Renegade Man (6 page)

“Is that the
Trace you’ve mentioned?”

“Yes. He’s a
marvelous boy, Jonah. He’s tall, with hair just about your color, and warm
brown eyes. He’s intelligent and sensitive and concerned about everything and
everyone.”

“Is that what
you saw in Chap, Rita-lou, that you didn’t see in me?”

She forced
herself to swallow and raised her eyes to meet Jonah’s hard gaze. “You and I
were never serious about each other, Jonah.”

“Maybe it was
the Kingsley money, then.”

She stiffened.
“Maybe it was because Chap was solid and dependable, not a will-o’-the-wisp.”

His mouth
tightened in a hard, unfriendly line. “Dependable? Where was he when you were
having labor pains? Where was he when you were having his kid?”

“And I suppose
you’d have been there?”

“I would never
have let it happen to you in the first place.”

“If you’ve
finished eating, Davy Jones, I think you’d better go.”

“That’s Jonah
Jones.” He rose, his body seeming to completely fill the confines of the tent.
“I think you’re right. We were at odds twenty years ago, and things haven’t
changed, have they?” He grabbed his hat and clamped it low over his forehead,
then gazed down at her from beneath its brim. “Just keep any old bones you dig
up out of my way.” He paused, and his expression grew even grimmer. “And you
with them.”

Chapter 4

Jonah spat into
his face mask, the best prevention against fogging.

He had just
primed the gold dredger’s engine, and now the dredger made a loud humming noise
in the quiet of the hot afternoon. Readjusting his regulator, he checked his
air intake valve to see if it was working properly. His years of SEAL experience
had taught him too well that it was the one little detail you overlooked that
would get you. A SEAL member might get a little cocky, and the next thing you
knew he’d get the bends, or incinerate himself trying to dispose of a bomb.

Looking like some
terrifying movie monster, Jonah waded into the river where it broke up against
the boulders in a rainbow mist. Without the wet suit and gloves he would have
been numbed by the chilly snow runoff. His fins slapped through the water,
making slurping, sucking noises. Once he was under the surface, he was
captivated by the sheer beauty of the scenery. The water was incredibly clear.
Tiny plants pushed through the riverbed, their fronds swaying in the unseen
current. Underwater, the drone of the dredger was almost nonexistent. It was a
silent, eerily beautiful world.

He went to work.
And it was work. Wearing sturdy gloves, he tediously but carefully sifted
through the half foot of gravel and sand that covered the bedrock. With the
dredger’s hose braced against his thigh, he tossed away the big rocks that were
too large for the nozzle. Sometimes, if you weren’t careful, the rocks
accumulated into a small mountain that could tumble down in an avalanche that
trapped you underwater.

Wherever the two
layers of the riverbed met, there was always an increased chance of finding
gold. He knew what to look for—gold glowed, it didn’t glitter—and he knew where
to look. Crevices and irregular formations usually trapped the precious mineral
after a flood had moved it down from the mountain mother lodes. Since gold was
nine times heavier than water, heavier even than silt and most metals, gravity
usually caught it in riverbed pockets.

He had selected
the Silver City area for prospecting, not out of nostalgia but because the Mesa
del Oro, a great alluvial fan many square miles in area and composed of gravel
and andesite, sloped down from the Animas Mountains and spread out through the Mimbres
Valley watershed. During his first exploratory trip back in March, he had
tested the sand and gravel and found them to be gold-bearing. But would there
be enough gold to provide a rich paystreak? It was a remote, but not
impossible, dream.

He worked more
slowly around the bedrock. Little by little he began to come across flour gold,
possibly an indication of a paystreak—a broad streak of gold dust that had been
laid down by a previous flood. The elusive metal had captured his imagination
as a child on his infrequent trips to Pinos Altos. P.A., founded in 1859 by a
group of forty-niners drifting home from California, had been a
rough-and-tumble town inhabited by the likes of Judge Roy Bean. Now it was a
ghost town.

