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  “What do you mean? What’s so bad about getting married?”

  We’ve reached the edge of the corral, with its resident horses and oxen. They’re mostly shapeless lumps in the dark, but I find Peony right away. I’d recognize her silhouette anywhere, as easily as I recognize my own hand. She’s asleep standing up, one back leg slightly cocked.

  “You see,” Jefferson continues, “I was hoping you said what you did to Old Tug just because you found him objectionable.”

  “You mean the part about having a sweetheart back in Georgia?”

  “All of it.”

  “You’re awfully well informed for someone who was away at his claim at the time.”

  “Everyone was very forthcoming. Couldn’t stop talking about it.”

  Of course they couldn’t. “I do find him objectionable. But some of it was true.”

  “So you don’t want to get married.”

  I snap, “Well, I’m not going to rush into it, that’s for sure.”

  “But do you—”

  “Once a woman gets married, she has nothing of her own. She can’t own property. She can’t make any decisions about her life.” Now that the words are coming, they’re like a burst dam, spilling so fast I can hardly catch a breath. “When Mama and Daddy died, everything went to my uncle. Everything I’d worked so hard for. I thought he’d stolen all our gold, more than a thousand dollars’ worth. Our twenty acres of land. The house, the barn, our horses and tack. But it turns out it was his all along, fair and legal. Because a girl can’t inherit. So here I am, all the way out in California, trying to rebuild some of what I lost. As a single girl, I can, you know. But once I get married, everything belongs to my husband. Even my own self. I have to give up the name Westfall and change it to my husband’s. Don’t you see? Once I get married, I lose everything all over again.”

  He’s silent for such a long time. Maybe I’ve silenced him for good. We circle back toward the rapids and climb up a ways. So many of our claims lie upstream that we’ve worn a bit of a path. It’s treacherous in the dark, but we’re careful.

  Finally he says, “Marriage doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “It was like that for your mama. Your da owned her.”

  Jefferson doesn’t like to talk about his mother. She left Georgia with the rest of the Cherokee when the Indians were forced to go to Oklahoma Territory. She could have chosen to stay, being married to a white man. Jefferson was only five years old, and she left him all alone with a no-good drunk of a man who beat her regular. No one in Dahlonega blamed her one bit, and by law, she had no right to steal a white man’s son. My own daddy, who rarely spoke ill of anyone, once said that Jefferson’s da was likely to kill her someday, that just because he married a Cherokee woman didn’t mean he didn’t hate Indians deep down.

  “It wasn’t like that for your mama,” he counters.

  He’s sort of right. My mama and daddy were partners. Best friends. I know they loved each other. I know they did. But it turns out that Mama married Daddy for reasons I may never fully know. She was in love with my uncle Hiram at the time, and no one expected she’d end up with Hiram’s brother instead. I never would have known, myself, if Daddy’s old friend Jim hadn’t found me in Independence and told me all about it.

  “If I ever get married, I want it to be like that,” I concede. “But Mama was a bit of a puzzle, you know. She loved Daddy, for sure and certain, but she had secrets. Even in love, she was never quite her own self.”

  Jefferson stops and lifts his head to gaze at the stars, and I follow his line of sight. The Big Dipper is bright above us. The Cherokee call it the Seven Brothers. Jefferson always wanted to have brothers.

  “I would never take anything away from you,” he whispers.

  My heart cracks a little. “Not on purpose, you wouldn’t. But that’s how the world works. It’s not something you can change just by being good.”

  “Can’t you?”

  I’m all talked out. I’ve got no words left in me, just a hint of sadness and a bucketful of stubbornness, and it occurs to me that maybe I’m ending up a lot like my mama.

  As if sensing my thoughts, Jefferson’s arms come up around my shoulders, and he pulls me tight to his wide chest. He smells of campfire smoke and fresh dirt, and there must be a bit of gold dust caught in the seam of one of his sleeves because it sets my belly to buzzing.

  His head bends toward mine, and his whisper tickles my ear. “I’m going to change your mind about marriage, Leah Elizabeth Westfall. Just you wait.”

  And I have to consider that maybe there isn’t any gold at all. Maybe it’s Jefferson himself that has my skin all shivery and my breath a bit ragged.

