Players:
= NPCs:
Summary: Marlowe reaches his mine
Date: February 3/4, 1884
Log TitleMarlowe-The San Juans
LocationThe San Juan Mountains
Four days later, as the sun's weak, lemony light crested the Sand Hills to
the southeast when the unlikely trio..man, horse and wolf..crested the top
of the San Juans.
The snow in those high southern mountains was over ten feet deep, but, they
had made good time, now, lean and haggard, the 'breed pulls up in front of a
tiny, dilapadated cabin on the southern slope, some miles above Cripple
Creek.
The rusted lock is shot off the door, although, truth be told, it may as
easily have been pulled from the rotting wood. The wolf slinks to the back of
the cabin, no doubt to burrow underneath, while the horse is led inside. The
'breed starts a fire in the rusting potbellied stove, then sets to stripping the
saddle from the horse and rubbing him down.
The cabin is fairly bare. A three legged stool sits at a piece of plank pegged
to a wall to serve as a table. A rope frame cot, the ropes sagging and
broken is against the side wall, under a shuttered window covered by a piece
of canvas. The floor, what remains of it, is planked over hardpacked dirt.
Several magazines and newspapers are on a pair of dynamite crates with a
plank top weighted down with a thick book..everything rodent chewed.
Finally, a pie safe with a broken leg is propped up by several large, flat
rocks..remains of several cans of peaches, long since spoiled and eaten by
rodents sit in a sticky black mass, and a oil lamp sit inside. Marlowe silently
sets to work, his face an impassive mask. The peaches are thrown out the
door into the deep snow, shelf and all. The old newspapers and magazines
are pitched into the potbellied stove, then he turns to the floorboards in
front of the pie safe.
Prying up one, then another of the boards, the 'breed uses the lantern to
examine the small, rock lined hole uncovered, and grunts. Out comes a
hammer, a seven pound single jack, a pair of drills, wrapped in oiled canvas
and a small, but heavy ore bag. He dumps the bag on the table, and pokes in
the nuggets and wire gold with a finger. His mine, for this was it, though
small had been dug into the side of the mountain where an ancient spring had
gushed forth in eons past before being covered.
He and his partner, a Shakespearean actor, long deceased, had cut into this
underground streambed and found a rich haul. They'd extended the shaft
thirty feet back before the old man had died, and a much younger and
idealistic Marlowe (then known only as Breed) had set out to find happiness
that cold gold could not provide. He'd returned, at least once a year, to
peck at the hard rock and have some ore assayed, but usually contented
himself with hoarding a few nuggets before returning to his other life.
His other life..ruined now..One wife killed, another deserted..yes, he had
taken to thinking of it in that manner during the long ride south..one child
sent to New Orleans with a flashy French woman his second, a babe in arms
in the deserted wife's care.
Meriah..Madeline..Christophe.. the life the petite woman had given him,
shattered by Chiane's return from the dead..the love he had had for her,
still had for her, stilled to a bitter pool because of her coldness and her
cutting tongue. It rose now in his anger as he muttered to the
horse,"Damned woman got all the men she wants"
Keira..the lovely red headed schoolteacher. A raging fire was concealed
behind those demure clothes.A dangerous inferno, and he, damn him, had
wanted to touch that fire..had touched it in fact, and been seared to his
soul..and his life was now bitter ashes, embers kept alive only by hatred..of
men and their rules, women and their notions, of the people that had come
into HIS people's lands, and stolen them.
He rolled himself in the heavy buffalo hide coat in front of the stove, and
slept uneasily, the dreams in his head coiling about like great dark serpents,
each telling him what he must do.
