“Certainly,” said Leo, overriding Chadbourne’s protest.
He watched Omie for her reaction, but the girl simply looked from one adult face to the next as they spoke, as if the conversation were held in some exotic language beyond her comprehension. Leo wondered for the first time if mother and daughter were afflicted with some kind of mental disease that made such ridiculous goings-on appear sensible. It was a depressing thought. He was very fond of them both, but further involvement with such types would be impossible if his suspicions proved to have foundation. An uncle of Leo’s had once married a woman who at the time appeared quite sane, but within two years had developed the habit of speaking with invisible entities and sleeping on the floor like a dog. Séances and table rappings were interesting phenomena, but illnesses of the brain were something else entirely. He felt very sad for the Dugans, and a little sad for himself.
“If you’re thinking of going into business on your own,” said Chadbourne, “you’ve drawn your last wage from our pockets.”
“I can do for you as I’ve done, and still find time to work my claim, Mr. Chadbourne.”
“Oh, really? That means you must have been doing considerable amounts of nothing until now. Maybe we should be reimbursed for your wasted time.”
“That will do, John,” warned Leo.
“I’ve said all along that a woman to cook and clean is a needless expense, and here’s the proof of it, from the lips of the lady.”
“I said that’s enough!”
“I meant,” said Zoe, her voice rigid with distaste, “that with a great deal of extra effort I will be able to spare an hour or so each day on my claim.”
Chadbourne snorted, his expression sour. “I guess you don’t know the other reason friend Leo hired you,” he said.
“No, I do not.”
Leo interrupted. “To have a civilizing influence on us all,” he said, glaring at Chadbourne. “Men alone are apt to degenerate without the presence of a decent female.”
“Such low beasts we are.” Chadbourne smiled.
“Well,” said Zoe, “I hope I may have aided you, or at least some of you.” She stared pointedly at Chadbourne, who sneered in return and looked away. Zoe could willingly have shot him at that moment, if she had had a gun to hand.
Sell Yost proposed that the new arrangement, incorporating Zoe’s efforts on the slope above, should go into effect the following day, to ascertain its worth. “If it turns out to be impossible, which I believe it will, given the time spent getting all the way up there and back, then we can reconsider our options, one and all.”
“Mr. Yost’s plan is fair,” said Zoe, and all talk thereafter, until the lamp was turned out, was of the most banal and inoffensive variety.
Zoe found out soon enough how correct Sell Yost was. It required three quarters of an hour to reach the deer lick, and a half hour to return. While there, she dug for a solid hour, but managed to accomplish little. Deer watched her from the trees as she attacked their salt lick with inexpert swingings of the pick. Her laborious spadings of loosened, partially frozen earth were accompanied by clouds of exhaled breath that disappeared immediately into the crystalline air. She exhausted herself several times, and had to sit on her meager pile of displaced soil to regain her normal heartbeat. She must ask Omie how deep the golden elk lay. With luck, it would be just beneath her boots.
For more than a week Zoe struggled to maintain work on her claim. Omie was unable to say how far below the surface her golden elk lived. Leo offered Zoe the use of one of their two remaining mules, but Zoe refused. She changed her mind the very next day, when new snowfall made struggling up the slope with her tools even more difficult than usual, but learned, on arrival back at the cabin, that Chadbourne had sold one animal that afternoon to pay for supplies; the remaining mule would, of course, be kept hard at work raising the still-barren earth from the Engineers’ claim.
Zoe knew the timing of the sale was not coincidental. It made her angry at first, then more determined than ever to prove them all wrong, especially Leo, whose initial rejection of her plan had hurt the most. His attitude toward herself and Omie had changed since then, becoming more distant, apart from the offer of the mule. She could not tell if he wished her to fail so that he and the others should be proven right, or if he hoped somehow to have his former opinion of Zoe restored, by an admission on her part that the mountainside mining scheme had been pure foolishness. She felt herself being judged, and did not like it. The El Dorado Engineers had been cockily proud of having chosen to stake their own claim where no other cared to join them, but in doing the selfsame thing, Zoe had earned their scorn. She supposed this was because they were men of education, while she was neither male nor learned. Leo had still not told his colleagues the reason for Zoe’s having chosen the spot she had, and she felt some small gratitude to him for that; word of Omie’s gift would only complicate matters.
