Heart of the West (76 page)

She tried to imagine what the proud daddy would say when she told him. She wouldn't tell him. Lord, what was she thinking? He would be able to see it for himself soon enough.

And he would insist on doing right by her, she was sure of that. When you shared a bed with a man for seven years you came to know at least some things about him. Drew Scully wasn't the type to father a baby and then walk away from the responsibility of it.

Another bout of nausea struck her and she fell to her knees, groping for the pan. She couldn't remember being so sick the last time. They said it was a good thing, a sign the baby was taking. If that was true, she thought with a shaky laugh, then Hannah Yorke was damn good and pregnant.

Drew...Oh, God, what was she ever going to do about Drew?

Never mind that she was much too old for him, she wasn't near good enough. As marshal he was well liked and respected by the town. He was a man on his way up in the world. Hannah knew how other men looked down on a man who was fool enough to marry a whore, even a reformed one. It was a matter of pride, of being content with other men's leavings. If he walked down the aisle with her, he would walk himself right out of the life he had made for himself here.

And if he had wanted to marry her for herself—really wanted to, and the town and everything else be damned—he'd have gotten around to asking her long before now.

So she would have to be looking after herself, again, and looking after herself meant leaving Rainbow Springs. She couldn't raise her baby as a bastard in a town where everyone knew its mother for a whore.

By late afternoon Hannah was feeling well enough to go out.

She dressed with care in a dusky rose linen gown and an enormous net-swathed hat trimmed with burgundy silk lilies. She went to the window and looked out, trying to peer at the sky through the heap-smoke haze, to see if it was likely to rain soon. In the end she decided to take along a black lace parasol lined with oilcloth. Over her shoulders she threw a purple-and-rose-striped silk shawl with black fringe that matched the fringe on the parasol.

She had just started down the stairs when her stomach began churning again. She gripped the banister tightly, drawing in great gulps of air. Her stomach turned over and settled. She released her breath in a long sigh.

She had reached her front gate when she saw Erlan coming toward her down the road, as near to running as she could come in her shuffling gait. She had her little boy in her arms, and the kid was using the wind they made by their rush to trail a red kite along after them. It was a strange sight, making them look like a big, awkward red-winged bird trying to take flight.

"She is here!" Erlan cried. She was breathless from having to struggle through the thick mud on her crippled feet. "She is going to do it."

Hannah felt a smile break across her face, and her blood stirred. A good down-and-dirty scuffle was just what she needed to take her mind off her own troubles. "Then I expect she'd like her friends standing at her side when she does do it," Hannah said. "Are you willing?"

Erlan looked toward the scarred, ugly butte, then up into the grimy yellow sky. The pall of smoke that hung over the town had grown much thicker since morning. The new heap roasting pit was half again as large as the last one, but it seemed to be releasing four times as many noxious fumes into the air. Just then the shift whistle blew, and Erlan started. But she straightened her shoulders and shifted her son's weight higher on her hip. She met Hannah's gaze, her eyes serious and a little worried, but resolute. "I am willing," she said. "We had better hurry, though."

Clementine McQueen was already standing beneath the gallus frame when they arrived at the Four Jacks. The morning shift was coming up in the cages and the afternoon shift was waiting to go down. She must have asked a nipper to stop each man coming and going, for a towheaded boy went from miner to mucker to skinner, and every time he spoke a head would swivel around to stare at her. The collar sheet and the area around it were already crowded—with cable spools and reels, boxes of muck sticks, picks and drills, and hopper cars full of giant powder and timber.

As more and more damp and sweating miners congregated around the shaft head, the gallus frame began to smell like a roomful of wet dogs. The carbide lamps on the miners' hats shot beacons of light into the murky haze. Hannah wondered how Clementine was going to make herself heard over the ringing bells, the clattering cages, the ore being dumped into the holding bins, the rhythmic throb of the pump rod, and the steam hissing from the boilers.

Clementine had climbed atop an empty cable spool. She stood tall, her head held high, like a queen about to address her subjects. Hannah, who knew her well, understood that Clementine gathered her ladyhood around her like a mantle only when she was most afraid. But folk had a tendency to find it off-putting, mistaking her shyness for conceit and maybe being a tad insecure about their own lack of polish. At least Clementine didn't look so Bostony today; in truth, she looked disheveled and muddy, as if she'd just ridden in off the range.

