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1
 
LATE MARCH, 1865
FRONT MOUNTAINS
COLORADO TERRITORY
 
“Brina, darlin’, you’d better get outside the mine while I set the charge.”
 
“Papa, are you sure this is a good idea? Maybe we ought to cut some more timber and shore up the tunnel better first.”
 
“Nonsense. We’ve hit pure rock, girl. It ain’t going nowhere except where I tell it to. I’ve been blasting rock for more years than you’ve been here.”
 
Cullen Alexander packed the charge into a hole he’d made in the tunnel wall and began to string the fuse. “Blast, too short.” He stopped and let out a chuckle as he slapped his knee good-naturedly.
 
“What’s so funny?” Sabrina Alexander had never been able to understand her father’s whimsical sense of humor.
 
“Miners ought not to use words like ‘blast,’ had they?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he stepped back and studied the stubborn wall of rock they’d encountered after weeks of digging. “Well, no matter, I move fast.”
 
Not as fast as you used to, Sabrina thought. She didn’t know why she was so uneasy. Following her father around, making sure he didn’t do something foolish, had been her self-appointed duty from the time she was only six years old. Nothing had changed in the years since, even though he’d sired four more daughters and outlived three wives. But this afternoon she couldn’t shake a feeling of impending disaster. God knew, they’d set off enough dynamite charges in the past. At one time or another Cullen had been convinced that every hill in Colorado’s Front Mountains was hiding gold, and he’d blown up a good portion of them.
 
But today was different.
 
Sabrina was tired. They’d been digging for six hours straight, with little or no results, until her father had uncovered two gray knobs of what he immediately pronounced to be silver. Sabrina couldn’t be sure; they’d been fooled before. But Cullen was exuberant, and his enthusiasm had been known to lead to carelessness. Sabrina prepared herself to reassure her father when this new mine turned out to be the latest in a long list of Cullen Alexander’s pipe dreams.
 
“Papa, please,” she said, inspired with a thought that might slow his action. “Let’s stop and have a cup of coffee first, just to get our breath, maybe add a wee drop of spirits to warm ourselves. I’ll run to the house and get it.”
 
“Irish whiskey?”
 
“Of course.”
 
“Capital idea, my girl. We’ll celebrate a new beginning. Like Columbus when he discovered America.”
 
“Except Columbus made a small error in geography and ended up claiming the wrong country.”
 
Sabrina smiled. Historical debates with her father were always lively, and often her father adjusted the facts to fit his own interpretation. If Sabrina hadn’t swapped a pig with a trader for a set of history books she would never have been able to hold her own in their frequent discussions.
 
But Cullen wasn’t ready to give up yet. He came up with still another dramatic comparison. “Like Romulus when he founded the city that became Rome, this site will be the start of Alexander City, Colorado. There’s a bottle under me mattress that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Go fetch it, Brina, my girl, and make sure your sisters have done the chores. Looks like it’s gonna come another snow before night.”
 
Sabrina nodded her head. She didn’t have to see to her sisters; quiet, gentle Lauren would already have done so. And unless there was something to distract her, Isabella always brought the cow in, and Mary always fed the chickens. Sabrina couldn’t be certain about Raven; she was the sister who fit no pattern.
 
Cullen Alexander was a whimsical ne’er-do-well who deluded himself into believing that he was the kind of man who brought up his daughters to assume responsibility. In truth he’d had little to do with that. Sabrina had been both mother and father to her sisters since the death of her second stepmother fifteen years ago. All Cullen had done was isolate them so that they would never experience the ills of the world.
 
At that moment, Sabrina was giving her father a worried look. Satisfied that the only way she could delay his frantic hurry to fire the charge was by bribing him with coffee and whiskey, she pulled her coat tight against the wind and started off down the valley to the house nestled in the spruce trees below.
 
She resisted the urge to remind her father that the only reason Rome succeeded was because Romulus hedged his bet by raiding a country called the Sabine for workers and wives. So far the City of Alexander was limited to one man and five women.
 