  I sleep late, finally missing a sunrise. That’s the rule—if you take a watch, you get some extra shut-eye. When the scent of sizzling bacon and the clang of breakfast dishes fill my lean-to, I turn over and pull my bedroll over my ears.

  I’m drifting pleasantly away when Nugget and Coney start barking their furry heads off. I groan. From the lean-to beside mine comes the sounds of stirring; Jefferson and Martin can’t sleep through this god-awful racket neither.

  I’m deciding whether to wait out the barking, or give in to the morning and fetch myself some breakfast, when Olive comes rushing over.

  “It’s Mr. Dilley and his men,” she whispers, low and fast. “They’ve found us. Ma says you have to come quick.”

  My sleep fog clears like it’s been whisked away by a violent wind. I throw off the bedroll and reach for my boots as Olive runs to pass the message to Jefferson.

  I stumble from the lean-to and blink against the cold sunshine. I grab my rifle and start loading as I head toward the breakfast area. Nugget and Coney come trotting over and follow at my heels. I’m glad for their company.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Lee McCauley!” says Frank Dilley from atop his dun gelding. He’s clean-shaven now, except for a thick black mustache. Someone should tell him that he’ll never be a gentleman, no matter how much wax he uses to make it curl and point.

  Nearly a dozen men are with him, all mounted. I recognize most of the faces from our wagon train. “No skirts today, pretty boy? You know what they say; nothing like a little gold mining to put hair on your chest.” He guffaws at his own joke, and his eyes drift meaningfully below my neck. Ever since everyone discovered that I’m really a girl, I haven’t bothered to wrap myself with Mama’s shawl. My true shape is plain as day to anyone with eyes.

  “What are you doing here, Dilley?” I glance around our camp, weighing our options. Jefferson and the Major stand nearby, guns at the ready. Martin Hoffman is holding the Joyner baby, but he eyes the powder horn hanging from the corner of his lean-to. Hampton is out of sight, to my relief—Dilley and his men would surely recognize Bledsoe’s former slave—and the college men are late abed, having taken second watch. Becky Joyner bustles around her breakfast table, serving miners as if nothing is amiss, but her shoulders are tense and her lips are pressed thin.

  “Just thought we’d call on some old friends,” Dilley says.

  “Friends?” Martin exclaims, loud enough that the baby starts to fuss. “My sister . . . You left us to die in the desert, you good-for-nothing son of a—”

  “I thought you’d be out prospecting by now,” I interrupt with a warning look in Martin’s direction.

  The miners at Becky’s table are murmuring among themselves, casting unfriendly glances toward the newcomers. Old Tug whispers something to Becky, and she whispers something back. He pulls his Colt revolver from his hip and places it on the table beside his plate.

  “Only fools try to mine once the weather turns,” Dilley answers. “Anybody with common sense is in Sacramento, looking for work before the rains hit. But we heard about a mixed group of folks up this way, Northerners, some Southerners, a German boy, and we figured it had to be you. Wanted to see for ourselves, didn’t we, boys?”

  “So you aren’t mining, and you aren’t working,” Jefferson points ou
t. “Who’s the fool?”

  “Your shirt has a bullet hole,” Dilley says. “Shooting your mouth off finally get you shot?”

  The Major swings forward on his crutch. “I see you’ve come to make friends, like always.”

  “Wally.” Dilley acknowledges him with a tip of his hat. He spits a stream of tobacco onto the ground beside his horse, and the gelding flicks his tail in irritation. “Nice to see you up and about, even if you’re not the man you used to be.”

  “I’m twice the man you ever were,” the Major says cheerfully. “Even with half as many legs.”

  “Tidy little settlement you got here. Looks like you’ve found some color.”

  “Not much,” the Major lies. “But we’re hopeful.”

  “Then where’d you get all this gear?”

  “I sold some heirloom jewelry,” Becky pipes in, bringing a pot of porridge from the box stove to the table.

  “Glad the baby turned out fine,” Dilley says, with a chin lift in Martin’s direction. The Hoffman boy is patting the baby’s bottom to keep her quiet. “Hope he got the right number of fingers and toes.”

  “She does,” Becky says, spooning lumpy porridge into Old Tug’s bowl. “No thanks to you.”

