Mitchell's Run

By Amy Gallow

Cynthia Sheldon is a modern young woman. She does not believe in ghosts. When Andrew Mitchell rescues her from a blizzard and shelters her in his mine, she knows there has to be a logical explanation. She finds it in Drew Mitchell, the current owner of Mitchell's Run. Proving that she wasn't fooled by any ghostly masquerade seemed quite simple in the beginning. Then her emotions got in the way...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whiskey Creek Press
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611606065

Book preview

Chapter 1

Cynthia was dying. She’d dragged herself out of the creek after crashing through the ice and struggled through the snow until her last reserve was exhausted. The biting cold was fading and her final sleep only the blink of an eye away.

Not yet, Goldilocks. A strong male voice, but his chiding was gentle, a tolerant parent reminding a beloved child. You still have things to do.

It could have been her father, but he was half a world away, in Africa, helping others. Resentment stirred, halting her retreat from life…

Good for you, Goldilocks. Feed that anger. We’ll need it to get you to shelter. He grasped her right wrist and wrapped her arm around his neck. Up you get.

She felt his other hand grasp the waistband of her ski pants and she was lifted bodily, her sodden ski jacket gaping at the bottom to funnel an icy blast of wind against her cringing flesh and shock her back to the world of piercing cold and clinging snow.

She’d been rescued.

A hundred paces and you’ll live, he promised.

She shuddered violently; her involuntary movement almost pitching them both face down in the snow.

He staggered then recovered, startling her with a short bark of laughter. I’m saving your life, Goldilocks. You won’t offend me by helping.

In a distant corner of her mind, a small part of Cynthia was still acting as an objective observer, and her fear overwhelmed hope. Someone had found her, but shelter was impossibly far and he was alone. One death would become two.

She tried to help, but only succeeded in making his task more difficult as he half-carried, half-dragged her through the deep snow. The thin crust of ice would not support their combined weight and he sank to his waist at each step while her legs floundered helplessly to find a footing on the slick surface.

Keep those legs moving, Goldilocks, he urged, his voice cutting through the wind’s howl. It is not far now.

A single moment more was forever to Cynthia. She could feel herself slipping away, all feeling ebbing from her body. Her rescuer was tiring and she could hear desperation in the words echoing inside her mind. Worse, she could sense his fear.

They reached a screen of bushes and he broke through with a lunge that sent them sprawling full length into the sheltered lee of an overhanging rock ledge. Two metres away, yellow light gleamed around the edges of a rough plank door, but her thought processes were now too slow to understand its significance. The interrupted process of dying had taken charge and she was sinking back into the comfort of sleep.

No you don’t. He shook her awake. I won’t let you die!

She felt him stagger to his feet, lifting her with him as he made those few final steps to sanctuary, battering the door aside with his shoulder. The bitter wind became just a sound as she felt herself lowered onto the dry wooden bed of a trolley. As the last tenuous threads of her consciousness unraveled and blackness engulfed the tiny spark of life, she felt a rush of pity for him. He’d tried so hard, but she’d let him down.

* * * *

Awareness advanced and retreated like gentle waves on a beach. In her confused mind, dreams interwove with reality. Did she feel the naked warmth of a hard-muscled body pressed against hers, or endure the pain of returning circulation to frozen limbs soothed by the massage with warm eucalypt scented oil, or was it a dream? Only his voice was real: cajoling, damning, encouraging, holding her just this side of death. Everything else was elusive.

Mere shadows on the edge of reality…

She grasped a moment of consciousness to force herself awake.

She was alive.

A strange awe flooded her mind. He’d succeeded. She was warm and safe. Unwilling to challenge this miracle, she lay quietly, content to cherish her survival until she was ready to explore her surroundings; her mind was fuzzy and reluctant to engage.

The silence was the first thing she noticed. It was oddly absolute. Even in the Chalet, she could hear the wind in the trees outside. Here, there was nothing, not a single sound of life beyond her own breathing.

It felt eerie.

She began a tentative exploration of her surroundings. A soft mattress cushioned her body as she lay on her back. The bed was narrow; she could feel the sideboards on either side. A throat-catching scent of eucalyptus oil confirmed one of her dreaming memories. She opened her eyes. Directly above her, someone had hand-carved an intricate crest into the rough-hewn timber of the ceiling. It was upside down from where she lay and unfamiliar, yet an uncertain light from her left highlighted the fresh cuts, making them quite distinct. A soft thud and sudden brightening of the light made her head turn towards its source. It was the mica-glazed windows of a pot-bellied stove. A piece of wood had settled further into the coals and flared into flame. The increased light partly revealed the shadowed figure of a man drowsing in a strange rustic armchair.