“Wait for me, Papa.”
 
“Just get the whiskey, girl. I feel a need to christen our mine, hereafter to be known as the Silver Dream.”
 
As Sabrina made her mad dash down the valley, she wished she felt as confident. A curl of smoke beckoned from the rock chimney ahead. Sabrina reminded herself to check the wood supply. From the looks of the sky Pa was right. The weather was going to turn nasty. She sighed. Wood was what Pa ought to be worried about, not gold or silver. And he always meant to, but he knew that his girls would see to the tasks of day-to-day living. If he could strike it rich, he could give them the kind of life they ought to have, in a real house in town.
 
With a sense of dread still dogging her steps, Sabrina hurried, picking her way through the bare rocks and hard ground that had once made up the bed of a long-lost, mighty river. She was only a few hundred yards away from the mine when the explosion set off a tremor in the earth beneath her feet. A sharp pain knifed through her.
 
“Papa!”
 
She whirled around and climbed back up the slope, losing her hat and tearing her glove in her mad flight to get back to her father. The sound of the blast was still echoing up the canyon, bouncing off the sides of the mountains like cannon shots in a battle. A cloud of dust billowed from the mine entrance. Loose rocks tumbled out, rolling down the incline, biting her feet and ankles as she made her way back inside the tunnel. But she knew what she’d find, even before she encountered the thick, choking air inside.
 
A wall of dirt and rock sealed the entrance.
 
“Papa! Answer me, Papa! Are you all right?”
 
But all she could hear was the settling of twisted timbers and debris.
 
“Damn you, Papa!”
 
He hadn’t waited. Cullen Alexander never waited. He never believed that anything could happen to him. Others might be unlucky, but he was protected by God and the little people, protected and inspired. Beyond the next shovel of dirt was a gold nugget the size of a dinner plate. Beyond the next rock was the mother lode. Beyond all of these was heaven, and he wasn’t welcome there yet.
 
Sabrina grabbed a shovel leaning against the side of the mine and began to dig. Frantically, furiously, she shoveled, only to have each space filled by new dirt sliding down the mound of earth that had sealed her father inside the mountain he’d spent weeks hollowing out.
 
Other hands joined hers at some point, and time passed in a haze of dust and pain, until finally—“Brina? Brina! Stop, Brina! We can’t do it alone.” Lauren was shaking Sabrina’s shoulder.
 
Sabrina finally stepped back and let out a deep, ragged breath. She looked up and turned slowly around, her lips pressed firmly together in that familiar way she had of daring anyone to disagree with her.
 
Mary was crying softly, her arms around Isabella and Raven, who’d pressed their faces against her ample chest.
 
“He’s gone, Brina,” Lauren said quietly. “He couldn’t have survived the cave-in.”
 
Sabrina pulled her father’s old sheepskin-lined coat tighter and shook her head hopelessly. “No! It can’t be true. I won’t let it be true. Papa is back there, behind the wall, waiting for us to dig him out. We have to keep going!”
 
But this time it was the sisters who comforted Sabrina. Hollow-eyed and beaten, they made a circle around the person who’d always been their strength.
 
Sabrina swayed as the truth washed over her. Lauren was right. Two flickering lamps lit the cave. The black night sky was giving way to a pasty gray dawn. They’d worked through the night. Still, after hours of digging, they’d made little progress in moving the earth. She was long past any feeling at all, and her sisters were exhausted. Lauren was right; it was hopeless. Five women couldn’t get through the rock.
 
“It isn’t fair,” Sabrina said. “Finally, after twenty years of searching, Papa really thought he’d found his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
 
“I know,” Lauren said, swaying as she leaned on her shovel. He had always been so sure.
 
Sabrina swallowed hard, her throat hoarse from calling out, begging for some response, some hope that he was still alive. But from the beginning there’d been only silence, broken by the occasional rattle of a loose stone echoing through the dusty darkness.