Late in November it became impossible for Zoe to continue; the air was simply too cold. For all her effort, she had barely been able to lower herself into the ground to the depth of her own shoulders. The hole was surrounded by a ring of its own material that froze solid each night, as did the earth to be taken from the bottom. Zoe had to swing her pick against a substance more akin to rock than soil. She would have to wait until the spring thaw before resuming her attempt to unearth the golden elk and its attendant herd. They paraded like carnival creations through her dreams, gleaming like creatures of sunlight, led by the elk that seemed always to bound just beyond her reach, its antlers gaudy as a Christmas tree.
Her reward for abandoning temporarily the highest claim in the valley was to be informed by Leo that the Engineers could no longer afford to pay her for taking care of their food and washing needs. He told her reluctantly, knowing that if he did not, it would be John Chadbourne who broke the news of their new state of impoverishment, and John would have dismissed Zoe with a kind of glee. “You and Omie are welcome to continue sharing the cabin with us, and we’ll share what food we have, in return for your usual duties. All back wages will be made up when we make our strike, naturally.”
“I accept your offer,” said Zoe, mustering what dignity she could. Whichever way she chose to look at it, she and Omie were now charity cases, cared for directly by the Engineers, who could scarcely meet their own requirements.
Unable to work her claim, smitten by guilt over Leo’s benevolence, Zoe took herself to the general store in Glory Hole and paid fifteen cents for a square of cardboard and the use of a brush and paint. She then stood on the main thoroughfare, exhibiting in her mittened hands the result: SEEKING HONEST WORK. SEW, WASH, CLEAN. The results were fast in arriving; Zoe was invited to put her talents in these dreary fields to work almost immediately, and the miners in need of her services were generous in their payment.
It became apparent from the start that one area of commerce she had not listed was what the miners required most of all—the sound of a female voice. While she worked at whatever task she had been hired for, Zoe was kept company by her new employer and a hasty gathering of his friends, all eager to watch and listen as she performed her menial assignments. She was offered life stories by the dozen, opinions on every subject under the sun, and was requested to say a little something about herself, including her reasons for staking a claim where she had. All this was for the sole purpose of hearing her speak. Zoe had only to open her mouth and the room she worked in would fall silent. It was as if she had become some great and wise leader of men, whose every utterance was treated with respect. Intimidated at first by this ludicrous status, Zoe quickly found herself enjoying the attention. She took particular delight in telling her audience that the claim she had staked was the result of a dream in which her dead mother appeared and spoke of the location in terms of golden salvation. The more sensitive among the listeners were prepared to accept this as reason enough to do what she had done; the rest decided it was pure bunkum, but were happy to hear it anyway, so long as it came from th
e throat of a respectable woman.
In less than a week of similar performances around the gold camp, Zoe was able to earn what would otherwise have taken her two months. She washed and ironed, darned and sewed, swept and cleaned; but above all, she chatted. Her only moment of alarm came when a man, considerably drunk despite the earliness of the hour, accused her of being “one of Leadville Taffy’s dancin’ whores, by God!” The drunk was ejected after a brisk pummeling that left him senseless. Apologies were offered Zoe on behalf of “the feller that had to leave just now, sudden-like.” Zoe accepted with a grace that did not sit well alongside the urgent galloping of her heart. If another man should identify her, general suspicion would likely follow, and Zoe’s lucrative reign of humble domesticity would be punctured in an instant. It had been the narrowest of escapes, accomplished only because the man had been disgustingly inebriated; a sober accuser would almost certainly produce different results. She jabbed herself painfully with the dull needle her latest employer had smilingly provided for the reattachment of his shirt buttons.
