Sweetwater Ridge (High Sierra Book 3) Read online

  Sweetwater Ridge

  By

  G.L. Snodgrass

  Copyright 2019 G.L. Snodgrass

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof in any form. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means. This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Purple Herb Publishing

  Email - [email protected]

  http://glsnodgrass.com/

  Amazon Author Page

  https://www.bookbub.com/authors/g-l-snodgrass

  https://www.facebook.com/G.L.Snodgrass/

  Return to your favorite ebook retailer or the blog linked above to discover other works by G.L. Snodgrass. Thank you for your support.

  Dedicated to

  Kim Strong

  Other Books by G. L. Snodgrass

  Regency Romance

  The Reluctant Duke (Love’s Pride 1)

  The Viscount's Bride (Love’s Pride 2)

  The Earl's Regret (Love’s Pride 3)

  Marrying the Marquess (Love’s Pride 4)

  Confronting A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 1)

  Charming A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 2)

  Catching A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 3_

  Challenging A Rake (A Rake’s Redemption 4)

  Duke In Disguise (The Stafford Sisters 1)

  The American Duke (The Stafford Sisters 2)

  A Very British Lord (The Stafford Sisters 3)

  Young Adult Romance

  Certain Rules

  Unwritten Rules

  Unbreakable Rules

  My Favorite Love (Lakeland Boys 1)

  One Night (Lakeland Boys 2)

  My Brother’s Best Friend (Lakeland Boys 3)

  Worlds Apart (Lakeland Boys 4)

  My Brother's Bodyguard (Hometown Heroes 1)

  My Hidden Hero (Hometown Heroes 2)

  My Best Friend’s Brother (Hometown Heroes 3)

  My Sister’s Best Friend

  Our Secret (The Benson Brothers 1)

  Hidden Truth (the Benson Brothers 2)

  Deception (The Benson Brothers 3)

  Sweetwater Ridge

  Chapter One

  Hank Richards pulled the Big Bay into the shade of a tall ponderosa pine so he could scan his back trail. For several minutes he held still, only his eyes moving over the hills and creek area, looking for any movement, any flash of color out of the ordinary.

  Eventually, he sighed as his shoulders slumped with relief. If someone was following him, they couldn’t come through that cut without being seen. Some would say he was being over-cautious. But then they hadn’t lived his life.

  “A man after gold can’t be too careful,” he mumbled to his horse. The Big Bay wiggled his ears, obviously agreeing. Old Ben, the pack mule behind the horse, stomped his foot showing his displeasure at standing around and waiting.

  Hank grumbled under his breath as he started back up the creek. That was the problem with living alone up in these mountains. A man started taking his animal’s opinions into account.

  As they climbed, he examined the country. It was laid out just like Ben Tarkington had told him years ago over that campfire out by Pyramid Lake. Tall pines and spidery cedars. Willows down by the creek. Sagebrush and the occasional cactus. Just like any of a dozen creeks and canyons in this part of the mountains.

  The man had been positive there was gold in the area, but he’d been unable to ever locate the source.

  Once they’d put another two miles behind them. Hank found a spot to camp down by the creek. After staking out the horse and mule, he grabbed his pan from the pack and squatted at a likely place.

  Within minutes, he had color. His heart jumped when he saw the flecks of gold at the bottom of the pan and two pickers about the size of match heads. Rough edges which meant it was close. It hadn’t traveled too far.

  “We’ll see,” he said to the approaching shadows, refusing to get his hopes up.

  Too many times over the years had possibilities disappointed him. Ben wouldn’t be the first man to exaggerate a little about what he had found. It sort of went with the description of a miner.

  He shook his head as he made his way upstream, stopping every hundred yards to pan some more.

  On the fifth pan, he came up empty. For the first time in weeks, he smiled. His face almost rebelled at the unfamiliar expression. The source had to be close. Back between this barren spot and the last pan that showed some yellow gold. But where?

  Standing up, he examined the area. Steep ravine walls, rising up to a ridge behind him and sloping up and over a ridge across from him. Dry forested ground typical of the Eastern Sierra. Thick pine and cedar, sagebrush and gray fallen limbs mixed in with red jagged rocks and rough gravel.

  It’d be like finding a preacher in a brothel. Near on impossible.

  “It’s never easy,” he muttered under his breath as he started back to camp. Just once, he’d have liked to find the seam of quartz sitting out in the open instead of having to hunt and peck through the forest for it.

  But then, what should he have expected? Life had never been easy. Besides, if finding the source of gold was simple. Ben or someone else would have done it years ago.

  Men had been combing these hills ever since the strike in Virginia City fifteen years earlier. They’d climbed and prospected up and down these canyons yet never found anything except what they could pan from the creek.

  Later that night, Hank stared up at the stars and mapped out his plans. He’d be methodical, he told himself. First, this side of the creek, only when that had been exhausted would he move to the other side.

