, fifty miners had been rescued, ten of those badly injured. Eight had come up dead, and two remained trapped in the mine—eight-year-old Tommy Daniels, Elaina’s best friend, and his older brother, Ren, who’d just turned eighteen.

Elaina pressed her face between the carved mahogany balusters of the stairs, her single thick dark braid tickling her cheek as it swung across her shoulder.

“How can you justify killing two innocent boys just to save a few dollars?” her father said, his face pale. He squeezed his hands together and paced in front of the fireplace, leaving mud on the thick Persian carpet.

“It ain’t a few dollars and you know it,” Dawson said, chewing his stubby cigar. “It could take days, maybe even weeks, to git them kids outta there. They was workin’ A level instead of E like the others, so they ain’t down as deep, but they’s farther in.”

“What were they doing in there?” her father asked. “They was crevicing,” Dawson said.

She knew that meant wedging themselves into crawl spaces too risky to dynamite and too small for a grown man to fit into, digging the coal out by hand from the narrowest cracks. It was the meanest job in the mine.

“We needed somebody small, so we sent the young ’un. And that older boy’s a troublemaker, so we made him go, too. We was hopin’ to make him quit.” Dawson’s ruddy face had reddened even more. “Odds are they’d be dead afore we could git to ’em, anyway. The damn mine’s near busted now. We can’t afford to lose any more money.” He slammed his hand down on the mantel, and Elaina jumped as if a gun had been fired.

“How do you intend to explain the boys’ death to the others?” her father pressed.

“Most folks will assume they’re dead by now, just like them others,” Dawson answered. “Only Ned Marlow and Jack Dorsey heard the tapping. A little extra in their wages’ll keep ’em quiet. As much whiskey as they down, nobody’d believe ’em anyway.” With his short legs firmly planted, Dawson glared up at her father. “The miners need work too bad to give us much argument. ’Sides, those Daniels boys ain’t got no kin left ’round here.”

Dolph Redmond spoke up for the first time. “You should have stayed in New York, McAllister. We could have used that extra capital you might have raised. Instead, you came

running back here at the first sign of trouble.” He shifted his position on the velvet settee and uncrossed his thin legs.

“Personally,” he continued, “it won’t hurt my feelings one bit to see those two troublemakers disappear. That older boy spends half his shift trying to convince the other miners that conditions in the mine aren’t safe anymore, and the young one goes along with him.”

“Well, obviously they aren’t safe!”

“That’s no longer your affair,” Redmond softly warned. Her father ignored Redmond’s warning. “If I remember correctly, the boys’ father died in a similar accident four or five years ago over at the Middleton Mine when you two were running things there.”

“Yeah, Ed Daniels was a troublemaker, too. Always fightin’ for miners’ rights—higher pay, shorter shifts, that kinda thing. See where it got him, don’t ya?” Dawson removed the stubby cigar from his mouth and spat into the brass spittoon beneath the clock on the wall.

“How soon did you blast after that cave-in?”

Redmond smiled, his lips a thin red wound.

Dawson balled a fist but kept it near his side.

Grampa McAllister’s cherrywood clock ticked heavily, the only sound in the room.

“Why didn’t you just fire the man?” her father finally asked.

“You oughta know that by now. Them hard-rockers is a close-knit bunch. A firin’ leaves hard feelin’s. Better to make things tough enough so’s the man’ll quit. Ed Daniels weren’t smart enough to know when to give up.” Dawson moved closer, his barrel chest heaving.

“Gentlemen, please.” Dolph Redmond stepped between the two men. “There’s no need to stir up the past. These things happen. It’s just part of doing business.”

“Then it’s settled,” Dawson said. “Time’s money and we’ve lost enough already. We put fire in the hole at first light. If the buggers git out afore then, so be it.”

“I want no part of this.” Her father sank down on the settee, his face hollow and pale. “You men are murdering those boys.”

“Relax, McAllister. Nobody’s murdering anybody, and I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk, if you know what’s good for you—and for your family.” Redmond smoothed a wrinkle from his immaculate blue suit, then gestured at Dawson, and both men moved toward the door.

Elaina still remembered Dolph Redmond’s last words: “All miners take risks. Besides, there’s hours left till dawn.”

She had returned to her room in tears and cried until she was numb. Hours later she’d thought of something that just might save her friends. . . .

