Wildstar

Feeling Clem squeeze her arm in sympathy, she glanced up at him through her tears. The deep lines creasing his forehead beneath his shaggy gray hair showed how wor­ried he was. He was fighting the same fear she was, she knew: a stark, gnawing dread in the pit of the stomach that felt like acid.

"Somebody tried to kill him a-purpose," Clem muttered unnecessarily, tugging on his long beard.

Jess nodded, not trusting herself to make a reply.

"I find the bastard what done it, I'll hold me a necktie party."

It was a measure of how shook up he was that he'd let the profanity slip out. Clem had a vocabulary that could set a prairie afire, but he always made an effort to curb his tongue around her. Normally, Jess didn't allow cussing in the home she shared with her father, or in her boarding-house a block away, where Clem and a dozen other miners lived. She was willing to make an exception this time, though. In this case, she shared Clem's sentiments exactly.

Silently she added her own oath to his, and the resultant surge of anger she felt was a welcome respite from her fear. Purposefully she hoarded that anger, directing it to­ward the man she knew was responsible for such treach­ery. Ashton Burke. Just the thought of him filled her with an icy cold rage. Wealthy, powerful, manipulative men like Burke deserved such fates as this, not Riley. All the rich men in the world, all the silver kings and railroad mag­nates, the financiers and industrialists and their greedy agents, all the money-grubbing parasites who lived off other men's hard work and honest sweat

Just then Doc Wheeler made a sound of satisfaction as he extracted a flattened slug of lead from his patient's back. Jess hastened to hold out a basin to catch it.

"You better save that, young lady. Riley will want to see it."

"He gonna make it, Doc?" Clem demanded fearfully.

The doc grinned. "Sure he's gonna make it. Bullet missed the lung by a good quarter inch, lucky for him. Be­sides, Riley's tougher'n an old boot. Take a lot more than this to kill him."

Jess felt her knees go weak. Murmuring a prayer of re­lief, she sank into a kitchen chair and pressed a hand to her mouth, while Clem unashamedly wiped his eyes.

After Doc Wheeler had cleaned the raw flesh with car­boli

c and scrubbed the blood off his hands, he carefully bandaged Riley's back. Then together he and Clem carried the unconscious man into the small blue-and-white master bedroom and laid him face down on the bed whose covers Jess had already turned back.

"He'll likely be out for a while," the doctor said to her. "I'll leave you a bottle of morphine to give him when he wakes. Sleep will be the best thing for him. Keep an eye out for fever and send for me if it gets too high tonight. Otherwise, I'll be back tomorrow to change the bandage."

Jess thanked the doctor and, too concerned to leave her father alone, asked Clem to show him out. She was sitting beside the bed when Clem returned. At her invitation, he claimed the other rocking chair beside hers, hooking his thumbs around the suspenders of his blue duck overalls.

They watched in silence for a while, until Jess finally spoke. "Burke had to be behind it," she said in a low tone.

"More 'n likely."

"Marshal Lockwood didn't believe me." "Reckon he wouldn't."

"Darn it, it isn't fair!"

"Nope, that it ain't."

"Burke has everything money can buy. Everything any man could possibly want. Why does he have to have the one thing that Riley has worked so hard for?"

"I dunno. Don't seem right that Burke can do anythin' he's wishful of."

"Well, he won't get away with it this time!" Jess vowed.

"What you aimin' to do?"

"Make him think twice about sending his hired guns to do his dirty work."

Stroking his grizzled beard, Clem eyed her warily. "Maybe you best steer clear of Burke, Jessie. If he did this to Riley, he's liable to do jest about anythin'."

Jess looked away, her jaw set with determination. "You've got it all wrong, Clem. Ashton Burke had best steer clear of me. He's not laying claim to the Wildstar, and he's not going to hurt Riley. Ever again."

It was a vow she intended to keep. All her life Jess had watched her father straggle to eke out a living from the Col­orado silver mines, first as a prospector, then as the owner of a low-grade ore mine. He'd been toiling unsuccessfully far longer than her twenty-one years, and had endured the pain of lost dreams and savaged hopes for all that time.

Gambling on what might be a worthless mine, he'd spent every penny of his life savings to work his claim. No one could make him see reason, not even Jess's mother. The siren song of silver had gotten into Riley's blood. Al­ways the bonanza was just around the corner, just a few more feet along a tunnel. That rich vein that would make him instantly wealthy. He'd never found it.

And now Ashton Burke wanted to take away even that pitiful dream. Burke's Lady J mine was adjacent to Riley's Wildstar up in Cherokee Gulch. Just last week Burke had stopped by the house and offered to take the mine off Ri­ley's hands for a goodly sum of hard cash. Not only wouldn't Riley sell, but he'd seen a hidden significance in the timing of the offer.