THE SILVERADO - ADVENTURE OF THE OLD WEST

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Millie woke well before sun-up, her body stiff and chill. She rose awkwardly from the iron bedstead, still wearing her faded blue calico dress. She had simply fallen onto the bed the night before, too exhausted to undress, and had slept immediately.

It had taken her the best part of the previous morning to drag the carcass of the horse a decent distance from the sod-built shack. By nightfall she had almost finished digging the long narrow trench. With darkness, and exhaustion, she had had to quit.

Now, on stiffened legs she walked to the shack's door and drew it open. The pure mountain air was still gasping cold, and would remain so until the sun came up. When it did the earth would scorch instead of shiver. She had to finish before the sun reached its full power, before the flies began to swarm.

Ignoring the bitter air, Millie walked across the baked, soulless ground towards the new-dug trench. With narrowed eyes she judged the width and depth of it. It would do.

She had already tied rope to the legs of the horse. She pulled on this now, first one side then the other, gradually edging the carcass nearer to the trench. When she judged one more pull would do it, she paused, and looked down at her old friend.

Poor old Boxie had been her only companion for the past five years on this bleached patch of earth. She would miss him. It came to her suddenly that without Boxie she no longer had a means of scraping a living.

How was she going to get her dried-apple pies daily into Jasonville, five miles away? And every Sunday, for the past three years, Boxie had pulled the buckboard the ten miles to the miners' camp at Pebble Creek, and back again. She had earned more selling to the miners on a Sunday than she did the whole week to the general store in Jasonville. She had managed to put some money aside; not much, and it wouldn’t be enough for another horse.

Without her noticing, the tip of the sun had risen above the crest of the mountain range. A shaft of warmth touched her bare forearm, bringing her out of contemplation of her misfortune.

With one final heave on the carcass it was done. She filled in the trench, and then piled the place with as many stones as she could find. When she had finished to her satisfaction, the sun was overhead.

Millie stood for a moment, roughened hands on bony hips, looking down the steep slope of ground that fell sharply away from the shack, and the dirt track that led to Jasonville; a tall woman in her late-thirties, too thin within her calico dress.

Her eyes, large and green, were surrounded with weathered, sun-darkened skin, in which fine lines were already spreading. Her mouth, though wide and well-formed, had a sad, downward cast, as if life had proved a bitter disappointment; a disappointment from which she would never recover.

Her gaze, narrowed against the glare of the sun, swept across the terrain. A moving cloud of dust caught her eye. A rider was coming along the track. Frowning, Millie watched the rider's progress for a few minutes, Soon she knew who it was. Ben Gibson. She knew his tall, rangy figure in the saddle.

She turned and walked back to the shack, wondering why the sheriff of Jasonville was taking the trouble to ride out to her place a second time within a month.

She fed the stove with kindling, set it alight, and put the battered coffee-pot on the top. She ladled some water from the cask in the corner into a tin bowl, splashed her face with it and then wiped away the surplus water on a clean calico rag.

With company coming she ought to fix her hair. Her thick, coarse reddish brown hair, from which the sun had long since dried the natural gloss, was streaked with dull grey. She twisted it with her thin, strong fingers into a bun, and secured it with a hairpin at the nape of her neck.