Free Foxfire by Anya Seton Page B

his breast pocket to bring out a small tin locket. Inside the locket there was a dried shamrock, given to him by his mother in Cobh the day before he stowed away on the brig bound for America. The locket slipped from his enormous fingers and fell between two rocks. He picked up one of the rocks to release his locket, and paused, startled by the weight. He bounced the rock in his hand, his aching eyes focusing on it gradually. “Holy Mother of God—” he whispered. “I’m dreaming for sure.” He picked at the rock with his finger nail and a minute gleaming fleck came off on his dirty nail.
    It was thus, from a piece of high-grade float, that Red Bill Cunningham located the Shamrock Mine, and his luck and native shrewdness thereafter overcame all difficulties. As he feverishly piled up a cairn to mark his claim he noticed the Bisnaga beside which he had slept. A two fold savior, this barrel cactus, to all those lost in the desert wilderness, and now that his wits had cleared he made use of it. Bisnagas always leaned roughly south, so his best chance of hitting the stage road again would be over there to the west. And the Bisnaga pulp provided water. He hacked the top off with his hunting knife and macerated the green fibers with a mesquite stick until they yielded a quart of watery fluid, which he sucked up feverishly.
    Red Bill never found his horse but, unlike many other discoverers of fortuitous minerals, he found his mine again two months later, made good his claim and, for sixteen years of the Shamrock’s first productivity before the original vein pinched out, he amassed a fortune. And all of it flowed from his free-spending hands as fast as it came in. Ninety thousand dollars of it went to build the mansion at which Hugh was gazing. Every foot of the materials which composed its thirty rooms had been dragged in by mule from somewhere else. The pines which formed the main wood of the structure came from no further than the forests near Flagstaff, but the mahogany bannisters and the oak parquet floor in the ballroom, the silver hardware and bathroom fixtures, the crystal chandeliers, the rosewood furniture, Turkey rugs and glass for the windows and conservatory had traveled from San Francisco, New York, and even Paris.
    Crazy-looking monstrosity, thought Hugh still staring fascinated at the weird ruin of an Irish immigrant’s dream of magnificence in the Arizona desert. Pigsty Gothic, with imitation turrets from which the gingerbread fretwork dangled in broken strips. The leaded green and red windows were starred from the impact of long-forgotten stones, when there were any panes left at all—most of the windows were boarded up. In all that vast and mouldering mansion there was no sign of life. And yet, there was life in there, in the two corner rooms to the west where purple velvet portieres covered the windows. Here Calise Cunningham, Red Bill’s widow, lived alone, as she had for thirty-three years. Alone—except for a ghost.
    She’s nutty as a fruitcake, Hugh thought, half resentful of the impression she had made on him, the one time he had seen her. She had been Calise de Barnay, a French Creole singer from New Orleans, an orphan of good family and high intelligence who had, nevertheless, run away from the aristocratic Louisiana convent where she had been reared to plunge herself into the turbulence of the West. Her true musicianship and rich lyric voice caused no great interest in the mining camps, but her extreme youth and dark beauty got her a job with the troupe. And then Red Bill Cunningham fell violently in love with her on the first night of her appearance in Lodestone.
    She had been seventeen and he forty-six, and in view of that disparity, and also of subsequent happenings, it would seem unlikely that Calise had reciprocated the huge bellowing Irishman’s passion. She had certainly married him, though, and a few old-timers could still remember glimpses of her