"What's this?" Cole asked. Kaya looked up. "Planning. There's work at the Broken Ridge mine."
"They need security for overnight shifts, and there's a freight company that runs supplies to the smaller camps. We could split up, cover more ground." "Or we could stick together," Lyra said. "Safety in numbers." "Safety doesn't pay as well," Kaya countered.
Cole sat down and studied the map. "What about that?" He pointed to a section marked in faded ink. "Says here there's a valley about 20 miles west, good water, decent soil." "So?"
"So maybe we think past the next paycheck. Start looking for something permanent." The women exchanged glances. Kaya folded her arms. "You serious?"
"I don't know. Maybe." Cole shrugged. "You're the one who brought up settling down. I'm just thinking about what that looks like."
"It looks expensive," Lyra said. "Land costs money. Building costs more. And we'd need livestock, tools, seed if we're farming." "I'm not saying we do it tomorrow. I'm saying we start thinking about it."
"Make it a goal instead of just drifting." Sani nodded slowly. "I like that." "Me too," Kaya said. "But we still need money, which means taking the work that's available now."
They debated for another hour, voices rising and falling, opinions clashing and merging until they'd hammered out something resembling a plan. Cole and Kaya would take the mine security job. Lyra and Sani would work the freight runs. They'd pool their earnings, save what they could, and in six months, maybe a year, they'd have enough to start looking at land seriously. It wasn't perfect, but it was a start.
The work at Broken Ridge was brutal. Twelve-hour shifts watching over miners who resented being watched, breaking up fights between exhausted men with short tempers, and keeping an eye out for claim jumpers who didn't care about legal niceties. Cole had been shot at, threatened, and once nearly stabbed over a dispute about who owned a particular vein of silver. But the pay was good, and Kaya proved to be better at handling the miners than Cole was. She had a way of talking to them that was firm but not condescending.
And more than once, Cole watched her de-escalate a situation that would have ended in bloodshed if he'd been handling it alone. "How do you do that?" he asked one night as they rode back to town. "Do what?" "Get them to listen. Half the time they look at me like they want to shoot me."
"That's because you walk around like you expect them to shoot you. They pick up on it." "So I should what? Smile more?" Kaya laughed.