A second jingle of the bell above the door drew Elaina’s thoughts from the past. As she rose and headed toward the first noon arrivals, she glanced again at the gunman, her sympathy for the miners’ cause stronger than ever. Maybe it was time she did more than just sympathize. More than just wish conditions would improve.

Maybe it was high time indeed.

Chapter 2

O
VER THE TOP
of his steaming mug of coffee, Morgan watched the men he had come to see walk into the room and head directly toward his table.

“Mr. Morgan?” Dolph Redmond extended a pale hand. With black hair slicked back from a too-high forehead and ears too close to the sides of his face, Dolph Redmond reminded Morgan of a rattlesnake—without the decency to sound a warning.

“I’m Morgan.” He unwound his lanky frame and accepted the handshake while his cold gaze brusquely assessed the three men.

“I’m Adolph Redmond. My friends call me Dolph.”

“Mr. Redmond,” Morgan responded pointedly.

“This is my partner, Henry Dawson, and his son, Chuck.”

Morgan shook hands with the other two men. Redmond was the tallest, the most expensively dressed, and, Morgan figured, probably the brains of the operation. Dawson looked a little like a former bare-knuckle fighter. He was short and stocky, and his bulbous, veined nose said he was a man who enjoyed his whiskey. The son had his father’s powerful shoulders and arms, but stood eye to eye with Morgan, who was at least five inches taller than Henry.

“We’re glad you accepted our invitation, Mr. Morgan,” Redmond said.

“That remains to be seen, Mr. Redmond.” Morgan lifted a comer of his mouth in a mirthless smile. He wasn’t worried about the men remembering him. He’d been considered dead around these parts for nearly nine years. He’d bet he had a plot in the cemetery. After an accident, even if the bodies of the victims weren’t recovered, the Blue Mountain Mining Company provided a headstone to mark the symbolic grave.

“Let’s go into the office where we can speak a little more privately,” Redmond said, pointing toward the door with a delicate finger ending in a finely manicured nail. “Chuck, have Elaina bring in some coffee.”

The men moved on into the hotel’s inner office. Redmond seated himself behind a carved oak desk, and Morgan took a chair facing him, as did Dawson and his son. The room was furnished with few frills: the desk, the chairs, a brass desk lamp, and an ornate floor lamp with a red-fringed shade. Faded pictures of the hotel as it had once looked lined one wall, along with sketches of what appeared to be plans for expansion. They, too, were yellow and faded. Lowell McAllister, it seemed, had had grand plans for the Hotel Keyserville .

While he waited for the men to make themselves comfortable, Morgan again assessed the men. He remembered the younger Dawson from his youth. Two years Morgan’s senior, Chuck Dawson had been self-centered, dishonest, and conniving. He’d been caught cheating the miners at cards more than once and been suspect in several cases of missing wages. When he’d dragged Betsy Pierson behind the schoolhouse, only his father’s money had saved him from punishment.

From the looks of things, Chuck Dawson had changed little. He’d grown taller and filled out in the shoulders, but unlike the older Dawson whose ruddy complexion, round face, and balding head gave him an almost jolly appearance, the younger man remained thin-faced and sallow. With his patrician nose, sandy hair, and generous mouth, he would probably be considered handsome, in a slick sort of way, but personally Morgan thought the man had too much the look of a jackal.

“Well, Morgan,” Redmond began. “Let’s get down to business. We invited you here to help us with a little problem. As you probably noticed on your way into town, coal mining is our main source of income. Dawson and I own the hotel and the general store and a few other odd businesses, but the real money’s in the mining. We’ve been through some tough years lately, but times are changing. The coal market’s due for an upswing, and we intend to be ready.”

A thousand questions raced through Morgan’s mind, starting with what had happened to the McAllister family and their interest in the Blue Mountain Mine.

Ten years ago, he and his brother had gone to work at Blue Mountain after the cave-in at the Middleton Mine and the death of their father. At that time Lowell McAllister had owned the mine as well as the hotel and general store. The following year McAllister had taken on Redmond and Dawson as partners, but he’d still controlled the majority interest in the mine as well as his other assets.

Morgan eyed the three men warily. “Go on” was all he said. He settled his long-legged frame a little deeper in the uncomfortable brown leather chair.

“Well, some of the miners have been stirring up trouble again. Happens every once in a while, but this time it appears it may be a little more than we can handle.” Redmond offered a thin cigar. Morgan declined, and Redmond lit one for himself.