As Hannah and Erlan approached her makeshift platform, Clementine noticed them. Her face lightened with a quick and dazzling smile, and some of the stiffness eased out of her shoulders. The miners had also spotted the other two women, and their murmurs rose from a hum to a beehive buzz. Not even hurdy-gurdy and red line girls hung around the gallus frame during a shift change.

"They're as fired up as a January stove," Hannah said to Erlan. "They're not going to want to listen to what she has to say."

Erlan set Samuel on the ground, keeping a tight hold on his hand. The worry in her eyes had intensified. "Perhaps we should have tried to talk her out of it."

"Have you ever known anyone, man or woman, more gut-stubborn than Clementine McQueen when she gets her sights set on a thing? I'm only worried our being here'll wind up harming more than helping. We ain't either one of us exactly upstanding citizens of the community."

"Merciful heavens." Erlan fingered the high, stiff collar at her throat. "I feel as if I am wearing a brand on my forehead like a Taoist monk. But Clementine said the battle cry must come from us women. So far we three are the only women willing to make any noise."

"I suppose you're ri—Oh, my lord. Speaking of needing mercy, will you look who's here?"

Erlan followed Hannah's gaze toward the man who leaned against one of the headframe's iron struts, a battered Stetson deeply shadowing his face. "Is that not the brother of her husband?" Erlan's forehead wrinkled. "Is this a good thing?"

At the sight of that dark, reckless face, Hannah's eyes had blurred a moment and her heart had clenched with the sort of bittersweet ache a gal got when she ran into a man she'd been crazy in love with a long, long time ago. It was hard to tell from this distance, but he looked pared down. More hardened, if such a thing was possible. "It could be good," she said, her voice cracking. "But then, it could also be real bad. With a sweet-talkin', heart-breakin' scoundrel like Rafferty, you can never guess."

If Clementine even knew he was there, she didn't let on. She nodded at the nipper, and he gave a short toot of the shift whistle, silencing the miners. "Gentlemen," she began in her fine diction, "I wish to speak to you about how the Four Jacks is poisoning your lives..."

"Come on, honey," Hannah muttered under her breath, "let 'er rip."

Hannah's gaze swept over the miners. She spotted Marshal Drew Scully lingering in the back of the crowd, his stance calm but watchful. Her heart surged up into her throat, and a warmth spread all over her, as if she'd just slipped into a hot bath. She wondered if there would ever come a time when she wouldn't react this way to the day's first sight of him.

At that moment he noticed Rafferty, and the two men eyed each another warily like two bull elks deciding whether to butt or back off. Then Drew's gaze found hers. She gave him an uncertain smile that he didn't return.

An angry bellow interrupted Hannah's thoughts, and she realized with a start that she had missed most of what Clementine had said.

"We all know the Four Jacks has offered to buy your timberland and fer a fair price, only you ain't sellin'," one of the miners was shouting back at her. "If you ask me, all this talk about poison is just a lot of sour hay."

The man's cronies laughed and hooted, banging on their lunch pails. From the back of the crowd someone let fly with the soggy remains of a letter-from-home. The gravy and meat-filled pastry landed with a splat on Clementine's chest.

She swayed, a look of utter distaste and horror twisting her face. But before Hannah had even thought to react, Erlan launched herself forward. "Did you forget you ever had a mother, you pile of turtle dung?" she shouted. "How dare you treat a woman with such disrespect? You are all mannerless pieces of dog vomit!"

A hoot of nervous laughter erupted out of Hannah's throat. "I reckon you boys've just been properly cussed out, Chinese style," she drawled.

The men, at least those standing in the front, looked sheepish. A few looked back over their shoulders to scowl at the culprit. But one turned around to address the others. He was a red-haired mucker with a long, sharp jaw and a big mouth that had started more than one fight at the Best in the West.

"What the hell are we listenin' to these women for?" he demanded. "Hannah Yorke here, who's no better than she ought to be, this slanty-eyed laundry girl, and a widow who probably just needs a good beddin' to get the hysterics out of her system."