  As he lay there with his hands folded behind his head, he wondered how many nights he had spent like this. Alone, out in the far beyond. It was either this or down in some other man’s mine working to get a grubstake so he could get back out here again. Someday he thought. Someday he would strike it rich.

  And when he did, he’d go home, back to Cleveland, and show them what he had done.

  The thought made him snort. They wouldn’t remember him. He’d been nothing but a big kid living on the streets. There wasn’t a person back there who would remember his name nor what he’d gone through.

  The thought saddened him. It was a hard thing to realize there was no one left to impress. No one close enough to care one way or the other.

  His friends Jack and Dusty would be glad for him, but they were different. They were from after he left his own version of hell.

  A wolf howled in the distance, both the Bay and Old Ben shuffled at the edge of the yellow firelight. Hank sat up to toss a couple more sticks onto the fire then stared off into the night.

  Prospecting was a lonely life. He well knew that. He welcomed it in fact. He’d learned long ago that the worse thing about this world was people. They had a habit of making a bad situation worse.

  He’d tried over the years, but people just naturally avoided him. He’d never really figured out if it was his size that scared them off or his general cussed attitude. Either way, they left him alone and he left them alone. A situation that just seemed to work.

  Probably his size, he thought with a grunt. He flashed back to a memory of the last time he’d stepped into the sutler’s in Reno. A mother had instinctively pulled her small son to her side as if a grizzly bear had walked into the store.

  He’d swallowed the anger inside of him and tipped his hat to her. She’d lifted her chin and turned away. He knew what she saw. A man slightly closer to seve
n feet than six. Beefy, with arms shaped by years of swinging a double-jack. A nasty scar over his left eye from a collapse in a silver mine. And a scowl that told people not to approach.

  Now, weeks later, the look in her eyes still burned.

  Turning over in his bedroll, he forced the thought away and returned to mapping out his assault on the hills around him. He’d find that source, and if he was lucky, no one could sniff at him with disdain ever again.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of fresh trout, he started up towards the ridge behind him. As he wormed his way through the willows and underbrush, he used his prospecting pick to turn over stones and expose the bedrock beneath the carpet of crumbled rocks and sand.

  “It could be anywhere,” he cursed.

  It had to be here, he thought, then reminded himself that there was just as much chance that the source had played out. A small pocket exposed to the weather. Just enough to feed the creek over thousands of years. Just enough to entice him into spending the rest of the year looking for it.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  As he climbed up the ridge, his eyes constantly scanned the ground looking for any sign of mineralized quartz. That special combination of white crystals with brown, crumbly rust.

  Gold could be located in other structures. But for the mother lode. The rich veins would be in the quartz.

  The day grew hot and tiring as he worked back and forth, slowly climbing the ridge. He stopped for a moment and looked up at the noon sun above him. As he stood there, he pushed his hands into his lower back and tried to work out the kinks.

  “It ain’t going to find you,” he mumbled as he started back up the hill. At this point, he’d have settled for pure quartz. At least he’d have something to test. But the ground was barren.

  It was almost evening and he was heading back down to the camp with a sour attitude. It had only been the first day, but he had hoped for better results.

  A large pine had fallen across the game trail, forcing him back up the hill around the exposed root ball. When he reached the top, he saw why the tree had fallen. It had sprouted in a few inches of soil over the top of bedrock.

  Once it got big enough, the first strong wind had ripped it out of the ground.

  He snorted at how life worked out sometimes. A good healthy tree but with no roots. It just couldn’t last.

  He reached out to grab a hanging root to steady himself on the slippery slope. As he did, he noticed something in the bedrock where the tree had been. A thin white streak. No more than six inches wide.

  Yes, he thought. Quartz. He’d know it anywhere. Kneeling down, he brushed away more dirt, exposing a vein of quartz that extended up the side of the hill until it disappeared beneath the sand.

  Hank took a deep breath and forced his heart to slow down. The stuff looked too pure. Solid white. None of the mineralization that would indicate metals mixed in with the quarts. And if there weren’t no silver, iron, copper. Then, there probably wasn’t any gold.

  It wouldn’t hurt to check, he thought as he used his pick to break away a few large chunks sandwiched between two halves of gray bedrock.

  As he examined it in the dying light, a strange feeling of being watched itched between his shoulder blades. That tingly feeling that had saved his life more than once. Without any quick moves, he ducked down behind the tree’s root ball. Silently cursing the stupidity of leaving his rifle in camp.

  Taking a quick breath, he darted to a tall pine and slid under its overhanging branches.

  No shot rang out. There was no indication that anyone was there. Just a feeling. Shaking it off and cursing himself for jumping at shadows he returned to camp. All the way scanning the country around him without being obvious about it.

  That early evening, only after the canyon was bathed in shadows, he broke up the sample and panned it out. As he swished out the last of the water, he sat back on his heels. Gold. Not a lot. No more than any other pan for the day. Not enough to become rich. But enough to explore.

  One thing he did know. This was the source. There was no doubt in his mind.

