«On three,» Reno said in a low voice. «One…two…three.»

Slowly, with carefully matched steps, Reno and Eve worked their way down the margin of the small valley. Hours ago they had started working with the needles here, then had gone on to other parts of the valley.

Only in retrospect had this section of the valley’s perimeter seemed different. Here the needles had been fairly humming. Here they had kicked and shivered and jostled.

Reno and Eve had assumed it was their own lack of skill rather than anything else that had made the needles so twitchy. Now they wondered if it might have been the presence of hidden treasure that had animated the slender dowsing rods.

To Eve’s right a small ravine opened, choked with brush and rubble from an old rockslide. To Reno’s left lay the valley itself. Ahead of them and around a rocky nose was the alcove where an Indian slave had laid down histenatefor the last time.

Silently, intently, Reno and Eve worked their way along the edge of the valley. Rarely did the needles come apart, despite the rocky, uneven terrain and the detours around trees or fallen logs. With each step, the metal sticks shivered almost visibly.

«Stop pulling to the right,» Reno said.

«Stop pushing,» she retorted.

«I’m not.»

«Neither am I.»

As one, Reno and Eve halted and looked at the needles. Here was pointing almost straight ahead instead of lying along her hand. His was at a right angle, as though pushing — or being pulled.

Slowly Eve turned to her right. Reno followed, matching his movements to hers as though he had spent his life sharing her breath, her blood, her very heartbeat.

When the needles were straight once more, the debris of the old landslide confronted Reno and Eve. Step by careful step, they walked along the landslide’s raggedly curving edge. The needles pivoted slowly, as though pinned to a point uphill and beneath the pile of rubble.

«Up,» Reno said tersely.

Together they scrambled up the slide, moving in unison despite the uneven terrain, like two cats chasing the same mouse with sinuous, nearly matched strides. Despite that, it should have been impossible to keep the needles in touch.

It proved to be impossible to keep them apart.

Suddenly the needles dipped, jerked, and pointed down, vibrating so fiercely, it was all Eve could do to hang on to hers.

«Reno!»

«I feel it. My God, I feel it!»

He slipped the hammer from a loop on his belt and jammed the handle into the rubble where the needles pointed, marking the spot.

«Keep going up,» Reno said.

They clambered up the last ten feet of the landslide. The needles grew calmer the higher up the slope they were carried.

«Back down to the hammer,» he said.

When they were back at the hammer, Reno looked around, orienting himself.

«Left,» he said, pointing with his free hand. «Toward the alcove, but stay as much on a line with this part of the slide as you can. Ready?»

«Yes.»

As they stepped forward, Eve’s tawny eyebrows came together in a frown of concentration that made Reno want to pull her close and kiss away the small lines. But he knew better than to reach for her while they were holding the Spanish dowsing rods. The one time he had put his hand on her when the rods were touching, desire had flooded through him so hotly it had almost brought him to his knees.

Although Reno didn’t understand the energy that coursed so fiercely through the slender metal sticks, he no longer doubted it. Sunlight wasn’t tangible either, but when focused through a magnifying glass, it could set fire to wood. In some uncanny way, the Spanish needles focused the intangible currents flowing between himself and Eve.

As Reno and Eve moved away from the rockslide, the pull on the needles diminished, but not as quickly as it had in the uphill direction. When they retraced their steps and walked in the opposite direction, the pull fell off quickly, leaving the metals sticks feeling almost lifeless in their hands.

In silence they walked out into the meadow and looked back at the rockslide.

«It felt strongest to me about two-thirds of the way up the rockslide,» Eve said finally.

«Same for me.»

Reno checked a compass reading.

«Going toward the nose is the next best pull,» she added.

He nodded and took another compass reading.

«What does it mean?»

He put away the compass and looked at Eve. Beneath the shadow of her hat brim, her eyes glowed as golden as a harvest moon. The curve of her lower lip reminded him of how sweet it was to run the tip of his tongue over the soft flesh and feel the shiver of her response.

«Well, sugar girl, I’ll tell you,» Reno said in a deep voice. «I’m damn glad it was Jesuit priests who used these needles before us. Otherwise I’d worry about pacts with the devil and my immortal soul.»

Reno smiled wryly after he spoke, but Eve knew he was quite serious.

«Me too,» she said simply.

He took off his hat, raked his fingers through his hair, and put his hat back on.

«If we can believe the needles,» he said, «there’s a concentration of pure gold somewhere under that rockslide.»

Eve glanced at the rubble. «Does it look like ore to you?»

«It looks like what was above the mine head before the king of Spain double-crossed the Jesuits and they blew the mine’s entrance to hell.»

20

For the third time that day, the sound of man-made thunder reverberated through the valley, battering the two people who were crouched behind a tree, their hands over their ears. Pulverized stone boiled up into the air and then fell in a jagged, dusty rain over a quarter of the small meadow.

When the last echo had faded and no more rocky debris pelted down, Eve cautiously lowered her hands. Despite the fact that she had covered her ears, they still rang from the force of the blast.

Reno straightened and looked out at the ravine that had been choked by rocky debris. As he watched, a ragged black hole in the mountainside emerged from behind veils of dust. Elation speared through him. He took off his hat and threw it into the air with a whoop of triumph.

«We did it, sugar girl!»

