A Margin in Time by Laura Hayden

Author:Laura Hayden [Hayden, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Parker Hayden Media
Published: 2015-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

An hour later, Barrett and Emma had a survey map spread across the desk. He pointed to a familiar spot. “The mine entrance is here?”

Emma reached down and shifted his finger a half inch over to the left. “No, here.” Barrett made a rapid calculation, tracing his way along the map. “Seventy-eight from the outcropping entrance, the shaft branches. The left branch takes off at a thirty degree angle and the right branch travels another hundred and five before it splits with a second branch taking off to the right at a sixty-two degree angle.” He found the pencil and sketched the shaft locations on the paper, stabbing the right branch so hard that the pencil point broke. “The copper starts here. The vein follows the fissure for fifty-eight feet, then angles off to the right. That’s where we got into problems.”

Emma stared at the hand-drawn shafts. “What do you mean?”

“Look.” He pointed to the map. “Here’s the outcropping and here’s the place where the copper vein angles away. The distance is . . .” He jockeyed some numbers in the margin of the map. “. . . roughly two hundred and thirty feet, lateral.”

“And?”

“It puts the end of the shaft roughly here. Under Main Street.”

She stared at the map, her expression narrowing to one of intense concentration. Her words started hesitantly. “And the common town properties are held jointly by the founding families of Margin.”

“Which means . . .” he prompted.

“Which means in order to mine the land, you’d have to negotiate the mineral rights with . . . virtually everybody in town.”

He nodded. “Which is exactly what Thornwald did. Everybody signed their property over to him right before the silver industry collapsed. At least, that’s the version I was told all my life. Johnny told me Thornwald actually blew up the mine in order to trick the people into believing it was played out. Of course, Johnny didn’t know that when he formed a partnership with Thornwald. Together they created the Continental Silver and Copper Consortium, but Thornwald and his heirs always kept the property rights, which eventually got tangled up in red tape and family legalities. When my company, Callan Industries, was all that was left of the original partnership, we didn’t have the land rights and it’s slowly choked the life out of our business.”

“So you want to grab the land before Thornwald does?”

He shrugged. “In essence.”

She glanced up from the map, cocking her head at him. “What makes you any better than him?”

“Huh?”

Emma leaned back in the chair. “People thought they were selling worthless land to Thornwald, correct?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “So I suspect he didn’t have to pay much to get the mining rights.”

Barrett nodded. “That’s probably true.”

“So all you’re going to do is get a jump on him by cheating the people out of their property first.”

“Well, not cheating . . .”

She crossed her arms with great precision. “It’s still cheating, not telling them there’s a good reason to hold on to the land.

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