Hannah lifted her parasol in the air and advanced on the man. "You're sucking wind, mister—"

"That's all right. Hannah," Clementine said. Her voice trembled at little, but she squared her shoulders, tugging at the peplum of her grease- and gravy-spotted riding habit. "You can throw your garbage at me and say all manner of vile things, but you can't change the truth."

"You cause trouble like this, lady," one of other miners put in, his tone more concerned than angry, "and you could be responsible for throwing two hundred men out of work. We can't afford to see the mine shut down, no matter what it's doing to the land."

"Who cares about a few acres of grass and trees anyways?" the red-haired mucker said. "It ain't like we're runnin' low on the stuff." And the men all laughed.

"I don't want to shut down the mine," Clementine said. "Only stop the heap roasting. There are alternative methods of refining copper ore, such as smelters with flues and smokestacks. But nothing will change until your union leaders raise the issue with the Four Jacks.

"Look," she went on, conviction coloring her voice and cheeks. "I've brought along with me some scenic views I made of this valley when I first came here twelve years ago, before silver and copper were discovered..."

She leaned over and handed the photographs to a miner standing in front. He gave the top one a dismissive look and passed them on. "Lady, them alternative methods you talk about take money to build, and if you don't know how their cost'll come in the way of jobs and wages, then you don't know diddly about how things work. I got me a wife and six young'uns to feed, and if I got to put up with a bit of stinking smoke and a few bald hills to do it, you ain't gonna catch me kickin' and squawkin'."

"Damn right!" the man next to him shouted and the others joined in.

They had a point, Hannah thought, feeling a pang of disloyalty as she did so. In the coal-mining town where she'd grown up, the soot covered everything, so that the whole world looked like the bottom of a scuttle. A mine dirtied up a place; that was a fact of life, like a man needing a job to feed his family was a fact of life.

But there was going to be no stopping Clementine, certainly not the men's indifference and resistance, which they'd talked about and expected anyway. She nodded to the towheaded nipper, who scurried in back of the spool and dragged out a burlap sack. He reached inside and pulled out the stiff, gray-furred carcass.

"This dead jackrabbit," Clementine said, "was picked up only a few moments ago out on the prairie."

One of the muckers let out a yelp when the boy put the animal into his hands. He flushed red with embarrassment at his overreaction, and the other men laughed. The boy held a dead blue jay up by its feet before another man's face. The miner smiled weakly, his eyes shifting away.

"And this," Clementine said as the nipper produced a dead steelhead from the gunnysack, "I found floating in an eddy right where the Rainbow passes through town. No natural causes killed that trout. It was the heap.

"And this"—she tossed something into the crowd, which one of the miners caught reflexively—"is a set of teeth that came from the skull of one of my cows. Those teeth are copper-plated from eating poisoned grass and drinking out of a poisoned river. Do you honestly believe this can be happening to the livestock and wildlife of the valley while nothing is happening to us? You and your families drink the same water and breathe the same air. With this new and bigger heap that has been fired up, how long do you think it will be before your wives and children fall ill from the fumes?"

She paused and seemed to capture each man's eyes in turn with her wide, still gaze. "You men pride yourselves on taking care of your families. But what if you're participating in a thing that is killing them?... That is all I have to say to you."

With an innate grace she descended from the empty cable spool and walked off the collar sheet, not looking back. The miners watched her go, silenced and not meeting each other's eyes.

Drew Scully had almost made his way to Hannah's side when a hand fell on his shoulder, turning him around.

"I don't know as how it was a good idea to allow the lady to go orating on like that, do you, Marshal? Orating and passing out party favors like at a church social."

Drew looked into the sleek, one-eyed face of Jack McQueen. He gave the man an easy smile. "There's no law against telling the truth, Jack."

The man's mouth broke into an answering smile that was all foxy charm and didn't come close to warming his single pale eye. People in town called him Mr. McQueen, and some who'd been around long enough to remember his salvation-show days called him Reverend. Behind his back a very few still called him One-Eyed Jack. But no one dared call him just plain Jack to his face, which was why Drew did it. But Drew knew it was only a way of making himself feel as if he was still his own man, even if he wasn't.