Blackstone's Bride. Bronwyn Williams

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      “I ain’t calling him nothing,” the boy grumbled, pocketing the money Jed handed over. How much of it his employer would ever see was between the boy and whoever had hired him. Jed had a fellow-feeling for any kid who chose to hire himself out instead of stealing to put food in his belly.

      Within half an hour he was out of town, headed generally west. Hearing the sound of a distant train whistle, Jed grinned and gigged McGee into a reluctant trot. “That old sumbitch has got a big surprise coming, McGee. Yessir, he’ll blow like one of those volcanoes I was telling you about.”

      He’d skipped ahead to the Vs and Ws last time he’d visited the library, knowing that it might be a while before he got to further his education, then leafed through the Z book, where he’d stopped to read about a striped horse. Damnedest thing he ever did see, but other than that, there wasn’t much of interest in the Zs.

      They made fairly good time, stopping each night and bedding down in the open. It was cold, but it felt more like home. Over the course of his twenty-five years, Jed figured he had slept out more than he’d slept in. At least sleeping out in the open, away from towns, he didn’t have to worry about any miscreant—now, there was a fine word for you—creeping in and robbing him blind.

      Three days later he stopped to buy cheese and soda biscuits and drink himself a real cup of coffee. He was in an unfamiliar area, but as the crow flies, it looked to be the most direct route to Foggy Valley. “What are the roads like to the southwest of here?” he asked the man behind the counter, who appeared to be roughly a hundred and fifty years old.

      The old man shifted a wad of tobacco and spat through the open door, splashing the red clay a foot away from McGee’s big, splayed hoof. “Tol’able,” he said. “Old wagon road’s growed up some. Most folks takes the new road now.”

      Jed would as soon avoid “most folks.” Surprise was his ace in the hole. One of them. If Stanfield knew money was on the way to pay off George’s loan, he would think of some way to stop it.

      “Where will I find this wagon road? You say it heads generally southwest?”

      “West-by-sou’west. Switchbacks aplenty once it gits into Miller territory. Wouldn’t go there if I was you. Rough country.”

      Switchbacks didn’t bother him. Neither did rough country. “How much I owe you?”

      The old man named a figure that was several times what the goods were worth, and Jed paid without comment. From the looks of the place, he might be the only customer all week. So far, his traveling expenses had amounted to a dish of chicken pie in Salem and the cigar he’d bought to take to George, to celebrate paying off the loan.

      This time the nightmare was slightly different. This time Eleanor was buried under tons of earth, unable to claw her way free, unable to scream for help. She waited for the dream to fade, and then she whispered, “I am not helpless! I am intelligent, resourceful and…”

      Trapped. Still trapped, despite her determination to escape, in a world that lagged a hundred years behind the times, held captive by a people who were obsessed by gold fever. A people who wrote their own laws and lived by them. A soft-spoken people who were distrustful of outsiders, even those who came into the valley by marriage, as Eleanor had.

      They were her late husband’s family. Cousins to the nth degree, inbred, uneducated, a few of them even vicious, especially after sampling the product of their own illicit distillery.

      Once her breathing settled down, she slid out of bed and made her way to the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of cool buttermilk. Back home in Charlotte—in her other life—it would have been warm cocoa. Turning the glass slowly in her hands, she studied the pattern etched into the sides. It was one of only three left of the set of tumblers she’d brought with her. The matched set of china had suffered even more. Two days spent jouncing in the back of a freight wagon, no matter how carefully packed, was lethal on fine china and crystal.

      The silver that had belonged to two generations of her family hadn’t even begun the trip. Instead it had been sold by her bridegroom to finance yet another piece of equipment for his damn-blasted gold mine.

      His mythical gold mine. No matter how they might carve up the earth in search of a new vein, the Millers were deluding themselves, Eleanor was convinced of it. Just because sixty years ago, Devin’s grandfather had found a lump of pure gold and a vein that looked promising, staked a claim and brought in his entire family to dig it out, that didn’t mean there were more riches still waiting to be uncovered. It meant only that the Millers, her late husband among them, were seriously deranged when it came to the subject of gold.

      And just as deranged if they thought they could hold her prisoner here until she married one of them, who would then control what they called “Dev’s shares.” His grandfather’s shares—the major portion of their elusive wealth.

      A hundred shares of nothing was still nothing, but try and convince the Millers of that. She’d been trapped in this wild, forsaken place ever since Devin had been killed, and she still hadn’t managed to convince anyone that letting her go back to Charlotte would not bring the world rushing in to steal their precious gold.

      Tomorrow night she would try again. After last night’s fiasco, they might not be expecting her to try again so soon.

      Later that morning Eleanor looked around the cramped log cabin, taking inventory of what she would be forced to leave behind. There was little left now, certainly nothing she could carry away with her. Devin had sold practically everything of value she possessed, most of it before they’d left Charlotte. He had obviously thought that because she owned her own home and dressed nicely, she must be well-to-do.

      Nothing could be further from the truth. She had inherited the house from the elderly cousin who had taken her in after her parents had died, and could barely make ends meet on her meager salary.

      But then, Devin hadn’t asked, and she certainly hadn’t told him how little a schoolteacher earned. The irony was that they had both been taken in. Devin’s charm had been no more genuine than her imagined wealth. Not that he hadn’t played his role well. Surprisingly well, considering his background. It would never have passed muster if she’d been more experienced. The proverbial old-maid schoolteacher, she’d been naive enough and flattered enough to swallow his line, bait, hook and sinker.

      Looking back, she couldn’t believe how blind she had been. Not only had she invited a stranger into her home, she had practically begged him to make a fool of her. Loneliness was no excuse, nor was the fact that the day they’d met had been her twenty-fifth birthday and there’d been no one to help her celebrate. Cousin Annie had been dead several months by then. Her friends were all married, some with growing families.

      The truth was, she’d been feeling like the last cold biscuit in the basket. Then along came Devin Miller, stepping out of the haberdashery just as she walked by with an armload of books. She had dropped the books; he had helped her pick them up, and almost before she realized what was happening he was courting her with flowers, candy and blatant flattery. And fool that she was, she’d lapped it up like a starving puppy.

      Oh, yes, she’d been ripe for the plucking, her only excuse being that no one had ever tried to pluck her before. Which was how she came to be in a situation that nothing in her quiet, uneventful life could have prepared her for. Held captive by a bunch of gold-obsessed men—the women were almost as bad—who were convinced that any day now, they would all be rich as kings and never have to work another day in their misbegotten lives.

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