Abandon (Page 55)

“What?” Quinn said. “They empty?”

Lawrence chucked something through the darkness.

A brick of solid gold thudded on the rock at Abigail’s feet. Then another. And another. She reached down, picked one up. The bar looked small in her hand, but it felt disproportionately heavy for its size, the yellow metal gleaming under her lamp, its surface marred with chinks and divots, cold as a block of ice.

“You’re holding more than two hundred and eighty thousand dollars right there,” Quinn said.

Lawrence wept.

Abigail went to him in the alcove, asked, “What is it?”

He shook his head. “Waited a long time for this.”

Quinn had been rifling through the sacks. “I count sixty-one bricks,” he said.

Lawrence closed his eyes as he did the math. “Almost eighteen million. God, my whole body is tingling. Look at that.” His right hand shook in the beam of his headlamp.

Abigail glanced over her shoulder, saw June wandering off into another part of the mine.

“I’m gonna go check on her,” she said.

Abigail struggled to her feet, walked over to June, found her staggering through the dark, shaking her head and muttering to herself.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Abigail asked. “You okay?”

When June looked back, her face had gone pallid and chalky, her eyes sunken, the small woman as bloodless as a cadaver.

She turned suddenly and vomited on the rock.

1893

FIFTY-SIX

When Stephen Cole raised his left arm, the noise in the chamber began to wane. Soon there was no sound but the occasional squall of a child. He stood in the center of the cavern, taking a moment to regard the horrified faces—these men, women, and children of Abandon who sat huddled together along the walls.

“Would you close your eyes with me?” he said.

Hats came off. Heads bowed. Children were shushed.

“Father.” Stephen Cole fell to his knees. “We come before You on this, the night of our Savior’s birth, a greedy, wicked, corrupt assembly. It is a dark hour. We have provoked Your wrath and for that I fall on my face and beseech Your forgiveness.” The preacher prostrated himself, his cheek against the cold rock floor. “I lift up the children to You, dear God. Children! I beg You.” His voice unraveled. “I beg You. Deliver them. Let them not be afraid, and if it be possible, allow this cup to pass.” The preacher’s tears ran down into the crevices of the rock. He whispered, “What of grace? Oh, my Father, what of grace? But not as I, but as Thou wilt. In Your Son’s holy name. Amen.”

Stephen wiped his face and rose to his feet, dusted the silt from his great-coat, replaced his visored felt hat. He approached the town blacksmith, a small, well-liked man named Mason Stetler.

“Mason,” he said, “I leave the town to your care. You’re capitan. I’m going out that door now, and I’m going alone. If you hear a knock in quick intervals of three, know that it’s me, but don’t open it for any other reason. Better paint for war.”

“Mind your hair, Stephen. Got a shootin iron?”

“Yes.”

Someone grabbed Stephen’s arm. He turned, faced Gloria Curtice, her wet, probing eyes still grasping for a shred of hope.

Stephen shook his head and embraced her. “Zeke is with our Lord now,” he whispered. “With your little boy. Be dreadnought.”

Her knees failed. As Gloria collapsed, wailing on the floor, her anguish masked another sound that emanated from the nearby passage—loud but brief, a sharp cry of pain.

Stephen carried a shadowgee, an old Colt single-action Army, and a shotgun up the tunnel. When he stepped out onto the ledge, he extinguished the flame and sat down on the rock. It was a good, protected rincon. The sun had gone away and bled the clouds into a deepening blue that cast the mountains in a gray-metal twilight.

He gazed down on Abandon situated in the gloom of the canyon floor, lifeless and dark, wondering how those six men fared who’d ridden up to the pass.

He wasn’t afraid, enwrapped instead in the clutches of the most peculiar detachment he’d ever known, as if he existed somewhere above himself, watching everything unfold apart from the fear and the anticipation.

Still, a part of him kept listening for gunshots, unsure if the crack of their reports could carry this far from the pass.

Soon it was full-on night. He grew cold, his head exploding now.

Down in the canyon, specks of firelight winked on.

He returned to himself. His hands shook.

As the procession of lights moved through the empty town, Stephen took two shells from the pocket of his greatcoat and broke the breech of the double-barreled shotgun, whispering as he slid them home, “Wilt Thou shew wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise Thee? Shall Thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave? Or Thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall Thy wonders be known in the dark?”

The scalp hunters were already to the north end of Abandon, and Stephen watched them turn their mounts toward the chapel, following the tracks of the fleeing townspeople. His lips moved again in the dark, “Oh, my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass.”

Joss emerged from the passage and took a seat on the outskirts of the cavern, her hands hidden under her serape, blackened and sticky with blood. If a saloon regular saw her, they might puzzle at Al’s absence. A reasonable explanation would be required.

She’d just set about inventing that lie when the roar of a shotgun filled the passage outside the iron door.

Everyone made a collective gasp, children crying, Mason Stetler yelling for every able man with a weapon to come forward, almost two dozen springing up, crowding the iron door in a ragtag battalion.

They waited.

Joss counted five staccato shots from a revolver. Three shotgun blasts. Then silence.

Stephen dropped two shells into the shotgun and reloaded the revolver from his cartridge belt.

Two heathens dead in the tunnel behind him. Two on the brink.

He was unscathed, but his heart beat so fast, he couldn’t think.

More lights approached, already to the chapel several hundred feet below. He could hear their horses snorting, the sound of hooves breaking through powder.

He took several steps back into the tunnel, his whole body quaking. He closed his eyes, tried to still himself.

The riders closed in on the rimrock.

He exhaled when he saw Oatha Wallace and Billy McCabe dismount. They waded through the snow and climbed up onto the ledge, stood just outside the entrance to the mine.

Oatha’s claybank eyed the preacher warily, and as had happened on more than one occasion in the last week, Stephen saw the horse’s brown teeth lengthen and sharpen in the firelight.