Maddie’s second performance needed no showy display to make the miners listen to her, for word of her first performance had spread across the mountain and men had traveled from camps all over to hear her.
She told Captain Montgomery that she would sing outside. He’d protested, but relented when he saw how determined she was. The men built her a stage of sorts, large enough for her and for Frank behind her, this time playing a flute. Captain Montgomery stood at one end and Toby at the other.
While she was singing she glanced once at Captain Montgomery. He was leaning against a tree, his eyes closed in pleasure. Whatever else she had to say about him, he was coming to genuinely like her music. By the end of the performance she found herself singing for him, watching out of the corner of her eye as, when she played with notes, holding them, trilling them up and down, he’d smile ever so sweetly.
When, after four hours, he led her from the stage, he wrapped her arm tightly in his, his fingers closing over hers. “You were right,” he said. “You cannot say enough about your voice.”
She thought perhaps it was the most sincere compliment she’d ever received. The compliment was so sincere and the moonlight was so lovely that she didn’t invite him into her tent for a glass of port, and once she was alone inside the tent she got out her photograph of Laurel and looked at it for a long while. Wh
atever she must do she must trust no one, at least not anyone who might possibly interfere. She imagined Captain Montgomery charging up the mountainside, sword drawn, and challenging that dreadful man with the letters. And in payment they might harm Laurel.
By the time she went to bed she remembered only Laurel.
There were no opening or closing hours for the saloons in the Pikes Peak gold fields. Since getting drunk was as much of an occupation as looking for gold, the drink flowed as freely as the mountain streams.
Inside one of the many tents there were two empty whiskey bottles on the table that would have been full of splinters except for the layer of gray grease coating it, and the four men were rapidly emptying the third bottle.
“Ain’t never heard nothin’ like her,” one man said.
“An angel can’t sing no better.”
“Member how Sully said she’d not be any good?”
“I would have liked the boys to hear her.”
“We could ask her to sing up at Bug Creek.”
“Takes a day to get there and there’s only fifty men. Wouldn’t even pay her way. She ain’t gonna do that.”
They called for bottle number four and drank half of it. “I think she ought to sing for us. Sully’d like to hear her, even if he thinks he don’t want to, and he can’t leave the fields, what with claim jumpers all around.”
They silently finished the bottle, and when they called for bottle number five their courage was at its highest. “I think she ought to sing for us.”
“Yeah,” the three others said. “Yeah.”
’Ring heard the men near Maddie’s tent and woke instantly. He couldn’t tell, but he thought there were two of them. Silently, he rolled out of his blankets, his pistol in his hand, and made for the trees. He was barely on his feet before he saw the shadow of a man near a tree.
’Ring stuck his pistol in the man’s ribs, and when the man turned, he grinned in the moonlight, and his breath was enough to knock a person down. “Evenin’,” the man said.
It was the last thing ’Ring heard before a pistol butt came crashing down on his head and he crumpled to the ground.
He woke to a pair of large hands shaking him vigorously. Groggily, he opened his eyes, but it was so dark he could hardly see the black face in front of him. Besides that, his head hurt abominably. It took a moment for his memory to come back, and then he tried to leap up but instead found himself staggering. He clutched at the big shoulder of the man. “Sam,” he whispered.
“She’s gone,” Sam said in a surprisingly soft voice for a man so large.
“Gone?” ’Ring couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening since his head was splitting in half. He blinked a few times to clear his vision, then looked again at Sam. “Gone? Maddie is gone? Where? Who’s she meeting this time?”
“She was taken. Four men.”
’Ring stood still for a moment, trying to take this in. “Who?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well, where the hell were you?” ’Ring shouted, then grabbed his head in both hands. When his brain stopped moving about in his skull, he realized it didn’t matter who or why, it just mattered where.
He went down the little rise to her tent. Edith was inside going through Maddie’s clothes. “Tell me all you know,” he said to her, the light hurting his eyes, but he squinted through it at her.
“There were four of them. They came into the tent and took her. I think they were drunk.”