Only 03 - Only You

Eve said, holding her hand at a slant.
    “Are you bothered by those tight tunnels?”
    She shook her head.
    “You sure?” Reno pressed.
    “Very. I’ll take tunnels over ledges perched like God’s eyebrow over a thousand-foot drop,” Eve said wryly.
    Reno’s smile flashed in the lantern light. “I’m just the opposite. I’d rather be on God’s eyebrow than down in coyote holes any day of the week.”
    She laughed. “Want me to see where that double-headed tunnel leads?”
    He hesitated, then reluctantly agreed. “But only if the walls are rock. I don’t want you crawling through any of the crumbling stuff we’ve seen. Understand?”
    Eve understood perfectly. While the coyote holes didn’t bother her the way heights did, she had no desire to end as the slave child had, buried alive.
    “Go on, then,” he said reluctantly.
    Before she turned to leave, Reno pulled her close and kissed her hard.
    “Be careful, sugar girl,” he said in a rough voice. “I don’t like this one damn bit.”
    Reno liked it even less as the sounds of Eve’s passage through stone faded into silence and the minutes crawled by as though nailed to the stone floor. The third time he dug out his watch, stared at it, and discovered that less than thirty seconds had passed, he swore and began counting slowly.
    Finally he heard the sound of Eve half crawling, half scrambling through the coyote hole. As soon as her head and shoulders appeared, he pulled her out and gave her a hug that all but squeezed the breath from her.
    “That’s the last time you go into a coyote hole alone,” Reno said flatly. “I aged ten years waiting for you.”
    “It was worth it, sugar man,” Eve said breathlessly, laughing, kissing him. “I found it! I found the gold!”
    T WO gold ingots gleamed in the firelight, gold as pure and uncorrupted now as the moment when slaves had first poured the molten metal into molds to cool. Reno looked from the ingots to the girl whose eyes were the exact shade of the Spanish treasure she had found hidden in darkness.
    Eve looked back at Reno, smiled, and then laughed softly.
    “I can’t believe there are sixteen more just like that one,” she said. “You should have let me go back and get them. I could have had them all out in the time it took you to widen the coyote hole that connects the two big tunnels.”
    “The gold has waited this long. It will wait until tomorrow.”
    “With both of us working, it shouldn’t—”
    “No,” Reno said flatly, cutting across her words. “You’re not going into that coyote hole again. The part where it cuts the second tunnel is too damned dangerous.”
    “But I’m smal—”
    “The reason they closed out that second big tunnel,” Reno said over her, “is that the middle section isn’t stable. It collapsed more than once. Each time they cut a coyote hole around the cave-in and kept digging until they mined out the good ore, and things kept on caving in. Finally they came at the ore from the other side, where we started.”
    “Do you really think that second big tunnel goes all the way to the alcove?”
    He shrugged. “The rock layers looked the same.”
    “Dear Lord.” Eve shivered. “That mountain must be honeycombed with holes.”
    “Are you cold?” Reno asked, noting the shiver that had passed over Eve.
    “No,” she whispered. “I was just wondering how many slaves died for those eighteen ingots of gold.”
    “Not to mention the other forty-four ingots that are hidden somewhere down there,” he said.
    Another shiver passed over Eve. She knew that Reno was going to search for the missing ingots. The thought of him hunting through the mountain’s lethal coyote holes for gold that might or might not be there made her wish they had never found the mine.
    “I didn’t see any other coiled-snake symbols chiseled in the wall,” Eve said. “Maybe the Jesuits took most of the gold with them. Maybe it would be a waste of time to search.”
    “Maybe they didn’t have time to spend chiseling snakes into rock walls to mark where treasure wasburied,” he said dryly. “Maybe they just piled the ingots in a coyote hole and got the hell out of there before the king’s soldiers came and dragged them back to Spain in chains.”
    Reno finished the last of his coffee and began scattering the embers of the small fire. Soon there was no illumination but that of the moon.
    “It’s worth staying until the weather changes to look for forty-four gold ingots,