tongue over the soft flesh and feel the shiver of her response.
«Well, sugar girl, I’ll tell you,» Reno said in a deep voice. «I’m damn glad it was Jesuit priests who used these needles before us. Otherwise I’d worry about pacts with the devil and my immortal soul.»
Reno smiled wryly after he spoke, but Eve knew he was quite serious.
«Me too,» she said simply.
He took off his hat, raked his fingers through his hair, and put his hat back on.
«If we can believe the needles,» he said, «there’s a concentration of pure gold somewhere under that rockslide.»
Eve glanced at the rubble. «Does it look like ore to you?»
«It looks like what was above the mine head before the king of Spain double-crossed the Jesuits and they blew the mine’s entrance to hell.»
20
For the third time that day, the sound of man-made thunder reverberated through the valley, battering the two people who were crouched behind a tree, their hands over their ears. Pulverized stone boiled up into the air and then fell in a jagged, dusty rain over a quarter of the small meadow.
When the last echo had faded and no more rocky debris pelted down, Eve cautiously lowered her hands. Despite the fact that she had covered her ears, they still rang from the force of the blast.
Reno straightened and looked out at the ravine that had been choked by rocky debris. As he watched, a ragged black hole in the mountainside emerged from behind veils of dust. Elation speared through him. He took off his hat and threw it into the air with a whoop of triumph.
«We did it, sugar girl!»
He pulled Eve to her feet and into his arms as he spun around and around until she was dizzy with laughter. He kissed her hard and fast, then set her on her feet and held her until she found her balance once more.
«Come on, let’s see what we have,» he said.
Grinning widely, Reno grabbed Eve’s hand and headed for the mine, moving with a long-legged stride that had her half running to keep up.
As he had hoped, the blast had removed most of the debris from the mouth of the mine tunnel. A tongue of jagged rubble stuck out from the opening. Grit and dust still hung in the air inside. Reno dropped Eve’s hand and pulled his dark bandanna over his nose.
«Wait here,» he said.
«But —»
«No,» Reno said, cutting off whatever Eve was going to say. «It’s too dangerous. There’s no way of telling what shape the mine was in before the blast, much less after it.»
«You’re going in,» she pointed out.
«That’s right, sugar girl. I’m going in. Alone.»
Reno lit the lantern, ducked low, and stepped into the opening. Almost immediately he stopped, raised the lantern, and began examining the walls of the mine.
They were solid rock. Though seamed by natural cracks in the rock beds, the tunnel seemed strong enough. When he used his hammer on the surface, very little stone came free.
Cautiously, bent nearly double, Reno went farther into the mine. Very quickly the walls of the shaft changed. A vein of pale quartz no wider than his finger appeared. Tiny flashes of gold embedded in matrix answered every shift of the lantern.
Had the quartz been a creek, the gold within would have been panned as dust. But stone wasn’t water. Getting the tiny specks of gold free of their quartz prison would take black powder, hard labor, and a man who was willing to risk his life in dark, rock-bound passages beneath the earth.
«Reno?» Eve called anxiously.
«It looks good so far,» he answered. «Stone walls and a small vein of gold ore.»
«Rich man’s gold?»
«Yes. And not a whole lot of it.»
«Oh.»
«Don’t get disappointed yet. I’m only fifteen feet into the mine.»
Eve heard the amusement in Reno’s voice and smiled despite her anxiety.
«Besides,» he said, «didn’t the Spanish journal talk about rough ingots of gold that had been cast but not carried off to New Spain yet?»
«Yes. There were sixty-two of them.»
A whistle floated back out of the mine.
«You never told me that before,» he said.
«I started to last night, but you distracted me.»
Laughter echoed in the tunnel as Reno remembered just how he had distracted Eve.
She had been bending over the campfire, tending a vension stew and talking about a badly spotted page in the journal she had just puzzled out. He hadn’t been listening closely, for the lush curve of her hips had claimed his full attention. They had barely managed to get all their clothes off before he pressed into her with the fire crackling on one side, the cool night air on the other, and in the center a smooth, liquid heat that fit him more perfectly than any glove.
«No, you were the one who distracted me,» Reno said.
Laughter was Eve’s only answer.
The floor of the mine shaft began to slant steeply beneath Reno’s feet. The vein of gold ore also dipped sharply, telling him that the tunnel was the result of following a bigger vein of ore rather than of any particular planning on the part of the Spaniards.
Reno moved quickly but carefully into the tunnel, shining the lantern all around as he went. The mine was sound except for the places where it cut through softer rock that hadn’t been cooked deep with the fires of the earth. Where the walls were in soft or heavily fractured rock, the Spaniards had put in beams to brace the tunnel.
There were many branching, seemingly random side tunnels that were too narrow for anyone but a child to get through. Those openings hadn’t been braced. Reno looked into each small hole, but didn’t find one that tempted him to explore it.
«Reno! Where are you?»
The sound of Eve’s voice thinned and echoed as it sank down through the mine.
«Coming,» he said.
Reno scrambled back up the steep incline and down the tunnel to the mine’s mouth. Eve was waiting just outside, a lantern in her hand.
«I told you to stay out,» Reno said curtly.
«I did. Then your light disappeared and didn’t come back. When I called out, no one answered. I didn’t know if you were all right.»
Reno looked at Eve’s level gold eyes and knew he wasn’t going to succeed in keeping her out of the mine unless he roped and hog-tied her like a calf for branding.
«Stay behind me,» he said grudgingly. «Don’t light your lantern, but keep some matches handy in case something goes wrong with the one I’m carrying. I have candles, but only for an emergency.»
Eve nodded and let out a hidden breath, glad that she wasn’t going to have to fight Reno over entering the mine. But fight him she would; she simply couldn’t bear to wait on the outside not knowing if something had gone wrong deep in the mine.
«This early part is safe enough,» Reno said.
Lantern light dipped and quivered and flowed as though alive when he gestured to the rock walls, ceiling, and floor.
«I thought all mines had some kind of wooden supports,» Eve said, eyeing the bare stone distrustfully.
