But then they were outside, where the air smelled of something besides musty air and creosote, and he dragged in a deep breath to fill his lungs. God! He was almost drunk with the feel of the sun on his face, warming his skin, burning his eyes. They stumbled along, still manacled at the legs, the chains a weighted constant clanking as they bent to the tasks of moving the ore cars along the gleaming lines of track.
It didn’t matter that they were forced to work from sunup to sundown as long as there was fresh, clean air to breathe, nor did it matter so much about the brutality of the guards. That could be borne.
He began, surreptitiously, to gauge the odds of escape.
Guards were posted on the rock walls that ringed the mine, others roved the work area. All were heavily armed, as if expecting trouble. Escape would be difficult, at best. Christ, it would be damn near impossible. While he worked, he scanned the area, marked the routine of the guards. It would take a miracle.
But the idea had taken root, and it sprouted and began to grow. All he needed was a diversion, something to distract the guards long enough for him to grab a weapon.
By now, if his grandfather or Ginny knew where he was, he would have been freed. No one knew. If he didn’t take the steps to freedom, he could end up spending years here, lost in the nameless, faceless mass of men forced to work.
There were so many of them, political prisoners some, others innocent of anything but the ill fortune to be taken by soldiers or Rurales. It hadn’t changed since he had been a political prisoner, a revolutionary spared from death and given a living hell instead.
Hate had kept him alive then, and a need for vengeance.
This time, it was thoughts of Ginny, his copper-haired wife who drove him to distraction so much of the time, but who was in his blood. It was a luxury to think of her, to recall the soft feel of her skin beneath his hand, the gypsy slant of her green eyes and the provocative pout of her sensual little mouth.
When he lay on the cold floor of his cell at night, he thought of their time at the waterfall, remembered Ginny’s delight at going naked, the way her body gleamed beneath the sun and glistened with rivulets of water streaming over her breasts, belly and thighs. She embodied passion, life and love. She represented his past and his future. Without her, he had only gone through the motions of living.
The other women—Francesca, Concepciόn, Beth—had never sparked a tenth of what he felt for Ginny.
When he escaped from here, he would tell her that. Now that he had time to think, he knew that until he took the risk of telling her everything he felt, there would always be barriers between them.
I’ll tell her…I’ll tell her everything….
27
Senator Brandon stared out the windows of the carriage that narrowly missed scraping against high stone walls rising on each side of the trail. When had he become an old man? It seemed to have happened suddenly, yet here he was, having to ride in a carriage instead of astride a horse like a man. The bullet in his back still crippled him at times, but the doctors had shaken their heads and informed him it would be there forever.
“To remove it would be to kill you. Or leave you unable to sit up or walk again.”
So he endured it as best he could, riding when once he could have walked, taking trains instead of carriages wherever possible.
His fingers drummed impatiently against the velvet-padded side of the carriage. There was enormous need for a railroad out here in this godforsaken country that was good for nothing but mesquite and the purest ore he had ever been privileged to see.
It was the last that would make his fortune, would give him a legacy to pass on to his grandchildren.
He frowned. In his later years he had come to the realization that such a legacy would be all he would leave. How had it happened? He’d struggled so hard during the disastrous Civil War to keep the Virginia estates that his father and his grandfather had left him. There were times it looked as if all would be swept away by the fortunes of war. So he had compromised. He had compromised his principles and compromised his promises, and had managed to hold on to them when others lost everything.
Such a dear price to pay.
At first, he’d wrestled with his conscience about the decisions he’d made, before consoling himself with the thought that it wasn’t just for his own use, his own pride that he had lied, cheated, even stolen. It was for his only child, his beautiful daughter Virginia. One day he would be able to tell himself that he had founded a dynasty, not ended it.
Yet it had all begun to unravel. The tapestry of deception and power he had woven during the years after the war was fraying rapidly. Virginia wasn’t his flesh and blood but the child of another man. The wife he had loved so much loved another man, and his second wife had slept with Steve Morgan. Even the grandchildren he claimed were not really his, but another man’s blood.
There were times it all seemed so futile, a pissing contest in the wind.
The analogy made him smile.
As the carriage slowed, he heard the unmistakable sound of money being made, the raw ore dug from the bowels of the earth rattling up on ore cars that would be conveyed to the smelter. Some of the purest damn ore he’d ever seen lay in the Galena mine—named after the high quality lead-silver ore.
The carriage’s well-oiled springs dipped gently as he emerged to stand in a canyon ringed by high rock and guards. If
