Lover's Gold Read Free

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