  “You still haven’t said what you’re doing here, Frank Dilley,” I say.

  “We’re following all the streams to their sources, seeing who has which claims. My boy Jonas here”—he tilts his head in the direction of Jonas Waters, his foreman—“he’s recording everything, official-like.”

  “Official for who?”

  “For somebody who knows his business. When all the placer gold plays out, and you’re going hungry, he’ll be ready to buy up the good claims and get to some real mining.” He waves a hand dismissively at our camp. “I ain’t made up my mind yet whether this claim looks like it’ll amount to anything.”

  “That so?” I say.

  “But the gentleman we’re working for, a fine rich man who knows gold mining, from Georgia, he’s also been asking around about his niece.”

  The world tilts.

  “Pretty sure he means you,” Dilley continues, grinning like a kitten that’s snuck some cream. “Pretty sure he’ll be awful glad when I tell him where you’re holed up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I whisper.

  Old Tug rises from the table. Several others stand with him. “Well, sir, I expect you best get on with it,” Tug says. “Lots of streams, lots of claims, lots of miles to cover.”

  Dilley’s mustache twitches. “And who’re you?”

  “Name’s Tuggle. Me and the rest of these boys”—he gestures around the table—“hail from Ohiya. But nowadays, we Buckeyes are neighbors to Widow Joyner and Miss Leah here, and we come to pay our respects every day.”

  Frank Dilley and Old Tug stare at each other for a spell. Dilley’s eyes make a sweep of Tug’s companions, noting their shiny new Colts.

  Finally Dilley tips his hat. “A good day to you, Mr. McCauley. And you, too, Jefferson.” He smirks at his own joke. “I won’t say good-bye—I expect we’ll see you again.”

  “I expect so,” I mutter.

  The Missouri men turn their horses to skirt the pond and head upstream. I gasp with the realization: when they reach the top of the rapids, there’ll be a vantage point, a brief break in the trees that will allow them to see our entire camp and most of our claim land. It means they’ll be able to spot Hampton.

  “Andy!” I whisper. He’s helping his ma take up the dishes, but he comes running. “Go to the corral and find Hampton. As fast as you can. Tell him to get out of sight and stay out of sight.”

  “Okay, Lee.” He gestures to the dogs. “C’mon, Coney. C’mon, Nugget.” And he’s off, pumping his chubby legs as fast as he can, the dogs at his heels.

  A hand settles on my shoulder. “That was good thinking,” says the Major.

  “Frank Dilley’s going to tell my uncle where I am,” I say.

  The Major gives my shoulder a squeeze. “We all knew he’d come looking, once he settled in.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Jefferson says, his face fierce.

  Becky clears her throat. “Well, would you look at that,” she calls out. “I made too many eggs today. Free seconds for everyone!”

  Old Tug and his friends whoop and cheer and slap one another on the backs, and for the first time, I’m glad to have them around. Becky was right to cultivate some goodwill.

  The college men tumble from their lean-to, bleary-eyed, suspenders hanging at their hips. Jasper yawns and stretches. “What’d we miss?”

  Chapter Six

  It’s been a week since Frank Dilley’s visit, and the weather has turned. Frost greets us most mornings, and panning in the creek turns my fingers and toes into icicles. Becky’s customers don’t thin out one bit, even though so many have headed into the valley to wait out the winter. Plenty of stubborn folk like us remain. Jefferson and I were raised in mining country, after all. We know the surface gold will play out soon enough, and we’ve only got this winter and the coming spring to find it before we have to start digging pit mines or diverting the creek.

  Jefferson and I practice shooting our revolvers. Sometimes, Martin or Tom or Jasper joins us, but I like it best when it’s just Jeff and me. We set pinecones on distant rocks and take turns trying to make them burst apart or at least fly into the air. I’m a better shot than Jefferson, even with his Colt, which has nicer action than my old five-shooter. But I can’t bear to give it up in favor of a Colt of my own, even if the blasted thing is a burden to load all the time. I’ve precious little left of my parents and my life with them.

  The college men make another supply run to Mormon Island. This time they find a cow, a milking shorthorn with a shiny red-brown coat. They name her Artemis.

