her intent face. One curve of it touched me. It was like nothing I'd ever felt before, so I jerked away from it. But, fascinated, I reached for it again. A gasp from Marnie stopped my hand. 'It's too big,' she gasped. 'It's too powerful! I-I don't know enough to control-' Her fingers flicked and the intricate light enveloped Derwent from head to foot. Then there was a jarring and a shifting. The slopes around us suddenly became unstable and almost fluid. There was a grinding and a rumbling. Rocks clattered down the slopes beyond us and the lip of East Shaft crumpled. The ground dimpled in around where the shaft had been. A little puff of dust rose from the spot and drifted slowly away in the cooling night air. We sorted ourselves out from where we had tumbled, clutched in each other's arms. Marnie looked down at the completely relaxed Derwent. 'It got too big, too fast,' she apologized. 'I'm afraid it spoiled the shaft.' Nils and I exchanged glances and we both smiled weakly. 'It's all right, Marnie,' I said, 'it doesn't matter. Is he all right now?' 'Yes,' said Marnie, 'his thoughts are coming back.' 'Everything's fine,' muttered Nils to me. 'But what do you suppose that little earth-shaking has done to the mine?' My eyes widened and I felt my hands tighten. What, indeed, had it done to the mine? Derwent's thoughts came back enough that he left us the next day, sagging in his saddle, moving only because his horse did, headed for nowhere-just away-away from Margin, from Grafton's Vow, from Marnie. We watched him go, Marnie's face troubled. 'He is so confused,' she said. 'If only I were a Sorter. I could help his mind-' 'He tried to kill you!' I burst out, impatient with her compassion. 'He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because of me,' she said quickly. 'What might I have done if I had believed that of him?' So Derwent was gone-and so was the mine, irretrievably. The shaft, laboriously drilled and blasted through solid rock, the radiating drifts, hardly needing timbering to support them because of the composition of the rock-all had splintered and collapsed. From the mine entrance, crushed to a cabin-sized cave, you could hear the murmur of waters that had broken through into, and drowned, the wreckage of the mine. The second day a trickle of water began a pool in the entrance. The third day the stream began to run down the slope toward town. It was soaked up almost immediately by the bone-dry ground, but the muddy wetness spread farther and farther and a small channel began to etch itself down the hill. It doesn't take long for a town to die. The workmen milled around at the mine entrance for a day or two, murmuring of earthquakes and other awesome dispensations from the hand of God, hardly believing that they weren't at work. It was like a death that had chopped off things abruptly instead of letting them grow or decrease gradually. Then the first of the families left, their good-bys brief and unemotional to hide the sorrow and worry in their eyes. Then others followed, either leaving their shacks behind them to fall into eventual ruin, or else their houses moved off down the road like shingled turtles, leaving behind them only the concrete foundation blocks. We, of course, stayed to the last, Nils paying the men off, making arrangements about what was left of the mining equipment, taking care of all the details attendant on the last rites of his career that had started so hopefully here in Margin. But, finally, we would have been packing, too, except for one thing. Marnie was missing. She had been horrified when she found what had happened to the mine. She was too crushed to cry when Loolie and Kenny and the Wardlows came to say good-by. We didn't know what to say to her or how to comfort her. Finally, late one evening, I found her sitting, hunched on her cot, her face wet with tears. 'It's all right, Marnie,' I said, 'we won't go hungry. Nils will always find a way to-' 'I am not crying for the mine,' said Marnie and I felt an illogical stab of resentment that she wasn't. 'It is a year,' she went on. 'Just a year.' 'A year?' Then remembrance flooded in. A year since the sullen smoke plumed up from the burning shed, since I felt the damp curling of freshly cut hair under my fingers-since Nils grimly dug the multiple grave. 'But it should be a little easier now,' I said. 