Mountain Laurel (Montgomery/Taggert 15)

She rose up on her elbow to look at him. “And what do you want in return?”

“All of you. Every bit of you,” he said as he kissed her.

“There’s a lot of me.”

He looked down at her breast. “I think I can handle all you have.”

“With what?” she said, looking down at his legs.

“I’ll teach you…” he said, and grabbed for her as Maddie squealed and tried to get away from him.

She didn’t succeed.

Laurel sat by the campfire near Toby. The sun was going down and it was growing cool. She looked over her shoulder, up the hill at the old shack where her sister and…and that man had been for three days now. Her eyes widened. “Toby, I think that place is shaking.”

Toby looked behind him and stared at the shack with interest, then, wisely, he nodded. “Who’s got shakin’ shack,” he said to the miners who were around them.

For several days the miners had gradually been leaving their claims, until now not one man had done any work at the streams for three whole days. Instead, their interest had been given over to the opera singer and what was going on in her life. They had first become interested when Maddie refused to sing and had instead spent her days standing under a tree and looking down the road, rather like a sea captain’s widow watching for a man who wasn’t going to return.

They had become even more interested when ’Ring and his brother had returned with a sleeping child. They’d gathered around Toby and asked lots of questions. If the woman wasn’t going to sing for them, the least she could do was provide them with stories.

Toby had been regaling the men with incredible stories of ’Ring’s exploits (and about the minor help he’d received from his “little” brother) when they heard Maddie’s singing coming from the cabin. They were very quiet as they listened, then they were astonished to see Captain Montgomery leave the shack, the opera lady leave behind him, and then there was some shouting (What a voice the woman had! You could probably hear her ten miles away) then the captain threw the woman over his shoulder and took her back to the shack. Not any of the miners had said a word, just stood there watching that shack.

It was when they heard a female squeal followed by a crash that one of the miners said, “I got twenty bucks that says they don’t come out ’fore mornin’.”

“You’re on,” said another man.

It had started out as a simple diversion, but when Edith took breakfast to the opera singer and her man the next morning, and the couple asked her to bring them the jar of rose-scented oil from Maddie’s trunk, that’s when the betting began in earnest.

They bet on the amount of time that Maddie and ’Ring would stay in the cabin. Since there were so many miners, they had to take bets on the hour that they would emerge. Toby found that young Laurel had had proper training from a man named Bailey and she knew all about odds on betting. Jamie had protested against someone of Laurel’s youth and innocence being involved in such a thing as betting on the sexual habits of her sister. He said this even as he put ten dollars down that said his brother couldn’t last more than forty-eight hours.

Laurel, for all her youth, knew something about men. She knew that Jamie wanted to get her away from the

others so he could drill her with thousands of questions about the kidnappers. She told Jamie that unless he let her handle the bets, she wouldn’t answer one question for him. When Toby laughed and said that Laurel had beaten a Montgomery, Laurel began negotiations for how much of the betting proceeds she was to receive from Toby for handling the transactions. Toby said that he’d give her a nickel for each bet that she recorded. Laurel had laughed in his face and started the negotiations at fifty percent. After much haggling, they settled that Laurel was to get thirty percent of whatever Toby made. She answered Jamie’s questions while she took bets.

“Shaking cabin,” Laurel said, looking at her notebook. “Tim Sullivan.” She opened the box (she also took care of the bags of gold dust) and paid the man. “I told you not to take that bet,” Laurel whispered to Toby. “You were bound to lose.”

“What do you know?” he growled. “You were the one that wanted that five hundred candle bet. And the honey bet. And the bathtub bet.”

“Ah, but we made it back when they asked for the milk to put in the tub. Nobody had milk bath.”

Jamie lounged against his saddle, his long legs sprawled out in front of him, looked at old Toby and the pretty little Laurel, and shook his head. Two days earlier he’d stopped saying that it wasn’t seemly for Laurel to participate in this kind of betting, that she was just a child. He was beginning to think that this “child” was older than he was.

“No more bets, Jamie?” Laurel asked him as she counted the bags of gold dust in her box. She had somewhere obtained a weighing scale to accurately measure the gold that she and Toby took in.

He pushed his hat down over his eyes. “The pride I have in my brother is more than enough reward for me.”

“Shhh,” Laurel said, and all the men around her became very still, their eyes on the cabin on the hill.

“What is it?” Toby whispered.

Laurel smiled. “That’s Carmen.”

There was immediate confusion as the men began scrambling to reclaim and pay off their bets. They didn’t know one opera from another, but Laurel did, and she’d made a list of what Maddie sang. The men had drawn the songs from a hat, then wagered on the corresponding times when they believed she would sing from the opera they had drawn.

There was a loud crash from the cabin and a corresponding shout of triumph from the miners.

Laurel looked at her book. “Fell off the piano for the sixth time,” she read. “Caleb Rice.”