Houston was eating one of the pretzels that Kane had put in the pack. He’d already declared them to be one of nature’s best foods, and she was to have them always on hand. “I think that perhaps a geologist would have a better explanation. Wouldn’t you love to have had the opportunity to go to school and learn things such as why those rocks are shaped like that?”
Very slowly, Kane turned to look at her. “You got somethin’ to say, say it. My schoolin’s g
ot me by enough to earn me a few million dollars. It ain’t good enough for you?”
Houston studied her pretzel. “I was thinking more in the line of people less fortunate than you.”
“I give as much to charity as anybody else does. I do my part.” His jaw was set in a hard line.
“I just thought that perhaps now was a good tune to tell you that I’ve invited your cousin Ian to live with us.”
“My cousin Ian? That ain’t that sullen, angry-lookin’ kid that you saved from the fight, is it?”
“I guess you could describe him like that, although I rather thought he had a look of your . . . determination.”
Kane ignored her last remark. “Why in the world would you volunteer to take on a problem like him?”
“He’s very intelligent, but he had to quit school to help support his family. He’s only a boy, yet he’s been working in the coal mines for years. I hope you don’t mind my asking him without consulting you first, but the house is certainly big enough, and he is your own first cousin.”
Standing, Kane began to strap the pack on his back. As he started to walk again, this time on flatter ground, he said, “It’s fine with me, but keep him away from me. I don’t like kids much.”
Houston started to follow him. “Not even your own son?”
“I ain’t even met the kid; how am I supposed to like ’im?”
She struggled to throw her leg over a fallen tree blocking the way. Kane’s pants that she wore were so large on her that they snagged on branches, and caught debris inside them. “I thought perhaps you’d be curious.”
His voice came from behind a clump of white-barked aspens. “All I’m curious ’bout right now is whether ol’ Hettie Green’s gonna sell me some railroad stock she owns.”
Panting, Houston tried to catch up with him, but caught her shirt on a tree branch. Fighting to free herself, she called to him, “By the way, did you get your apartment building from Mr. Vanderbilt?”
Kane turned back to help her, gently freeing her shirt and then her hair from the rough branches. “Oh, that. Sure. Though it wasn’t easy, what with bein’ out here ’n’ all. For what I’m spendin’ in telegrams, I could own that company.”
“You don’t own Western Union?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Kane seemed to have no idea that she was teasing him. “Not much of it. Someday they’re gonna hook up the telephones all over the country. Damn thing is useless as it is. Cain’t call nobody outside Chandler. And who wants to talk to anybody in Chandler?”
She looked up into his eyes and said softly, “You could call your son and say hello.”
With a deeply-felt groan, Kane turned around and started walking again. “Edan was right. I shoulda married a farm girl, one that’d mind her own business.”
As Houston practically ran to keep up with him, stumbling over fallen branches, slipping once on an enormous mushroom, she wondered if she’d gone too far, but for all Kane’s words, his tone was not angry.
They walked for what must have been another mile before they came to the abandoned mine opening. It was situated on the very steep side of a hill, overlooking a broad panorama of the valley below it.
The mine went back into the earth for only about twenty feet before it collapsed. Houston picked up a piece of coal from the ground and studied it in the sunlight. When looked at closely, coal was beautiful: glossed with an almost silver quality, and Houston could readily believe that coal, with pressure and time, could become diamonds.
She looked out over the valley at the steep mountainside below. “Just what I thought,” she said, “the coal is worthless up here.”
Kane was more interested in the view, but gave a cursory glance to the pieces of coal on the ground. “Looks like all the rest of the stuff to me. What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing is wrong with the coal; in fact, this is high grade ore, but the railroad can’t get up here. Without the railroad, coal is worthless—as my father found out.”
“I thought your father made his money from sellin’ things.”
Houston rubbed the coal in her hand. She liked the slick feel of it and the angles made by the way the coal fractured. Many of the miners thought coal was pure and kept a piece in their mouths to suck on while they worked. “He did, but he came to Colorado because he’d heard of the wealth of coal here. He thought the place would be full of rich people dying to buy the two hundred coal stoves he nearly lost his life bringing across the ‘Great Desert,’ as they used to call the land between St. Joseph and Denver.”
“Makes sense to me. So he sold the stoves and got started in the mercantile business,”