“I want you to drink this because you are going to need it.”
Instantly Kady was alert. “Has something happened to Cole? No, of course it hasn’t. I just left him, and no one has come to tell us anything.”
“I want you to drink this,” Ruth said more forcefully.
Kady leaned away from her. “What is going on? I’ve told you everything about me, so I think you owe me the courtesy of telling me whatever it is that makes you think I’ll need a shot of brandy to be able to stand the news.”
As though for courage, Ruth took a few deep breaths before she spoke. “The year now is eighteen ninety-seven. My grandson died when he was nine years old. In eighteen seventy-three.” She looked hard at Kady. “My grandson has been dead for twenty-four years.”
At first Kady was puzzled; then she smiled; then she began to laugh. “That’s very funny. I think that whoever told you your grandson died told you a great whopping lie. I left your grandson about three hours a
go, and I can assure you that he was very much alive.”
For a moment Ruth sat there, the tumbler of brandy in her hand; then she downed it in one gulp. “All right, my dear, shall we go?”
“Go where?” Kady asked.
“Why, to visit my grandson of course. The invitation to dinner is still open, is it not?”
Kady hesitated, not at all sure that she wanted to go anywhere.
Standing, Ruth held out her hand for Kady. “Come, my dear, we’re going to visit my grandson.”
Kady stood, but she stepped away from Ruth Jordan. Maybe the tragedies years ago had left the woman insane. Quite suddenly, the only thing that seemed important to Kady was to return to Cole. To Cole the man, not a nine-year-old boy.
Turning, Kady ran past the Hanging Tree to the grassy area where she’d tied her horse. But the horse was not there.
“Would you like the brandy now?” Ruth Jordan asked Kady softly; when Kady didn’t respond, she held it to her lips, forcing Kady to drink.
“No,” Kady said, turning away, gasping for breath and trying her best not to look at the ruins of what had once been the thriving town of Legend, Colorado.
Ruth, in her carriage, had caught up with Kady as she was running toward the town and defiantly, Kady had climbed into the carriage behind the driver. And as they rode into the town, the horror had begun. Only a few hours earlier Kady had ridden out of a pretty little town full of people who had waved to her, called her by name. But now there was only a ghost town full of rickety buildings that had never been solid to begin with.
The first place they passed was the Amaryllis Mine, but now the collapsed, boarded-up old mine had a broken sign that said The 9 Mine. “But that’s the Amaryllis!” Kady exclaimed.
“Amaryllis was the name of Cole’s little sister, who was killed on the same day he was,” Ruth said softly.
Quietly, Ruth had her driver go down one lane after another, and Kady saw that everything in the town was different. Every street, every house, every building had changed. There were more crumbling saloons than anything else in the town, and over them were what had unmistakably been brothels. The school wasn’t the pretty building Kady had seen but a ramshackle shed. There was no sports field, no ice cream parlor. The lovely Palace Hotel was a thin-board shanty that she doubted had ever had glass in the windows. There were no boardwalks and no vacant lots, as every inch along the streets was covered with what looked to be one house of iniquity after another. To guess from what she could read from the faded signs, gambling was the major industry of Legend.
Too stunned to speak, Kady just sat in the carriage and looked, her mind too full to comprehend what she had been told and what she was seeing.
At the end of the town, on a road that she had known as Paradise Lane but now with a sign declaring it as Damnation Avenue, was a disintegrating stone wall that seemed to separate this section of the town from the other she had just been through. A nice hedge had been growing there a few hours before.
“The Jordan Line,” Ruth said softly, then tapped Joseph on the shoulder and told him they would walk from here. Ruth seemed to sense that Kady was too shocked to speak, but also that she needed comfort, for when they were on the ground, Ruth took Kady’s arm tightly in hers.
“Legend was a horrible place,” Ruth said. “Worse than you can imagine. In 1867 my husband and my only child, Cole’s father, found silver here. They were good men and were determined not to allow to happen to this place what had happened to other silver towns in Colorado. They didn’t want a cesspit of brothels and saloons; they wanted families and churches and schools.”
“Idealists,” Kady whispered, holding on to Ruth’s arm as though she might fall without it. In front of her should have been a library, a church to her left, but instead there were a couple of makeshift buildings and open land.
“They were very much idealists, and since they were going to be very rich men, they thought they could carry out their schemes. All they had to do was refuse to sell the land or the mines, then they’d have control.” For a moment Ruth paused, sighing as she looked about the empty, decaying town. “We should have known that nothing was going to work when the mine workers renamed the town Legend. My husband called the town Acropolis, but some wag said it ought to be called Sink Hole, Colorado, then someone else said the glory of the place was a legend in Adam Jordan’s mind and nowhere else. The name Legend stuck.”
“It never happened,” Kady said softly, trying to comprehend what she was seeing and hearing. Somehow, she could accept that she had gone back through time, but now she was to understand that she had gone back to a dream, to a place that never existed. She had met a man who had never grown to manhood.
Ruth was looking at her sharply. “I think you’d better sit down. I’ve had years to deal with this, but you, my dear, haven’t had time to recover or even to comprehend.”
Leaning heavily on Ruth’s strong arm, Kady allowed herself to be led up a path that had once led to the mosque. But Kady didn’t have to ask to know that no mosque had been built in memory of Cole’s dead friend. In its place was an old house that was surely the most substantially built structure in town. It had once been a nice house with a big porch and windows and . . .
“You lived here, didn’t you?” she asked Ruth.