Stretched out towards the stove, his work-scarred lace-up boots were calf-high and topped with a knitted roll of greasy wool. Above that, the roughly woven material of his trousers seemed to absorb the light, leaving the rest of the figure shrouded in darkness. Other than the polished gleam of a large belt buckle at his waist, the only detail she could see was a mass of dark hair drawn back and secured in a thick queue…

The archaic term for a man’s pigtail came so naturally that it took her a moment to recognize the cause. Everything she could see should have come from a hundred years ago. It was as if they had brought a museum display to life.

An unlit oil lamp, bracketed to the wall next to a shelf of well-used leather-bound books, lit the rough desk with its capped glass inkstand. A leather miner’s cap with a mounted carbide lamp hung beside it. She remembered seeing a similar one in the Long Tunnel Mine museum at Walhalla last summer. This one showed none of the aging that had made the other look sad rather than functional. Instead, it looked as if he had just put it there after a day’s work. An odd flash of visual memory told her that her rescuer had worn it.

It was him. This man had fought for her life and won. Gratitude welled up, tightening her throat muscles and dampening her lashes with tears. She tried to lift her head from the pillow, but a wave of weakness defeated her. Eyes closed against the accompanying nausea, she felt blindly for something solid to hold onto, the rustle of her bedclothes unnaturally loud in the silence.

You are awake, Goldilocks, the remembered voice commented and the chair creaked as he came to his feet. She felt, rather than heard, him cross the small room to her side.

My name is Cynthia Sheldon, she explained formally, her eyes still tightly closed.

No ‘Where am I?’ or ‘What am I doing here?’ She could hear the chuckle lurking behind the gentleness in his voice.

I imagine you’ll tell me soon enough. I’m not at the Chalet, nor back at the Stockman’s Hut. Therefore, this must be your home. The nausea was receding, so she opened her eyes and looked up at her rescuer.

The lady wins the prize, he acknowledged, the firelight reflecting on a lean, clean-shaven face. This is my home for the moment, and you’re safe here until the storm blows itself out.

It’s still blowing? I can’t hear it.

Not through sixty feet of rock, he agreed.

The anachronism of using feet instead of metres captured her attention. He seemed her age, possibly a year or two older. That made him thirty at the most. His education should have matched hers. It would have been entirely in metric units. Only an American would have used feet to measure distance and his speech had no trace of an American accent. In fact, he sounded like a well-educated Englishman, his diction precise.

You’re English, she accused.

No, though I did go home for the mining degree. There is nothing to match it here.

The implied criticism of Australia stung. An Anglophile, she thought, raising herself abruptly from the pillow. A move she regretted instantly. Her head spun with the sudden movement. She collapsed back again and closed her eyes tightly as she waited for the bed to stabilize and stop spinning.

You should take it slowly, he said. You came very close to dying out there. How did you manage to fall though the ice into the creek?

We were making a cross-country run from the Stockman’s Hut to the Chalet when the weather closed in. I must have missed the turn. We were together one minute. Then, quite suddenly, I was alone. I thought I heard the others and skied towards the sound. The bank gave way and then I was in the water. She almost shrugged with the simplicity of the disaster that had befallen her. How did you find me?

I was out checking the vents. A heavy fall can sometimes cover them. I saw the flash of color across the gully, but it took me over an hour to reach you. I had to open a disused adit to bring you into the mine.

We’re in a mine?

Yes.

Oh… Cynthia paused thoughtfully. They were still well within the boundaries of the National Park, giving the clear implication that this was no legal operation, but suggesting this to her rescuer hardly seemed polite.

What do you mine? That seemed a safe enough question.

Gold. The auriferous strata around here are the richest I have ever seen. A zealot’s glow lit his eyes, although his lips curved wryly as he added ruefully. I’ve been searching so long for a reef like this one that it feels like forever.

He turned away and crossed the room to the shelf above the desk, returning with a small open-topped canvas bag. As he approached, she could see the glint of gold nuggets. The bag was almost full!

Look, he said, shaking a nugget onto the palm of his hand. The size of Cynthia’s thumbnail, it was all jagged and rough where it had been broken from the rock. There were still flecks of marble-like stone sticking to it. The mother of all riches. His tone contained something not unlike awe.

She reached out and took it from the palm of his hand, turning it over in her fingers and admiring its gleam in the firelight. It was surprisingly heavy.

It is almost pure, he said. I have never seen a seam like it.

That bag must be worth a lot of money, she said, placing the nugget back in his palm. She tried to estimate the weight in the bag and multiply it by the price of gold per ounce.

Not enough, he said sadly. Unless I win more, it will not keep the bank from taking Mitchell’s Run.