Her proceeds were spent not only on herself and Omie but on the remaining El Dorado Engineers. Zoe’s generosity was prompted in equal parts by her naturally sympathetic character and by a need to thumb her nose at the men who allowed her to stay on as their servant in return for food and shelter. Now she was able to support their needs for a time, and her satisfaction at their embarrassed acceptance made the financial sacrifice worthwhile. Chadbourne in particular was affected by the changed circumstances in the cabin; he would not look at or speak with Zoe unless in answer to a direct question from her, and even then would give only the briefest of replies.
Chadbourne began spending time at the drinking shack that passed for a saloon in Glory Hole. Work on the diggings had become sporadic, dependent entirely on the weather, and that was generally cruel at so high an altitude. Zoe visited her claim once in late December, and discovered almost a dozen elk licking at the ring of frozen earth around the hopelessly shallow hole. They bolted, abandoning the lick so quickly their bodies collided with and rebounded from each other with solid thuddings, and their blundering passage through the deeper snowdrifts sent up showers of whiteness. They were the first elk Zoe had seen, and although their size had been impressive, she thought them less appealing than the daintily bounding deer; the former were heavy, substantial creatures of the earth, the latter almost a part of the air.
Christmas Day found the cabin exactly as Omie had predicted, the atmosphere so unrelievedly glum Zoe was obliged to leave, just to escape the tension inside. She took Omie with her, and asked if it gave her daughter pleasure to know she had foreseen exactly how the day would transpire. Omie said no, because she had liked Lewis almost as much as she did Leo.
“And do you still like Leo?” Zoe asked.
“Yes,” said Omie, “but he’s very sad now, and wishes you were someone else.”
“Someone else? Who?”
“You, but different.”
“I see,” said Zoe, and they walked on through the forest beyond Glory Hole, in the crackling cold of the afternoon. Sunlight was all around them, refracted through the billion prisms of ice hanging from the trees. The valley walls shone with a whiteness so intense it glittered and hurt the eyes. Zoe thought it the most beautiful scene she had ever witnessed, and said so to Omie.
“It’s ugly,” Omie replied, her tone matter-of-fact.
“How can you say that? See how the sun shines off every tree.”
“There aren’t any trees, Mama, they’ve all been cut down. There’s a town all over, a dirty town with lots of smoke from big chimneys like they had in Pueblo.”
Zoe knew she was referring to the refining smelters.
“And what else do you see?”
“Houses, all up and down the sides, little houses all squeezed together and smoking.”
Zoe tried to picture the scene described by Omie. The effort was similar to passing folds of black silk across a brilliant mirror, obscuring its light.
“How sad for our little valley in the clouds.”
“Yes, Mama.”
On the first of January, Chadbourne declared himself at the end of his rope. “We’re wasting our time. We should try somewhere else. All we have is a worthless hole in the ground.”
“Our original choice was made using the full extent of our knowledge,” Leo reminded him. “We didn’t fool ourselves into thinking it would come easily. We knew we’d have to dig hard and deep, didn’t we? Or have you forgotten? Let ignorant numskulls hope for a strike in twenty-four hours, we know how to mine professionally: that was what we told ourselves.”
“And look where it’s landed us! Jackasses with no more brains than a turnip are finding nuggets right in the middle of town!”
“They are,” agreed Sell Yost. “Look at that fellow just yesterday.” A miner had pulled a chunk of gold the size of a fist from his claim, and been paraded around the streets on the shoulders of men less resentful than Chadbourne. Leo was unable to defend the Engineers’ original plan with anything like enthusiasm, not when similar thoughts had been in his own mind.
“Well, then,” he said, “what are you proposing?”
“I’ve already said: we should start again somewhere else.”
“Where, in particular?”
“Just about anywhere but here.”
“Throw a stone, and where it falls, dig your hole?”
“If it works for know-nothings, it should work for us. Sell thinks so too, don’t you, Sell?”
Yost nodded. “In fact, Leo, we were talking with a fellow on his own who wants to go into partnership with us. He’s got a claim he can’t work since his partner got frostbite in his hands and went down to Leadville. He’ll bring us in cheap, just so he can keep digging. You can be in on it if you want.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m committed to this claim. I believe in it.”
