Born of gilded mountains, p.1
Born of Gilded Mountains, page 1
“Readers will be utterly enchanted by Dykes’s Hepburn-esque heroine who brings the glitz of the Golden Age of Hollywood deep into the heart of the mountains in a last-ditch effort to keep a broken promise. They’ll uncover a tale that reminds us all that no matter how impossible things may seem, there’s always room for restoration. Unforgettable.”
—Amanda Cox, bestselling and award-winning author of He Should Have Told the Bees
“Amanda Dykes is one of the most creative and talented storytellers I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Born of Gilded Mountains is a symphony of characters who resonate, pitch-perfect pacing, and a setting that sings. Settle in for a tale worth savoring down to the last note.”
—Jocelyn Green, Christy Award–winning author of The Metropolitan Affair
“A mountain-sized treasure of a tale, artfully scripted, skillfully penned. Dykes has outdone herself in this nostalgic and heartfelt portrayal of friendship beyond measure and redemption beyond circumstance. Bravo!”
—Nicole Deese, Christy Award–winning author of Roads We Follow
“Amanda Dykes has achieved a new level of storytelling with Born of Gilded Mountains. Glimmering in charm and rich in heart, this novel stunned me and compelled me to journey deeper and deeper into the lives of Mercy and Rusty. This is the perfect book to enjoy with friends.”
—Susie Finkbeiner, author of The All-American and Stories That Bind Us
Books by Amanda Dykes
Whose Waves These Are
Set the Stars Alight
Yours Is the Night
All the Lost Places
Born of Gilded Mountains
Novellas
Up from the Sea from Love at Last: Three Historical Romance Novellas of Love in Days Gone By
From Roots to Sky from The Kissing Tree: Four Novellas Rooted in Timeless Love
© 2024 by Amanda J. Dykes
Published by Bethany House Publishers
Minneapolis, Minnesota
BethanyHouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
Ebook edition created 2024
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-4660-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Scripture quotations are from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled esv are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016
Author is represented by Books & Such Literary Agency.
Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and postconsumer waste whenever possible.
To Joanne, for everything.
A friend is someone
who knows the song in your heart
and can sing it back to you
when you have forgotten the words.
—Unknown
Thank you for singing it back, time and again.
You’re treasure, and you’re treasured.
Contents
Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Historical Note
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
The mountains will bring peace
to the people. . . .
Psalm 72:3
Prologue
Mercy Peak Gulch, Colorado
San Juan Mountain Range of the Rockies
1894
Blood moons were made for pact-swearing. Four boys orbiting ten years old knew it, and so did the mountains standing witness.
They were an unlikely group, but life up here did that. Remote and rugged, so beautiful it’d cut you to the quick just as sure as the peaks sliced the air and brought down the heavens in the form of stars and storms.
Silas Bright led the charge, tonight and always. He was the one rapping on doors, throwing pebbles at windows, rallying troops. Short in stature but he moved worlds, Silas did, with a heart bigger than the sky.
Martin Shaw had come west on an orphan train. Its chuff-chuff-chuff had rattled into his spine for so many miles it got caught there for the rest of his life, till everything he did had rhythm and drive. He jumped off that train in the Rockies and ran for the hills: prospecting, digging, working odd jobs until someone lassoed him up into school.
Reuben Murdock was the quiet one. Still waters run deep, they say, and for Reuben it was God’s honest truth. Kind and sincere, a gentle giant whose little sister toddled after him like a shadow.
Randolph Gilman was a tall, lean, walking ledger of calculations. He had an affinity for logic in a world that made no sense most times. Head and shoulders above the rest, Randolph could cut a course out of granite, given enough time and numbers.
Those Blood Moon Boys ran with everything they had, Silas whooping when they reached the top of the butte. Dust flew up at their heels as they stopped on the precipice of something so great they could feel it beating in the air. They lit a fire to seal their promise, there on the edge of forever.
“Swear it,” Martin Shaw said, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. “Any of us finds treasure out here in these mountains, we all get behind that man. None of this backstabbing, money-grabbing, no-good—”
“Crying crayfish, Marty,” said Silas Bright. “That book got you worked up good!” The teacher had been reading Treasure Island to them at school, and Martin had piped up nearly every chapter with questions about why people were turning on one another, why maps were the cause of so many problems, why treasure seemed like something good but turned so many to poison—why this, why that, why such things happened around here, too.
“We’ll use what we find for good, and we won’t get all rotten, and we’ll take good care of any claim we find. That’s all I’m saying. We should swear it, and quick.” He eyed the moon. It’d be a plain old white moon again soon, and then who knew what’d happen to pacts sworn under it. “And we’ll sign it in writing, too.”
