The Arizona sun hung like an anvil of white iron over Silver Creek, beating against the bleached false fronts of the town until the pine boards groaned and exuded sticky, boiling sap. Dust did not merely drift down Main Street; it hung suspended, an amber fog kicked up by freight wagons carrying stamping ore and dry-goods casks from the southern railhead. It settled into the collarbones of laborers, the grease on teamsters' boots, and the folds of Sarah Mitchell’s worn black calico dress.
Sarah stood under the scant shelter of Henderson’s General Store awning, resting one palm just under the swelling ridge of her stomach. The heat had a physical density, heavy as damp wool. Inside her, the baby shifted—a sharp, sudden turn of small limbs that took her breath and made her lean back against the upright cedar post.
Six months, she thought, closing her eyes against the glaring alkali light. Six months gone, and three months alone.
Three months had passed since the lower gallery of the San Pedro Mine collapsed. They said it was a pocket of soft sand and rotten timber. Thomas had gone down into the dark before daybreak with his pick, his tallow candles, and a tin lunch pail Sarah had packed with cold biscuits and salt pork. By noon, thirty men were furiously shoveling through tons of crushed slate, coughing on the dry dust of an underground tomb. When they finally hauled the timbers clear, Sarah had not even been permitted to look upon him. They had brought her his battered tin canteen, a single scuffed work boot, and his silver pocket watch inside a small crate made of rough-planed crate pine.
The townsfolk had been kind at first. In a frontier mining town perched precariously between Apache strongholds and scorched chaparral, grief was a common coin. Women had brought pots of dried beans, half-loaves of soda bread, and murmurs of Christian pity. But sympathy in Silver Creek evaporated faster than rain on caliche clay. Within three weeks, the debts surfaced. Thomas had borrowed money for an iron cookstove; he had bought seed corn and lumber on credit from the mercantile; he had taken cash from the saloon bank to purchase the mineral rights on thirty barren acres north of the creek.
When the money dried up, the visits ceased. The storekeepers did not look her in the eye, and the town women pulled their skirts aside when she walked past, as if widowhood and destitution were catching ailments carried on the desert wind.
"Sarah! For heaven's sake, get yourself out of that blast furnace!"
Martha Henderson’s shrill, raspy voice broke through the heat shimmer. Martha stood framed in the double doors of the mercantile, wiping flour-dusted hands on a striped apron. Her face was creased like dried apple skin, her graying hair gathered into a knot as tight as a fist.
Sarah forced a small, polite smile and stepped inside.
The interior of the general store was cooler, smelling of burlap, vinegar barrels, plug tobacco, and bolts of unbleached muslin. A wide ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, pushed along by a pulleys-and-cord apparatus attached to a mule harness out in the back alley.
"You look like a ghost walking around in broad daylight," Martha scolded, though her tone lacked true malice. She walked behind the pine counter and ladled cool well water from a cedar bucket into a tin dipper. "Here. Drink all of it. If you faint out there in the road, there's nobody going to pick you up except teamsters and drunks."
"Thank you, Martha," Sarah whispered. The water was metallic, tasting strongly of iron, but it brought relief to her parched throat. She finished the dipper and handed it back. "I was only waiting on the mail wagon. I thought perhaps Thomas’s brother in Missouri..."
Martha gave her a sorrowful, impatient look. "Child, if that brother intended to answer your letters, he’d have sent word eight weeks back. Men don't send gold west; they only come west to take it. You have to stop looking at that road."
Sarah looked down at her feet. Her boots were scuffed gray, the leather cracking across the toes where desert gravel had bitten into the stitching. "I have seven dollars left from selling the mule, Martha. After I settle what Thomas owed Mr. Henderson for the salt and flour, I won't have enough to pay the county tax on the cabin."
Martha sighed, looking away toward the shelves of canned peaches. "I spoke to Henderson about that balance. He said he’d let it ride another month, but... times are lean, Sarah. The mine isn't paying out what it used to, and folks are getting skittish."
The bell above the heavy front door jingled—a sharp, brassy sound that cut through the low thrum of the ceiling fan.
Boots clicked on the floorboards with a measured, heavy cadence.