Yesterday he had
found what seemed to be a significant amount of gold in the tailings. Now,
trying to be pragmatic, he backtracked to where the tail end of the streak
should be—a large, low area near the inside of the river’s bend, where the
water changed direction. One hundred pounds of lead at his waist kept him from
drifting downstream with the rapid current.

Gold. The word
alone evoked images of wealth. The ancient rivers of gold. Immortal,
incorruptible gold. Man had been using it for over sixty-six centuries. It
permeated the dark world of the medieval alchemists, who labored for decades in
their laboratories, futilely seeking to transform base metals into nobler ones.
Yet gold fever had never diminished for dreamers like himself.

Lest he be
doomed to the same disappointment as the medieval alchemists, Jonah kept his
eye out for valuable minerals other than gold: garnet, silver, tourmaline and
platinum, which was even heavier than gold and worth an even bigger fortune. He
sifted carefully through the sand and gravel. Then, suddenly, the nozzle’s
suctioning power diminished.

Damn it, he
thought. The hose was clogged. He took the rubber hammer from his belt and
tapped along the length of hose. When the water intake didn’t increase, he knew
he was going to have to check the unit itself. Probably one of the sluice boxes
was backed up.

Surfacing, he
pulled aside his regulator, pushed his mask atop his head and looked straight
into the direct brown eyes of his childhood sweetheart. He nearly replaced the
regulator over his nose and mouth in order to restore the simple but mandatory
process of breathing, something he’d suddenly forgotten how to do.

Ritz—distant,
proud Ritz—had always had the power to do that to him. But over the years when
she had been absent from his life, he had conveniently forgotten that small,
arbitrary fact. The hell of it all was that she was unaware of the power he had
long ago delegated to her, however unwillingly. He had gone down fighting
against this extraordinary attraction like a sailor beguiled by a singing
mermaid.

“How long have
you been watching?”

“About twenty
minutes.” Her arms were wrapped around her sleek legs; her chin was nestled on
her knees. A smudge of dirt shadowed her cheek, and tendrils of hair escaped
her carelessly gathered ponytail, only to be trapped by the perspiration at her
temples. At her side, the Lab was napping, probably dreaming of chasing cats or
field mice. "Don’t you get claustrophobic or something, under the water
all that time?”

He pulled back
his hood and tugged off his gloves. “If you do it enough, it becomes second
nature.”

His ear, attuned
to the hum of the dredger’s engine, picked up an out-of-sync noise made by the
compressor. Just great, he thought, adding up the amount a new compressor would
cost.

“Why do you do
it? Everyone says your chances of finding any sizable amount of gold on a
virgin claim are nil.”

He plopped down
on the other side of her, propping his weight on his elbows. “That’s what they
said about finding oil in Baghrashi, where every reputable geologist had
insisted oil would never be found. Now the country is floating on the largest
pool of oil in the world. Like oil, gold is where you find it. But it’s more
than that, Ritz. It’s the gold itself. It’s always in the purest state. You can
dig it up when it’s been lying under the ocean for four and a half billion
years and its luster won’t have dimmed.”

He realized he
was spilling his feelings to her, just as he often had more than twenty years
before. One thing he could say about Ritz, she was a damned good listener. His
gaze lowered from her attentive eyes to the valley created by her breasts,
exposed by the brown chambray shirt she had knotted at her midriff. Sweat
sheened her sun-pinkened flesh. Wanting, a phantom pain left over from earlier
days, ached insistently inside him and that same old song began playing inside
his head.

How do you
forget a memory? he wondered. Now, when he looked back, he could see how his
young, carefree, careless love couldn’t have kept her his any longer. Time was
merciful enough to diminish pain... yet memory could still tug at the heart
when it passed through.

She shifted
uneasily under his regard. “I came by to make my own apology. 1 was pretty rude
earlier this week.” She rushed on before he could reply. “I’m on my way into
town. Need anything?”