“I think it’s a good idea.” Reuben Murdock scuffed his foot, words falling quiet to the earth, as his often did. “I don’t have the smarts for a plan, but you can count on me.” He shrugged a shoulder, the burlap sack slung over it bobbing the neck of an instrument upward. He set the sack down, brought out a guitar. Retreated to where the glow of the fire barely touched him and summoned notes from steel.
“We’re the future of these mountains, boys,” Martin said. The vision was rising up within him. “You see all those people leavin’ in droves. We won’t leave. These mountains raised us, and we’re going to raise these mountains up from this ‘silver slump.’ But when we get our hands on something good, it ain’t gonna ruin us. Not like what we’ve seen around, and not like that wretched old book!”
“We can’t raise the mountains,” Randolph Gilman, literal to his very bones, tried to make the words add up.
“That’s not what I meant. In all this mess with the silver crash . . . if we can stick it out, boys . . . five, ten years from now, we’ll see this place right.”
“In five or ten years, we’ll be about . . .” Randolph calculated lightning-quick. “Fifteen or twenty. Do you see any fifteen-year-old sheriffs or superintendents around?” He scratched his head through impeccably combed dark hair.
“Well, you won’t, that’s for sure,” said Martin. “Deserting us for that fancy school. You in or out of this?”
“It’s not my choice,” he said. “I have to go, it’s all arranged. And anyway . . . Manchester Meeks isn’t so bad as far as schools go.”
“Who you gonna play kick the can with around there?” Silas Bright kicked a rock into the fire, causing a swirl of sparks to coil up toward the red moon. It was like him, Silas, to blow off the tension quick as a wink. “Ten cents says you won’t find friends there like us.” A grin spread across his freckled face. “Don’t worry, Rand. We’ll keep your place here. Right, Marty?”
Randolph tugged at his jacket, not sure where to look. “I’m not going for friends. I’m going to come back as an engineer. So I can vow as well—as good—as any of you gentlemen—you fellas—that I’m going to come back and help, too. Just watch.”
“Good man.” Martin nodded. “I swear this place isn’t done yet. There’s more mining to be had, I know it. You just gotta read this mountain like a story, it’ll show us. Our job’s just to not give up, even when the others do. So swear it, boys: We will not leave this place. We’re gonna be the ones to see it through, someday. Yeah?”
Randolph Gilman was the first one to step forward and stretch his hand out.
Martin let out a whoop. “Yessirree!” He spit into his hand, ready to pump Randolph Gilman’s promise into certainty.
“Now you spit, too,” he said.
“. . . spit?”
“Spit.”
“But that isn’t how the men at my father’s mine seal their contracts. They use ink and wax.”
“Listen, if you mean it enough to shake on it, you better mean it enough to give it something from way down deep inside your soul.”
“And that’s . . . spit?”
“Spit.”
Randolph shook his head but took a step closer.
And as the mountains bore witness and the blood moon slipped to white, the boys spit into their hands and shook all around. On their honor, cross their hearts, hope to die, avenge each other’s death, brothers to the end, and above all, someday pull enough riches from this dying mountain to bring it back to life.
So when they took their spit-smeared, handshake-sealed promise to the back of a scrap of brown postal paper, wrinkled and peaked like the mountains, and signed their names with the tail feather of a bald eagle because—according to Martin—“it means more that way, like our promise came from the sky or somethin’ . . .”
It meant something, alright.
Enough for Martin Shaw, the visionary, to grow up into a prospector who never gave up searching every gully and gulch, every pinnacle and peak.
Enough for Silas Bright, who never knew a stranger and grew up toiling in those very mines, to recount that legendary night to his bride and daughter, all through the girl’s growing-up years.
Enough for Reuben Murdock, the gentle giant whose fingers brought magic to strings and who was perhaps the unlikeliest to break the vow—to leave. A man shattered. Gone, they feared, forever.
And enough for Randolph Gilman, bona fide engineer, sole heir to Gilcrest Mine & Holdings, to hang onto that wrinkled charter. Buried beneath decades of ledgers, plans, and a snuffed-out conscience. Sealing the silence of a legend . . . and the whereabouts of a treasure that could change everything.
But a promise meant something in Mercy Peak. And when Martin Shaw came shivering down from the mountain one winter, summoning Randolph Gilman and Silas Bright back to the place of their pact, they showed up. Martin was bound for Denver, to verify he’d found what he thought he found, at a claim he would not yet tell where. But knowing well his own mortality and not willing to let the treasure languish when it could do so much good, he gave the two men each a piece of a puzzle.
For Randolph, a brass capsule, containing a riddle that was useless without a key.
For Silas, that key, in the form of something tucked into a box. Useless, without the riddle.
For Reuben, absent Reuben, a prayer that if the worst happened and these men needed to use the gifts he’d imparted . . . the loss of Martin’s own life might prove to be the rescuing of another.
