Heiress by Susan May Warren

Author:Susan May Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Heiress
ISBN: 9781609362188
Publisher: Guideposts
Published: 2011-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

SECTION THREE

Esme

SILVER CITY, MONTANA

1903

Chapter 11

The Butte Press had scooped her again.

Esme sat at the long, polished oak bar of the former Trammers Saloon-turned-headquarters for the Copper Valley Times, her hands still black with ink from her single-plate printing press, and read the Butte sixteen-page weekly cover to cover.

The Butte paper had covered the recent vigilante hanging of two highway robbers on the road between Virginia City and Butte, the mining accidents from the Copper Valley mine just outside Silver City, an unsolved murder of a gambler found in the alley behind the Nickel, and the recent looting of Annie Doyle’s homestead. All articles found in her own eight-page Copper Valley Times.

But the Butte paper also had headlines from Washington, New York, and San Francisco. She hadn’t known about President Theodore Roosevelt’s upcoming visit. No, that she found on page one, above the fold, and read it three times, hating Ellis Carter for every ounce of backdoor, underhanded shenanigans that allowed the Copper King-Newspaper Baron-Senator to trickle down information to his staff at the Butte Press.

She needed an insider in the halls of Washington, or even the state seat in Helena if she wanted to compete with the Press’s circulation.

And, with their advertising power.

She propped her chin on her hand and flipped through the paper again, counting the ads, the space. Paid-for space comprised half the paper. No wonder Carter could afford the mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York when he wasn’t in Washington, or paying off senators in Helena.

And, as if to grind salt into her wounds, there, on the back page, a quarter-page ad from Adelaide’s Mercantile, just three doors down from Esme’s office, advertising a shipment of Heinz 57. As if any of the immigrant workers down at the Silverthread mine could relate to an advertisement of a showy high society woman and her daughter admiring their housekeeper’s recent purchase.

The advertisement just reeked of Carter’s grimy fingers creeping toward her little town, greenbacks in one hand, a copper collar in the other.

“Miss Essie, I thought you went home.” Hudson came from the back room—which used to hold the kegs of beer, the bottles of whiskey back when Silver City boomed, years before copper was discovered in the defunct silver mines. Then, miners and gamblers, and even highway robbers bellied up to the long bar, staring at their grizzled mugs and bloodshot eyes in the mirror, hoping for substance before heading back out into the lawless and unorganized territory of southern Montana.

Esme had rolled into town ten years too late for the silver boom, but in time to acquire the saloon for the price of one of her pearl earrings. She’d purchased the linotype machine, the printing press, and the opportunity to prove her father wrong with the other.

Hudson came with the place. Once a miner, he bore the years of frustration in his baggy eyes, the bow of his back, and knobby worn hands. He had long ago lost his dwindling silver claim to a pair of jumpers who paid off the sheriff’s vigilante crew of bone-breakers for protection.

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