  Artemis’s milk nearly dries up the first few days she’s with us, on account of being terrified of Nugget and Coney. But one morning, Hampton finds Nugget curled up happily against Artemis’s warm back, and the big, dumb-eyed cow drops plenty of milk from that day forward. I teach Olive how to use Jasper’s new churn, and Becky is able to add buttered biscuits to her breakfast offerings.

  Our lean-tos weren’t much—just pine boughs slanted across rough-hewn wooden posts to keep out the worst of the wind and rain. We’ve converted them into what Old Tug calls “right, proper shanties,” but they look like overgrown woodsheds to me, if woodsheds had canvas roofs.

  Jefferson and Henry finish the walls of the log cabin and top it with yet more canvas, promising Becky they’ll build her a real roof come spring, with shingles and all. The cabin is dark as night inside, with a single window covered in paper for now, and a dirt floor that seeps wetness at the edges whenever it rains. It’s drafty—the walls need chinking badly—and it stands a bit lopsided, the peak of the roof rising slightly off-center. But it’s solid, mostly dry, and warm on account of the box stove, and after six months sleeping in or under our wagons, followed by another month in tents or lean-tos, Becky announces that it feels like the finest hotel in the whole wide West.

  My chest swells with warmth and pride to return each evening from a hard day’s prospecting. With newcomers lending a hand, our camp has grown into a small town practically overnight, with several buildings, an awning for Becky’s customers, three outhouses, and a corral and pasture—all cozied up to the clear running creek that tumbles into our wide, beautiful beaver pond.

  Frank Dilley’s visit with his weaselly land recorder in tow has got Tom fired up. He’s already scheming on how to make the land ours, straight and legal. He says the days of informal mining claims are numbered, that we’ll eventually have to file real claims at a land office, probably by next year. Once we do that, and California becomes a state, we ought to petition for a town charter.

  I can hardly believe something as grand and official and permanent as a town can happen just because people settle down and make it so. But that’s how it seems to work, and every evening as I wander back t
oward the cabin and campfire to greet my friends, it feels like coming home.

  Only Jefferson seems displeased. He works as hard as anyone, but whenever Tom gets to discussing property or claim rights or town charters, he goes silent and gloomy.

  My job all this time has been to find gold, and I’ve found plenty. Piles of it. My own claim has yielded a fair bit, but Hampton’s has proved out better than anyone could dream. There, I found a small vein hidden in a big slab of slate with quartz outcroppings. It was easily accessible to our pickaxes, and both Martin and Jefferson helped us mine it out.

  No one has done better than Becky Joyner, who seems to have found the mother lode by serving bad breakfasts to lonely prospectors. Now that she’s hit on the idea of selling extra biscuits wrapped in kerchiefs for the miners to take along with them, she makes almost fifty dollars per day. Sometimes the men pay in gold. Sometimes they offer goods in return, like a chicken for a hankie full of biscuits, or a sack of oats for a week’s worth of breakfasts. And if they don’t have anything else, they pay in labor, which we make good use of, too.

  Everything is going so much better than we could have hoped. We’re going to be rich after a single season, every one of us. It’s marvelous to think on.

  And at the same time, my mind just won’t take it in. I watch my flour sack fill with gold until it’s bursting at the seams, and I don’t believe it’s actually mine. I see our camp grow, watch everyone add luxuries—like a second woodstove, an apple sapling, a large henhouse with room to grow, a feed shed beside the corral and pasture. And none of it matters. It’s all temporary.

  Because Frank Dilley is going to tell my uncle where I am, as soon as he finishes with his surveying job. Maybe he has already. Uncle Hiram might be on his way here right now. And this fancy little dream about a new home and a new family and more riches than a girl could imagine will meet a quick end.

  It’s a brisk fall night that makes us button our collars and don our gloves, but the sky is clear, showing a million sparkling stars, which means we share supper outside the cabin beside the fire pit. We sit beneath Becky’s awning, which traps some of the heat, and use Becky’s too-hard biscuits to mop up platefuls of beans in molasses. An oil lamp hangs from a hook beneath the awning, lighting our meal and the faces around me in soft yellow orange. Crickets chirrup in chorus, punctuated by the occasional protestation from a bullfrog.