He couldn’t
believe the chance fate had handed him. “Yeah, but I doubt you’ll be able to
get it on your own. If you don’t mind, I’ll hitch a ride in with you.” She got
to her feet and dusted off the back of her pleated khaki trousers. “I don’t
mind.”

Her suddenly
closed expression told him that she hadn’t expected him to ride in with her. “Just
give me a moment to change,” he said easily.

He wasn’t inside
his camper more than five minutes, but when he reappeared in jeans and a shirt
she was pacing back and forth underneath an old elm, her dog padding patiently
behind her.

Jonah clapped on
his battered Stetson. “Ready.”

She eyed his
shirt, the sleeves of which had been cut off at the frayed shoulder seams. “I
suppose.”

 Cupping her
cheek, he wiped away the smudge of dirt with his thumb. “You haven’t changed a
bit, Ritz. Still sporting a dirty face, aren’t you?”

Her voice was
stony. “Let’s go.”

While she drove,
she kept her mouth closed and her eyes on the road, and he in turn was able to
take his secret fill of her. Once she flicked a nervous glance at him. He only
smiled, but afterward he regretfully focused his attention elsewhere. From his
side of the Chevy, he could see a red-tailed hawk circling lazily on the
thermals that spiraled upward from the heated ground.

“Every time I
see old Mangas Coloradas,” she said, nodding toward the rocky profile of
Cooke’s Peak, “I have to wonder what he thinks about all the interlopers in his
valley. And how it’s changed.”

He had the
feeling she had spoken only to break the silence. Simply for the sake of
argument, to capture her attention, he said, “No, that’s not Mangas Coloradas.
It’s the Kneeling Nun.”

“No, no,” she
said, turning serious. “You’ve forgotten. The Kneeling Nun overlooks the Santa
Rita copper mines. Over there, that’s Mangas Coloradas. The Apache warrior is
looking southward to see if Spaniards are coming again.”

He kept his
expression sober. “You’re wrong. It’s the Kneeling Nun.” According to the most
widely accepted version of the Kneeling Nun legend, an order of nuns had
arrived from Mexico to work with the families of Santa Rita Del Cobre in the
early 1800s. “Don’t you remember the tale,” he asked now. “That among the nuns
was one who was very beautiful? And that a contingent of soldiers was stationed
in Santa Rita to protect the copper mines and the settlers from Indian raids?”

“It’s Mangas
Coloradas.” She compressed her mouth in irritation.

He was enjoying
himself immensely. “And the beautiful nun attracted a handsome sergeant’s
attention—which, you understand, quickly turned into devotion and love,” he
drawled. “Finally the nun yielded to the soldier’s ardor and, as a result of
her broken vows, was changed into a stone pillar, condemned to forever read
penance as that monolith.”

“My, my, aren’t
we articulate?” she snapped. “Leave it to you to see the nun’s love as
something evil. You got the ending all wrong, however. It was because of her
broken heart that she was transformed into an everlasting monument to prayer
and purity.”

He grinned
triumphantly. “Then you admit that’s the Kneeling Nun?”

“I did no such
thing. I was merely arguing the point.”

He saw the
shadows in her eyes and regretted his ruse. “Maybe you’re right. I don’t really
remember the story that well, anyway.” Nevertheless, he knew that she—and yes,
himself, too—had been talking about a much more crucial issue, a twenty-year-old
issue.

Once more they
lapsed into silence, and this time it lasted for forty-five minutes, until they
entered Silver City. With unspoken relief on both their parts, they agreed to
go their own ways, meeting back at the car in three hours, at six.

Feeling as if he
had shed an old burden, he sauntered off. All she was to him now, he thought,
was a snag in the way of his mining claim. Unless he wanted her to be something
more. Which he didn’t. He didn’t need a spiderwoman weaving a silken web around
him to trap him. He had a dream to keep.

Before the
railroad had been built in 1881, fourteen-horse teams had hauled ore and
bullion into Silver City from the mining camps, and bricks of gold and silver
had been stacked on sidewalks outside shipping offices. Silver City had been a
flourishing shipping point ever since.