Mildred dozed on the sofa, while Jak was idly juggling with three of his knives, sending them high toward the ceiling in a weaving maze of honed steel. He had been doing it for several minutes and hadn’t dropped them once.
They’d enjoyed a nutritious supper of freeze-dried mulligatawny soup and some more of the self-bake rolls, but Mildred had gone carefully through the entire larder and found very little else that she considered safe for them to eat.
Also, the hot-water system had packed up both for washing and for heating, which meant the house, despite its excellent insulation, was already beginning to drop in temperatureapart from the living room, where they were keeping the fire going. Jak had struggled out before the snow had settled in deep drifts and brought in several loads of wood, enough to ensure warmth for at least twenty-four hours.
“When do you reckon we can move on, J.B.?” Krysty asked. “Any chance of tomorrow?”
“Doubt it. You never know. Weather can change in a few hours. But that’s serious snow, and nobody’s going to be out there clearing the trail for us.”
“You worried about Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“Course I am. What a stupe!” Krysty closed her emerald eyes and sighed. “Sorry. On edge. If only we knew where he was. Could be safe in the school. Could both be trapped out in the open, stuck in a snow hole with no food.”
“Could be storm missed him,” Jak said. “Looked like we was on north edge of it.”
Krysty put her head on one side, close to the pane of glass, listening. “Anyone hear that?”
“Wolves,” Jak said, never missing a beat with his intricate juggling.
“You can hear them, too?”
“Course. Heard them few minutes ago. Came closer. Went away. Coming closer again.”
SUPPLIED WITH TRAIL FOOD by the kitchens of the Brody School, Ryan made good time. He reached the edge of Leadville well before dusk, passing the rusted remains of what had obviously been an old predark railroad.
A battered sign told when he passed the ten-thousand-foot altitude line, though his body had already warned him that he was approaching the edge of the comfort zone. His breathing was faster and more shallow, and when he stopped he was aware of the blood pounding in his ears.
The ghost of a headache pressed behind his eye, and he felt slightly nauseous. But after eating a handful of dried apples and apricots, and taking a good long drink from a crystal-clear stream alongside the trail, he felt refreshed and carried on toward the ville.
He knew from his memory of the map he’d seen in Glenwood Springs that Leadville was only about twenty-five miles from Fairplay.
As the crow flew.
Unfortunately only a crow could make it in that distance. For humans there was the little matter of fifteen-thousand-foot mountains in the way.
The only viable route involved heading back north from the ville, to Fremont Pass at eleven and a half thousand feet, then trying to cut across to the Hoosier Pass, above Breckenridge, at a similar height. To stick to the main highways would mean going all the way back to I-70, then heading south once more, which would be a total distance of more than sixty miles.
When he reached the fork in the road, Ryan hesitated. Part of him wanted to get on as fast as he could to reach Fairplay and meet up with Krysty and the others, who, he imagined, might well be ahead of him by now.
Evening was closing in, and the attractions of Leadville overrode his impatience. The chance of another night spent in a warm bed and some good hot food was altogether too tempting for him to resist.
He turned right, toward the distant buildings of the ville, a place that he knew well from his visit with Trader.
Back in the 1800’s it had been a gold boomtown, then a silver boomtown. Its fortunes had been linked to the larger-than-life millionaire-philanderer Horace Tabor, but had declined by the middle of the twentieth century, when it had lurched from minibust to miniboom and back again.
When Ryan had visited the place with Trader and the lumbering war wags, it had been a bustling frontier pesthole with several gaudies and saloons, one of them established in what had been Leadville’s very own opera house. He recalled that Doc had mentioned that a famous writer called Oscar Wilde had once traveled all the way to Leadville to perform there.