The Drought? she guessed, recognizing the Outback term for a cattle station in the title. A lot of rural properties were in trouble in this third year of below average rainfall.

Yes, he agreed. That and a pair of land speculators who lifted the hopes of the locals. They spread rumors about the rail line to Sydney.

Cynthia nodded, remembering the rumors that had accompanied the route of the recent proposal for a high-speed train link to Sydney. It was supposed to replace the century-old Melbourne/Sydney rail line. They’d favored two routes, she thought, though she couldn’t remember where they were supposed to run. A rural family would have found it easy to borrow on the expected increase in price for their land and then find themselves deeper in debt than they could ever support with the property. Their son had found another way, one not entirely legal. He did not sound like a country boy, but perhaps his parents were English. It would explain him calling England home.

She lay back in the bed to consider and found her eyelids drooping with a sudden tiredness. Her rescuer reached across and tucked the blankets around her more firmly. The male aroma of sweat, dust and machine oil tickled her nostrils. She could see the glint of red in the hairs on the back of his wrist in the firelight. It all seemed so distant and she felt herself drifting even farther away, though something nagged vaguely at the edge of her consciousness. Her last conscious thought was that brown eyes were much warmer than blue ones.

* * * *

The smell of food invaded her dreams, twisting them, awakening a hunger too intense to allow sleep. She halfway opened her eyes and cautiously raised her head from the pillow. There was no nausea. The scratch of the steel nibbed pen carried clearly across the room and she turned her head towards the sound. Her rescuer sat at the desk, writing in a distinctive leather-bound journal by the light of the oil lamp.

You have decided to re-join the human race. Her movement in the bed had alerted him.

If that’s the price of being fed, she agreed, opening her eyes fully and sitting up, a movement halted abruptly as she realized she was naked under the bedclothes.

Your clothes are on the end of the bed. They are dry now. He rose from the desk and walked out through the doorway to her left, near the head of the bed, leaving her with the distinct impression his eyes had lingered for more than a moment on her exposed body.

She flushed uncomfortably. Then her memory rebuked her. He’d undressed her, dried her, and warmed her with the heat of his naked body before massaging the circulation into her limbs. He’d already seen everything at his leisure. The fading scent of eucalyptus oil clung to the bedclothes to remind her of all he’d done for her. It was churlish to begrudge him a typical male reaction.

She turned away from the door and looked down at the foot of the bed. As he said, her clothing lay folded neatly, with her thermal underwear on top. She reached for the latter. The cabin was warm enough for the quilted outer clothing to be superfluous. She slid into the cellular vest and long johns. Warmed by the fire and dry, their weave was dense enough to protect her modesty. A shake of her head and a quick comb with her fingers made her hair as presentable as it was ever going to be, and she was ready for food. Her bare feet slid easily into the well-used moccasins he’d left conveniently at the side of the bed, big enough that she had to shuffle rather than walk. It didn’t delay her; the aromas coming through the door and her hunger made the difficulty inconsequential.

She found the next room a combined kitchen and eating area, lit by an oil lamp with a tall, sparkling-clean, glass chimney. A large wood stove took up most of one wall and a scrubbed pine-top table the other. There was only one chair, another rustic construction, well-polished by use, which would have fetched a small fortune at any art auction. He motioned her towards it, ladled a thick, rich smelling stew into a tin bowl and placed it before her. Waiting on the table was a large, fresh damper. Beside it a ceramic crock of butter, rich and yellow—obviously not factory-made.

We are a little limited in cutlery, he explained. You can have the spoon and I will make do with the fork.

I don’t even know your name, she said, politeness battling her hunger briefly.

Andrew Mitchell.

She had to nod her acknowledgment; her mouth was too busy eating. Even allowing for her hunger, the stew was superb, holding flavors she couldn’t recognize, but each complementing the others so well that the result made them individually unimportant. It was not until she was wiping the last scraps from the bowl with a large piece of damper that she felt compelled to continue the conversation.

This is very good, she said unnecessarily. You could be a cordon bleu cook.

I suspect hunger added to its quality for you, but, as I am the one that has to eat it normally, I prefer that I be able to enjoy it, as well. He shrugged.

He was kneeling at the stove, interrupting the act of feeding it with split wood by looking at her over his shoulder. A slight smile softened his features. He seemed amused by her, as if her reactions were slightly off-key.

He rose and turned back to the table, taking a steaming billy pot from the stovetop and a chipped, but spotlessly clean china mug from a shelf above it.

I will use the billy pot, he explained, placing the mug before her and filling it. I usually do when I am working. I am afraid we have no milk. I’ve become used to doing without it.

Black unsweetened tea was not one of her favorite drinks, but she enjoyed it nonetheless. Her situation