He pulled Eve to her feet and into his arms as he spun around and around until she was dizzy with laughter. He kissed her hard and fast, then set her on her feet and held her until she found her balance once more.

«Come on, let’s see what we have,» he said.

Grinning widely, Reno grabbed Eve’s hand and headed for the mine, moving with a long-legged stride that had her half running to keep up.

As he had hoped, the blast had removed most of the debris from the mouth of the mine tunnel. A tongue of jagged rubble stuck out from the opening. Grit and dust still hung in the air inside. Reno dropped Eve’s hand and pulled his dark bandanna over his nose.

«Wait here,» he said.

«But —»

«No,» Reno said, cutting off whatever Eve was going to say. «It’s too dangerous. There’s no way of telling what shape the mine was in before the blast, much less after it.»

«You’re going in,» she pointed out.

«That’s right, sugar girl. I’m going in. Alone.»

Reno lit the lantern, ducked low, and stepped into the opening. Almost immediately he stopped, raised the lantern, and began examining the walls of the mine.

They were solid rock. Though seamed by natural cracks in the rock beds, the tunnel seemed strong enough. When he used his hammer on the surface, very little stone came free.

Cautiously, bent nearly double, Reno went farther into the mine. Very quickly the walls of the shaft changed. A vein of pale quartz no wider than his finger appeared. Tiny flashes of gold embedded in matrix answered every shift of the lantern.

Had the quartz been a creek, the gold within would have been panned as dust. But stone wasn’t water. Getting the tiny specks of gold free of their quartz prison would take black powder, hard labor, and a man who was willing to risk his life in dark, rock-bound passages beneath the earth.

«Reno?» Eve called anxiously.

«It looks good so far,» he answered. «Stone walls and a small vein of gold ore.»

«Rich man’s gold?»

«Yes. And not a whole lot of it.»

«Oh.»

«Don’t get disappointed yet. I’m only fifteen feet into the mine.»

Eve heard the amusement in Reno’s voice and smiled despite her anxiety.

«Besides,» he said, «didn’t the Spanish journal talk about rough ingots of gold that had been cast but not carried off to New Spain yet?»

«Yes. There were sixty-two of them.»

A whistle floated back out of the mine.

«You never told me that before,» he said.

«I started to last night, but you distracted me.»

Laughter echoed in the tunnel as Reno remembered just how he had distracted Eve.

She had been bending over the campfire, tending a vension stew and talking about a badly spotted page in the journal she had just puzzled out. He hadn’t been listening closely, for the lush curve of her hips had claimed his full attention. They had barely managed to get all their clothes off before he pressed into her with the fire crackling on one side, the cool night air on the other, and in the center a smooth, liquid heat that fit him more perfectly than any glove.

«No, you were the one who distracted me,» Reno said.

Laughter was Eve’s only answer.

The floor of the mine shaft began to slant steeply beneath Reno’s feet. The vein of gold ore also dipped sharply, telling him that the tunnel was the result of following a bigger vein of ore rather than of any particular planning on the part of the Spaniards.

Reno moved quickly but carefully into the tunnel, shining the lantern all around as he went. The mine was sound except for the places where it cut through softer rock that hadn’t been cooked deep with the fires of the earth. Where the walls were in soft or heavily fractured rock, the Spaniards had put in beams to brace the tunnel.

There were many branching, seemingly random side tunnels that were too narrow for anyone but a child to get through. Those openings hadn’t been braced. Reno looked into each small hole, but didn’t find one that tempted him to explore it.

«Reno! Where are you?»

The sound of Eve’s voice thinned and echoed as it sank down through the mine.

«Coming,» he said.

Reno scrambled back up the steep incline and down the tunnel to the mine’s mouth. Eve was waiting just outside, a lantern in her hand.

«I told you to stay out,» Reno said curtly.

«I did. Then your light disappeared and didn’t come back. When I called out, no one answered. I didn’t know if you were all right.»

Reno looked at Eve’s level gold eyes and knew he wasn’t going to succeed in keeping her out of the mine unless he roped and hog-tied her like a calf for branding.

«Stay behind me,» he said grudgingly. «Don’t light your lantern, but keep some matches handy in case something goes wrong with the one I’m carrying. I have candles, but only for an emergency.»

Eve nodded and let out a hidden breath, glad that she wasn’t going to have to fight Reno over entering the mine. But fight him she would; she simply couldn’t bear to wait on the outside not knowing if something had gone wrong deep in the mine.

«This early part is safe enough,» Reno said.

Lantern light dipped and quivered and flowed as though alive when he gestured to the rock walls, ceiling, and floor.

«I thought all mines had some kind of wooden supports,» Eve said, eyeing the bare stone distrustfully.

«Not in solid rock. You don’t need it, unless the ore body is huge. Then you just leave some of the ore in place to act as pillars.»

A flash of white caught Eve’s eye.

«What’s that on the right?» she asked.

«A small vein.»

«Gold?»

Reno made a rumbling sound of agreement. «Just like the chunk I took out of thattenate.»

«How did the Spanish know the gold was here if they couldn’t see it from the outside of the mountain? Did they use the needles?»

«Maybe. And maybe the vein showed on the surface somewhere else.»

Reno pointed to the wall. «This is the end of a shaft rather than the beginning. The nature of the rock changes about ten feet this side of the opening. The way the vein is dipping, it might come out close to that alcove you found.»