Chadbourne and Yost looked at each other, then at Leo.
“The fact is,” said Chadbourne, “Sell and I are going in, with or without you. We want you to buy us out, if you won’t ditch the claim altogether.”
“I accept,” Leo said. “How much for your share?”
“We need fifty dollars each to buy into the other fellow’s claim,” said Yost, “and we’ll need to be taking our fair share of tools. You could keep the mule, he already has two good ones.”
“I don’t have a hundred dollars. All I can offer is a signed IOU.”
“Make it out to our new partner,” said Chadbourne. “He knows you’ll make good on it someday.”
Zoe stepped forward. “There is no need.” She counted out fifty-seven dollars in bills and coin, and included several tiny nuggets given to her as payment for her domestic duties by miners. “I have not had time to have these appraised,” she said, “but if you judge them to be worth the balance, take them.”
The erstwhile Engineers accepted Zoe’s offering, and vacated cabin and claim within the hour. Leo sat by the stove, staring into its burning embers. He had thanked Zoe, his voice made gentle by defeat, and she had not attempted further conversation with him while she prepared the evening meal. It was Leo who finally ended the silence.
“And now,” he said, “there’s one thing I must do for you, in return for what you have done for me.”
“What is it?”
“We should be married. With just us two and Omie here, tongues will wag.”
“That isn’t necessary, Leo. Why should tongues wag, when everyone has been told we’re brother and sister?”
“Zoe, Zoe … no one has believed that since the day you filed your claim in the name of Dugan. Couldn’t you see what would happen the moment you did that? Has no one questioned you? They have me, and my late partners.”
“No one has said a word. Oh, my, was I as foolish as that? I didn’t think, simply signed my name as usual.… No wonder every man whose cabin I swept was so interested in me. They all saw me as
a fallen woman, I expect.”
“No one thinks you’re anything of the kind. Whatever his other faults, the common miner knows respectability when he comes across it. I daresay they’ve all been curious, nothing more. You haven’t answered my question.”
“Why do you wish to marry me?”
“For the reason stated.”
“That, and nothing more?”
“And because you happen to be a fine woman. I have the greatest respect for you. I’d be a good husband, I swear. Maybe not a rich one,” he added, laughing.
“You would not prefer that I was less … different?”
“Different? How? You are as I would have you—yourself, and that’s enough. Is there something lacking in me that makes you hesitate? I believe Omie is fond of me in her way, and she’ll need a father, just as you need a husband, and I a wife. No, you don’t love me, but you will, and I’ll love you also, because there’s no reason why we should not, given time. Pardon my bluntness, Zoe, but all three being in need of each other, why not accept what fate has so clearly ordained? I’m not a romantic man. This isn’t a romantic proposal, but it’s a realistic one.” He stood and reached for his jacket. “I intend walking for an hour or so. I’d appreciate an answer when I return.”
He was gone before Zoe could think what to say. Omie was watching her from the hammock she had taken as her own since the death of Lewis.
“Well?” said Zoe. “I suppose you have already seen whether or not we wed.”
Omie shook her head. “I didn’t see anything, Mama. Should I try?”
“Does that work, trying?”
“It happens mostly when I don’t try.”
“Then why waste time? Do you like Leo? Would you have him for a father?”
“He’s very lonely, Mama, but tries not to show it. He wants you to say yes. You could ask him to dig up the gold elk with you if he was your husband.”
“Is that reason enough?”
“I don’t know, Mama, and Mama, what about Papa?”
The disappearance of Bryce Aspinall from their living room in Pueblo had hurt and infuriated Zoe so much she had seen fit to consider the man dead, to all intents and purposes. But mention of him by Omie was the feeblest of excuses for not confronting this offer of a new life, with a new husband. Why should a dead man, even if he still lived, cause her further pain? Bryce’s betrayal of herself and Omie would not keep Zoe from another chance for happiness.