'It's only that on the Home it would have been Festival time-time to bring our flowers and lift into the skies and sing to remember all who had been Called during the year. We kept Festival only three days before the angry ones came and killed us.' She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. 'That was a difficult Festival because we were so separated by the Crossing. We didn't know how many of us were echoing our songs from Otherside.' 'I'm not sure I understand,' I said. 'But go on-cry for your dead. It will ease you.' 'I am not crying for those who have been Called,' said Marnie. 'They are in the Presence and need no tears. I am crying for the ones-if there are any-who are alive on this Earth we found. I am crying because-Oh, Aunt Gail!' She clung to me. 'What if I'm the only one who was not Called? The only one!' I patted her shaking shoulders, wishing I could comfort her. 'There was Timmy,' she sniffed and accepted the handkerchief I gave her. 'He-he was in our ship. Only at the last moment before Lift Off was there room for him to come with us. But when the ship melted and broke and we each had to get into our life-slips, we scattered like the baby quail Kenny showed me the other day. And only a few life-slips managed to stay together. Oh, I wish I knew!' She closed her wet eyes, her trembling chin lifting. 'If only I knew whether or not Timmy is in the Presence!' I did all that I could to comfort her. My all was just being there. 'I keep silent Festival tonight,' she said finally, 'trusting in the Power-' 'This is a solemn night for us, too,' I said. 'We will start packing tomorrow. Nils thinks he can find a job nearer the Valley-' I sighed. 'This would have been such a nice place to watch grow up. All it lacked was a running stream, and now we're even getting that. Oh, well-such is Life in the wild and woolly West!' And the next morning, she was gone. On her pillow was a piece of paper that merely said, 'Wait.' What could we do? Where could we look? Footprints were impossible on the rocky slopes. And for a Marnie, there could well be no footprints at all, even if the surroundings were pure sand. I looked helplessly at Nils. 'Three days,' he said, tightly angry. 'The traditional three days before a funeral. If she isn't back by then, we leave.' By the end of the second day of waiting in the echoless ghostliness of the dead town, I had tears enough dammed up in me to rival the new little stream that was cutting deeper and deeper into its channel. Nils was up at the mine entrance watching the waters gush out from where they had oozed at first. I was hunched over the stream where it made the corner by the empty foundation blocks of the mine office, when I heard-or felt-or perceived-a presence. My innards lurched and I turned cautiously. It was Marnie. 'Where have you been?' I asked flatly. 'Looking for another mine,' she said matter-of-factly. 'Another mine?' My shaking hands pulled her down to me and we wordlessly hugged the breath out of each other. Then I let her go. 'I spoiled the other one,' she went on as though uninterrupted. 'I have found another, but I'm not sure you will want it.' 'Another? Not want it?' My mind wasn't functioning on a very high level, so I stood up and screamed, 'Nils!' His figure popped out from behind a boulder and, after hesitating long enough to see there were two of us, he made it down the slope in massive leaps and stood panting, looking at Marnie. Then he was hugging the breath out of her and I was weeping over the two of them, finding my tears considerably fewer than I had thought. We finally all shared my apron to dry our faces and sat happily shaken on the edge of our front porch, our feet dangling. 'It's over on the other side of the flat,' said Marnie. 'In a little canyon there. It's close enough so Margin can grow again here in the same place, only now with a running stream.' 'But a new mine! What do you know about mining?' asked Nils, hope, against his better judgment, lightening his face. 'Nothing,' admitted Marnie. 'But I can identify and I took these-' She held out her hands. 'A penny for copper. Your little locket,' she nodded at me apologetically, 'for gold. A dollar-' she turned it on her palm, 'for silver. By the identity of these I can find other metals like them. Copper-there is not as much as in the old mine, but there is some in the new one. There is quite a bit of gold. It feels like much more than in the old mine, and,' she faltered, 'I'm sorry, but mostly there is only silver. Much, much more than copper. Maybe if I looked farther-' 'But, Marnie,' I cried, 'silver is better! Silver is better!'