  He froze as he glanced around. Worried that someone had seen. No one was there, he finally realized. It was five miles back to Verdi and the lumber camp and another ten to Reno. There wasn’t anyone within miles, he told himself.

  No, he was alone. And he had a mine to plan out.

  He’d need a cabin. A sluice. Supplies. He’d need to file a claim. There were a dozen things that needed to be done.

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he mumbled as he stared down at the gold in the bottom of the pan. “Set out the stakes marking the claim. Sink a shaft and see how it turns out. That quarts might end three feet under the ground.”

  Stepping away from the creek, he looked into the dark towards where he’d found the vein. It might amount to nothing. But years of experience and more failures than he could count told him there was something there.

  Chapter Two

  Amelia Dunn refused to cry as she watched the two workmen lower her father’s body into the grave. When they had finished, they both stepped back to give her time to say goodbye.

  The numbness inside of her turned over to anger when she thought of the small town down the hill from the graveyard.

  No one had joined her. Not one person had thought her father was worth the effort. It made her clench her teeth at the hate that burned her soul.

  They’d despised him for years. And therefore, by connection, her. All because he had talked against the war. Saying they shouldn’t be fighting to save slavery. That it was a rich man’s war. Not his.

  During the war, they had tolerated him as an ignorant farmer from the backwoods of the Arkansas Ozarks. The kind of man that could be ignored. But when the south lost. That disdain had turned to hate.

  “No one likes being proven wrong,” he had told her.

  Amelia bit the inside of her cheek as she nodded to the workmen to fill the grave. She had said her goodbyes. Nothing was going to bring him back.

  When they had finished, she reached down to pick up the carpetbag at her feet, took a deep breath, and started for the town and its train station.

  Her life here was over. Some Yankee had bought the bank and called in her father’s loan. The farm was gone. No, there was nothing for her here. No one to go to for help. No friends. No family.

  Sighing, she pulled the slip of paper from her dress pocket and looked down at the words written on it.

  Theodore Simmons, Reno Nevada.

  That was all that Mrs. Davis had given her. That and a train ticket. The woman had assured her that it was common for men in the west to marry women they had never met.

  The woman had been visiting throughout the county looking for brides for men out west. Surprisingly, she had been rather successful. The war had taken so many men that even now, seven years later, it was difficult to find a husband.

  Amelia knew very well that she rested at the bottom of the hierarchy when it came to wife material. Plain, poor, despised locally. Not exactly big selling points. Especially for a woman at the ripe old age of Nineteen.

  Most girls that had been able to find a husband had two or three children by that point.

  Into this disorder, Mrs. Davis had arrived like a godsend. A way out. She had said that Mr. Simmons was a prosperous businessman. A good man. Respected in the community. Looking for a young wife to start a family.

  Amelia held her head high as she walked through town to the train station at the far end. People stopped to watch her pass. She could see it in their eyes. A combination of guilt mixed with relief knowing that she would be gone and could be forgotten. No longer a reminder of their worse tendencies.

  She refused to acknowledge them as she walked. They were no longer important. They were from her past. People to be forgotten.

  When it came time to board the train however, she hesitated. She was leaving everything she knew. Trusting a woman, she’d barely met. What if he didn’t want to
marry her? What if he changed his mind?

  She scoffed. It wouldn’t be worse than here. Nothing could be worse.

  Taking a deep breath, she stepped up onto the train and found a seat. It would be five days. If she was frugal. She could make her funds last until she got there. If not, she would go hungry. Heaven knew it wouldn’t be the first time.

  She sat back as the train whistle blew. Five days. She could do anything for five days. Mrs. Davis had assured her that she would send a telegram to him informing him of her pending arrival. But Amelia didn’t know if she trusted telegrams, they seemed too magical to her. A man across the nation could know she was leaving before she even left. It seemed too farfetched to even believe.

  For the next five days, Amelia watched as the country changed. Several people tried to strike up conversations. But they were but passing moments. No sooner had the connection been made than it was broken when they got off the train to be replaced with new passengers.

  She learned to stay to herself. It was easier that way.

  When they dropped down out of the Rockies into the desert, her insides grew tighter with each passing mile. Dryer, browner, sparse. Everything was so different than at home.

  “It’s not home anymore,” she whispered to herself as she shook her head. This would be her new home, and somehow, she would make it work.

  Finally, in the late afternoon of the fifth day, the train pulled into the Reno station. Amelia ran a hand down over her best dress. A gray cotton. Poor farm girls couldn’t afford silks.

  She adjusted her homemade bonnet, took a deep breath, and stepped down from the train.

  Two men eyed her curiously, their gaze traveling over her like she was a sow being auctioned off. She swallowed hard as she pushed away the feeling of fear that flashed through her.

  “Miss Dunn?” the older of the two said with a stern expression.

  She hesitated for a moment wondering if she should identify herself to these men. Something told her it might be dangerous. Neither looked like what she had imagined a prosperous businessman would look like.