..."Water.
Yes sir, I could smell water somewhere in that mine tunnel, and I stumbled my way toward it like a crippled moth fluttering its feeble way to the flame. Deeper and deeper into that tunnel I went, until it was too dark to see my hand in front of my face. I felt my way along the walls, and when my feet got wet I fell to my knees, then flat on my face in that blessed pool. An underground spring, it was, and it had flooded that mine, as water has a way of doing, often to the woe of the miners unlucky enough to get trapped by it. But that day it saved one poor soul, and that was yours truly, Sam Malone.
I drank my fill and then must have passed out for a spell, and when I opened my eyes next I thought I’d died after all. There was light where there shouldn’t have been, a soft, golden glow, and I recall thinking, Lord, I don’t know how or why but I made it to Heaven! Because where that light hit the water and the walls of that mine tunnel, it gave back a sparkle, a shine I’d only heard about in the stories men told around the fires in the hobo camps alongside the railroad tracks. I understood, then, the madness that drove men to leave everything they knew and the kinfolk that loved them, throw it all away to follow the lure of the gold.
Could it be? In awe, almost in a trance, I dipped my hand into the pool of water and held it up to my face and stared at the flecks that stuck to my skin. Yep, no doubt about it--it was gold.
Before my brain could get to understanding what had happened to me, before I could think what kind of miracle I’d stumbled across, the light moved and sent my shadow dancing long and crooked across the tunnel wall. And a voice spoke to me from the blackness behind the light.
“You’re trespassing.”
That is how I found my first treasure. Her name was Elizabeth.
She had the face of an angel, but any notions I might have had about being in Heaven went flying straight out of my head when I saw, by the light of the lantern in her hand, the shotgun she carried cradled in one arm and leveled straight and true at my heart"...
Visit Kathleen Creighton Novels on Facebook.
"Sherrif's Runaway Witness"
by Kathleen Creighton Fuchs
excerpt from the prologue