Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell Read Free Page A

beneath a broken box, he found a letter and sat in the sunshine to read it.
Dear Audrey,
    After all of the hardships of the trail, California is a paradise indeed. The land is wild, that is true, but it is beautiful as well. As I pen this letter, I am sitting in front of our snug tent. Higher in the mountains, snow lingers far into the spring, but here in the foothills the sun is warm and the grass is green.
    From where I sit, I can look across a verdant valley. William is panning for gold in the stream. Little Sarah stands by the stream nearby, fingering pebbles as if she, too, is looking for gold. The sunlight glistens on her red-gold curls, and that’s all the gold that I need. She has grown so much in the last year. She’s bright and alert and sharp as a tack, a laughing child who even now holds her hands out to show me a pretty white stone that she has found.
    William and I are well. The mountain air is sweet and healthy and the water is fresh and pure. I think this place will be good to us. I just know that we will find a rich claim here, and I’ll send you gold nuggets the size of goose eggs. I hope
    The letter ended there, obviously incomplete. No one would ever know what she had hoped.
    Max stood and slipped the letter into his pocket, wondering what had happened to William and little Sarah. In the debris scattered beside the tent, he found three letters from the States, all of them addressed to Rachel McKensie, which he assumed was the woman’s name.
    He expanded his search and found William’s body beside the stream below the tent. Like the woman, William had been shot and scalped. Still no sign of a child.
    Long ago, in another life, Max had had a daughter. He did not like to think of that time. But now, as he searched for the lost child, he could not help imagining his own daughter, lost in the wilderness. She would be weeping; she would be frightened.
    “Sarah!” he called. “Sarah! Where are you?”
    After an hour of searching, he shook his head. There were so many places a child could hide. Alone, he could search this wild countryside for hours without covering it all. He needed help. At last, he took the mule’s lead and headed down to Selby Flat.
    In 1850, Selby Flat was inhabited by three hundred or so men and three women. For a mile or so along the shores of Rock Creek, miners had built cabins and shelters and shacks, constructing them of canvas, of logs, of brush, of stones yanked from the hillsides.
    The path that meandered among the shacks was muddy when it rained and dusty when it didn’t. At night, it was a dangerous place to stroll. On either side of the path were so-called coyote holes—some of them ten feet deep—remaining from mining operations. Drunken miners regularly tumbled into these pits as they wandered in search of their cabins. The hills on either side of the creek were riddled with long burrows dug by miners in search of gold.
    That Sunday afternoon, a dozen miners lounged on a patch of gravel and sand beside Rock Creek. The surrounding boulders were draped with cotton shirts and canvas trousers, washed in the rushing water and now drying in the sun. For the past hour, the men had been sitting around in their underdrawers, idly discussing the latest excitement in the town. Four days before, two armed men had held up the stage, shot the driver, and stolen a shipment of gold headed for San Francisco.
    A fellow named Arno had gone missing at about the same time. Most of the miners figured that Arno, with the aid of a confederate, had stolen the gold. The identity of the confederate was a mystery.
    There was no sheriff in Selby Flat. No sheriff, no judge, no official representative of the law. A jury of miners dispensed a rough sort of justice, subject to the consent of the general population. Stealing was punished by whipping and banishment. Murder—unless it was in self-defense—was punished by hanging. A posse of miners had set out to look for the stagecoach robbers, but