Colorado Hope(15)
Then again, it might be more prudent for her to hole up somewhere farther away, awaiting word of their capture. Don’t be a fool, Lenora. You know what that cutthroat Clayton will do to you if he finds you. She hated the thought that they might find the gold. Sure, she’d hidden it well, but in their desperation they would look hard—and take as long a time as needed—to tear that place apart, plank by plank. But she had buried it out in the meadow south of the woods. No way could they figure out where—not with a whole winter of snow dumped on the ground. No—they would not find the gold. And when they didn’t . . .
Lenora thought back to when Hank had bought the cabin, when he first started his gang, figuring its location and difficulty of access made it the perfect hideaway. From time to time the gang met up there to plan their robberies, but since it was so far from Denver City, they’d rarely gone in recent years. She had sweet-talked him into taking her that last time—when he needed to hide all that gold. He didn’t trust anyone in the gang to go with him. And he didn’t trust her either. He made her stay with the horses down a ways from the cabin. But when she returned on her own just before he’d been arrested, neither the cabin nor the gold was hard to find. The fool had left a trail of muddy boot prints across the wood-planked floors, and he’d hid the gold underneath a loose floor plank. Hank wasn’t much for neatness, and for that she was grateful.
She also knew he’d lied to his men, telling them the gold was in an old abandoned mine shaft near Boulder. But Clayton hadn’t believed Hank; he told her so one night in his drunken stupor. No doubt Clayton had suspected all along that the gold was at the cabin—and that she knew where it was. So she’d better get to it before Clayton got to her.
Lenora huffed. Patience, patience. That was not her strong suit. She hated waiting for anything, and that gold was calling her. She wasn’t getting any younger either, and her marriage to Hank Dutton had taken its toll on her youth and beauty. She hardly looked her twenty-five years. She could still pass as a young lady, innocent, untouched, untarnished. A dab of makeup here, a proper corset, and a few stiff petticoats could hide a multitude of shortcomings. She grunted. All this fretting wasn’t helping. She would just have to trust serendipity.
As she got closer to the wide river, she noticed how the flat marshy land was reeling from a recent flood. Ugly gray water moved at a fast clip and tickled the tops of the banks. She huffed. Didn’t appear she’d be crossing this anytime soon. A day, two days maybe?
She looked across the marshy land to the desert stretching before her. The Front Range went on for endless miles—a stark, drab, lonely place. Full of dust and cactus and tumbleweeds. Why anyone in their right mind would choose to live out here in this wasteland was beyond reckoning. All those stuffy rich people from back East, thinking to settle here and find their paradise . . . well, they were fools, every one of them. Putting up with blizzards and drought and tornados and locusts. Yep, truly fools to give up their creature comforts and heated houses for this. She had passed the temperance town of Greeley a few miles back—the “city of saints” it was called in Denver City. No drinking allowed—how fun was that?
She let her mind wander as she rode up to the river and watched the swirling, churning waters of the South Platte. To the northwest, the Cache la Poudre tumbled down canyons of rock and merged with the Platte. Only after traversing miles of flat desert did the river slow and widen enough for a safe crossing. Off to her right a ways sat a copse of willows and cottonwood, and she got a glimpse of a wooden structure. A cabin maybe. Aside from the ranch she’d passed fifteen minutes ago, there were no signs of habitation. And rightly so. Anything built close to the river would be in danger in a flood. She wondered how that little hideaway had weathered the many times the Platte overran its banks.
While she sat in the wagon, pondering her next move, toying with the idea of riding back to Greeley and getting a hotel room and then coming back at dawn to make the crossing, she caught something out of the corner of her eye. Upstream, a giant oak had speared itself into the riverbank, with dozens of branches like broken arms supplicating the heavens sticking every which way. But entangled in the branches was a shape that greatly resembled a man. A swath of brown fabric hung ripped in shreds from one branch.
She got down from the wagon bench and stepped carefully through the mud, her boots squishing as she walked. Upon closer inspection she noted that indeed it was a man—poor fool—and dead most likely. His mop of bark-brown hair hung down from his head as he lay facedown across the branch he was trapped in. Even from twenty feet away, she could tell he was young and strong. His body draped over another branch, his muscular legs in thick brown denim pants and feet in sturdy boots.