Wildstar

They drank to Jenny Ann Sommers—which made them all somber—and to the future of the Wildstar mine—which made them all light-headed with excitement—and then sat around the long pine-board table in the communal dining room and planned the expansion of the mine. Riley drew a layout of the tunnels on the writing paper Jess had fetched.

"We'll start a new drift there," he said, pointing, "and follow the vein back. From the looks of it, we may have trouble smelting the ore around here—got too much silver for the rock—but we can ship it down to Denver."

"All that purty silver," Clem said reverently.

Riley grinned. "I'm still not sure I believe it. Of course, the first thing we have do is hire a surveyor. We've got to make sure we have the rights to mine that lode, though as best as I can tell, it starts on our claim."

Adjacent to the Wildstar, Riley sketched in the outline of Burke's Lady J mine. "We don't want to get in a legal tiff with Burke over this and have it tied up in court so we can't mine—" He broke off suddenly, seeing what he'd drawn. "I'll be damned."

They all stared at the rough pencil marks that showed a Lady J tunnel running smack into the vein Riley had dis­covered. It wasn't an accurate rendering, certainly, but it raised the suspicions of every person sitting at the table, even Flo, whose extent of knowledge about mining was only that it resulted in hungry men.

"That low-down, two-timin' skunk," Clem growled. "That's why Burke was so hot to get his hands on the Wildstar. He found our lode!"

Riley nodded slowly. "Look's like it. What do you bet they've been mining our vein?"

"I ain't betting those odds," the mule skinner snorted.

Suddenly Riley started to chuckle.

"What's so funny?" Jess asked indignantly, her anger at Burke obscuring her ability to see the remotest humor in this situation.

"Maybe this is what books call poetic justice," her fa­ther said. "The only reason we found the lode was because of that crack in the wall. And that crack wasn't there last week. I know every inch of that lower tunnel and I'd stake my life on it. The blast that Burke's hirelings set off—the one that almost killed you, Jess—must've shook something loose."

She forced a smile. It would indeed be ironic if the fab­ulous strike was the result of Burke's foul play; if by try­ing to coerce them to give up the Wildstar, the silver king had actually hastened the discovery of the vein that would set them up in riches for life.

"Have you told Devlin?" Flo interjected.

Jess stiffened at the very mention of the name, and her father gave her a sharp glance.

"He knows," Riley answered. "We sent somebody over to the Diamond Dust to fetch him down to the assay of­fice. He said if everything turns out the way we hope, he's going to take us all out to celebrate."

"Not me," Clem declared adamantly. "I ain't gonna put on no fancy suit."

Flo hit him on the arm. "You will, too, you old coot, and you'll take a bath and put on some o' that sweet-smellin' shaving cologne, even if you won't get rid of that rats' nest you call a beard."

Jess didn't add her own declaration—that she wasn't go­ing, either. Not for all the silver in the state of Colorado would she spoil this day for her father by reminding him of her estrangement with Devlin. This day was Riley's tri­umph, the fulfillment of a dream . . . if it didn't fade away like a mirage when a survey was done, if it was really and truly real.

But this strike didn't make up for what Devlin had done, not by a long shot. She still wasn't willing to ab­solve him from having hidden motives regarding the mine.

Come to think of it, it did seem a bit odd that he had bought a large share of the Wildstar just before the vein had been discovered. It was almost as if he'd known about the silver being there. . . .

Jess frowned as she tried to form a mental picture of the tunnel the night of the explosion. Devlin had left her in or­der to find some water, she remembered, and he'd taken a long time to return. She'd even called out to him, asking if anything was wrong, which he'd denied. Had he been inspecting a crack in the rock wall?

A score of troubling thoughts assaulted her at once. Had Devlin discovered the rich silver vein then? Was that the real reason he had forked over such a huge sum for an in­terest in the Wildstar? Because he knew they would soon be hauling out ore worth many times that amount?

It made all too much sense.

A raw, scorching anger started to build inside Jess, along with a stabbing anguish that Devlin might have betrayed them so callously.

She didn't mention a word to her father about her sus­picions, though. He was so blinded by gratitude, by Dev­lin's charm and money, he wouldn't have believed her any more readily now than he had earlier.

Instead, she waited until her father and Clem had left for the mine before she grabbed a bonnet and her reticule, which held the two-hundred-and-fifty dollar salary that Devlin had refused and the extra money he had tried to throw in her face. Then she snapped out an excuse to Flo about having business to attend to and stormed out of the boardinghouse.

All the way to Devlin's hotel, Jess dredged up every single grievance she had against him, the latest being his possible concealment of the silver lode in the Wildstar. His combined transgressions were enough to whip her fury into a white-hot pitch. By the time she arrived at the Di­amond Dust, inquired in the lobby for Devlin's room number, and endured the shocked stares of the clerk be­hind the counter, Jess was so mad she was breathing smoke. Muttering a thank-you for the information, she turned and nearly collided with Ashton Burke.

At her involuntary gasp, the Englishman reached out to steady her, his golden eyebrows raised in an expression that showed surprise and perhaps a hint of disdain. "Are you lost, Miss Sommers? May I be of assistance?"

Burke had a right to ask such questions, Jess remem­bered as she regained her balance. He was the hotel's owner, after all. She was the one who had no business be­ing here, since no lady would visit a gentleman's hotel room alone. It was apparent from Burke's snide smile that he'd heard her ask for Mr. Devlin's room number.