If anything happened to Martin, the men would need each other to find the treasure.
The pact would hold fast . . . come what may.
It had to.
MERCY PEAK
A Screenplay in Three Acts
Written: 1949
By: Sidney McGee
ACT I
THE VANISHING OF MERCY WINDSOR
Scene 1
NEWSPAPER, HOLLYWOOD HERALD, SPINS TO A STOP. CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON HEADLINE.
SILVER SCREEN STAR VANISHES
SECOND NEWSPAPER, SILVER SCREEN TIMES, THROWN ON TOP. HEADLINE READS
WHERE IS MERCY WINDSOR?
THIRD NEWSPAPER, HOLLYWOOD HERALD, SPINS TO A STOP. HEADLINE READS
WHO IS MARYBETH SPATTS? AFTER DISAPPEARANCE, MERCY WINDSOR’S HUMBLE BEGINNINGS COME TO LIGHT
ENVELOPE SPINS TO A STANDSTILL AS CAMERA ZOOMS IN.
PAN-AMERICAN YOUTH CORRESPONDENCE PROGRAM 1928
CUT TO CAROLINA SCHOOLHOUSE. INTERIOR—SCHOOLHOUSE WITH POTBELLIED STOVE IN CORNER, CHILDREN AT DESKS IN ROWS.
MARYBETH SPATTS, 10, opens ENVELOPE. At teacher’s prompting, children begin to read opening paragraph of their letters aloud together:
CHILDREN (in unison)
Dear [children all insert their own name], It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking part in the new initiative to promote friendship, literacy, and cross-geographic personal educational encounters through the Pan-American Correspondence Program. I send you greetings from the mountainous terrain of Telluride, Colorado. . . .
Marybeth, dark hair in long and wobbly braids as if she has made them herself, looks around, quickly realizing her correspondent did not use the same opening sentences as others, and is not from Telluride. She slips a little lower in her chair and starts to read silently.
RUSTY (off screen)
Rusty Bright, age 10
Mercy Peak, Colorado
1928
Dear Friend,
What's your name? Mine's Ruby, but they all call me Rusty, on account of the time I jimmied the lock of the old church door to let out a trapped cat. I picked the lock with a rusty nail. Carried it (the cat, not the nail) to Miss Murdock’s over the river on Whistler’s Bridge. By the time I got to Miss Murdock’s, that cat was yowlering and looking like its stripey orange face got stuck in a blast of wind. Miss Murdock wasn’t home, so I picked her lock too, let the cat loose inside, locked the door good. You got any pets, Marybeth?
Marybeth looks up, thinking. Fade to footage of Marybeth feeding the squirrels on the hill behind her house, its open windows dark as a worn curtain ripples outward in the background. Fade back to schoolroom scene, where Rusty’s voice continues reading letter.
Miss Murdock asked how I broke into the church, and she sort of had the same look on her face as the cat did, with the wind and fangs and all. I told her I picked the lock with an old nail I found in the dirt. Then she saw how tore up my good green dress was from the cat and her face looked even more cat-in-the-wind-y, and soon folks all around were saying how there wasn’t much I couldn’t do with a rusty nail.
So that’s how I got my name, even though Miss Murdock says nicknames are vulgar. Says I need a good woman’s influence. Well, I had that once. Dad says I might not remember my ma—she died when I was a baby—but that she loved me big enough to last a lifetime and make me richer than all the metals he mines for in these mountains. Then he slides a slab of corn bread in front of me and says, “Eat up!” He doesn’t know many things to cook, but what he does is good enough to make a rock rise up and eat it. Your dad or ma cook anything good, Marybeth Spatts?
FADE TO FOOTAGE OF MARYBETH COOKING DINNER IN A SMALL CABIN KITCHEN AND PUTTING IT ON THE TABLE FOR TWO, THEN WAITING AS THE CLOCK SHOWS AN HOUR GOING BY AND THE FOOD GROWING COLD BEFORE HER FATHER, A COAL MINER, TROMPS IN, PICKS UP A ROLL OFF HIS PLATE, AND GOES TO LIE DOWN. FADE BACK TO SCHOOLROOM.
And now I’m supposed to ask you three good questions.
Here are the three best questions I could think of:
One: Why do spiders have eight whole legs? Eight! Just seems wrong.
Two: Why does Sam Buckley keep bringing plums in his lunch pail if he doesn’t like them? I take them off his hands, and keep the pits. His grandfather brought five pits with him when he came west, prospecting. Planted them all, and all died but one, and that’s where Sam’s plums come from.
Three: What is the meaning of life? I don’t really know what that question means, but I saw it on the cover of Miss Murdock’s Harper’s Bazar. She says she’s a bastion of civility here in the mountain wilderness. I wonder what that means.
