“We’re going to have to do something,” said Emma Crockett. “People are beginning to talk.”
Travis sat at the table in her small cabin sipping a cup of coffee. She stood near the fireplace. He asked, “Does that bother you? That they’re talking?”
“No, not really. It did when they called my father crazy because he was looking for the Spanish gold, but it doesn’t bother me now. Not after all we’ve done and seen.”
“Especially since you’re going to be a very rich lady in a couple of months.” He grinned and set the cup down. “Very rich.”
She moved from the fireplace to the table and sat down. She looked right into Travis’s eyes. “There are ways of stopping the talk.”
“Like me moving into the hotel, or returning to the east?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “That wouldn’t stop the talk but make it louder.”
Travis realized that all the gold and silver in the cave along with his leaving would not stop the talk. It would only make the tongues wag faster. And he knew what the only sure cure for the wagging tongues would be. A subject that had never come up between them.
Staring at her, Travis asked, “This what you want?”
She nodded slowly, but was looking down at the table as if afraid to face him. “I never thought we’d get out of that cave,” she said. “I still think about that cave. Dream about it.”
Travis knew what she was saying. He’d thought the same thing, and once they were out, he thought they’d never live to reach El Paso. But the company from the Texas Cavalry had come along, chased away the Apaches, and then escorted them into the city. The escort was large enough that the Apaches, if they had been around, hadn’t bothered it. That was the thing about the Indians. They never attacked unless they felt the odds were on their side.
But that was just talk to disguise what was really on her mind. They had been over that end of the rescue a hundred times, and they had talked about how it had been too bad that the cavalry hadn’t arrived a couple of hours earlier. They had been there to save Travis and Crockett but not Davis and the others.
Travis decided that he didn’t want to think about Davis and the others, about the gold they couldn’t get at for the moment, and everything else that went with it. Instead he decided that he’d rather think about Emma Crockett and what life would be like with only memories of her.
“We can afford to do anything you want,” he said. “Maybe not right this minute but in the very near future.”
“Then,” she said quietly, “what I’d really like to do is go back, get a bar or two of the gold, sell it, and travel to New Orleans to get married.”
“There’s a war on and the Union has New Orleans,” he said.
“I don’t care about the war.”
Travis got up and walked over to the bed they had been sharing for the last few weeks. He reached under the mattress and pulled out a small leather bag. He returned to the table, opened the bag, and spilled the contents on the table.
“I didn’t see you take those.”
“You were searching for a way out,” said Travis. “I thought that if we got out, that would keep us in food and clothes until we could get back for some of the gold.”
“You never said a word.”
“One of those could be mounted into a ring and the others used for a honeymoon.”
She glanced up at him and said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
“I take that as a yes?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She reached up and began unbuttoning her blouse. She grinned shyly, as if it was the first time she had done that for him.
Travis stood and moved to the bed, pulling the cover down. He turned and waited for her to join him. ‘Tomorrow,” he said, “We’ll leave for New Orleans.”
Still grinning, she said, “Not too early.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not too early.”