Charming Grace by Deborah Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

Dahlonega, Georgia’s major brushes with fame had been Mark Twain, Susan Hayward, and a corny silent western titled Tom Brown and the Shady Valley Gang.
    Ride fast, boys! Black Bart’s escapin’ up the ridge to that old west town that’s really a bunch of shacks left from an Appalachian gold mine. Watch out for the placer trenches and the mercury residue!
    Older Dahlonegans fondly remembered Susan Hayward’s sojourn in the mountains during the 1950’s, when the friendly, beautiful, tough-talking actress filmed Climb the Highest Mountain . Only a few rare centenarians recalled the creaky 1920’s silent western, filmed around old gold-mining camps that hadn’t yet been bulldozed or burned.
    Mark Twain’s connection to our town went back farther, to the 1840’s, when a leading citizen stood on the handsome little balcony of the Dahlonega courthouse begging a crowd of our gold miners not to heed rumors of easier pickings on the other side of the continent, in California.
    The first major U.S. gold rush happened in northern Georgia during the 1830’s, with Dahlonega at its epicenter. Within ten years every stream, river, gully, and trickle of gold-flecked water within easy reach was dug, sluiced, panned, and dredged. Most of the protesting Cherokee natives were rounded up and marched westward from a local fort in Auraria, a frontier community named after the Latin word for gold. Naming places after gold was, apparently, a pioneer hobby. Lumpkin County became a place of treasure hunters, saloons, brothels, red-clay mining trenches and all-purpose gangsta fortune seekers. Only a few pioneer burgermeisters and burger-ma’ams focused on forming a polite civilization out of the ore-speckled mud. My people, the Bagshaws, were among that self-anointed core who held on and held up.
    “Look at those hills, boys,” the top-hatted Dahlonega potentate orated to the disenchanted 1840’s miners, waving an arm at a fertile green mammoth called Crown Mountain. “There’s still millions in ‘em.”
    The miners left for California anyway, but liked the speech so much they took it with them, embellished it, and made it famous. Out west, a young gold-field writer named Samuel Clemmons heard the tale. And so, “There’s gold in them thar hills” eventually made it into a Mark Twain short story, and the rest was Cliff Note history.
    Until now.

    “Incoming! Noleene, run for your life!”
    Magnified by my high-tech earpiece, Tex Baker’s squeaky drawl made me jump like an armadillo on a New Orleans interstate. My spine tingled and everything soft drew up in self-defense.
    Incoming . Code for Diamond Senterra, the Stone Man’s 35-year-old baby sister. She was a swaggering stack of body-built womanhood with an emphasis on the hood. Diamond talked like a Jersey Teamster, played hit women and kick-ass villains in her big bro’s movies, sold her own line of workout clothes and vitamins on the Home Shopping Network, and had been Stone’s most trusted career advisor going back twenty years to his days as a pro wrestler. The fact that she hated me like cats hate dogs didn’t make my job easier. Every time I got fired, Diamond had pestered Stone into doing it. Every time Stone hired me back, she got madder.
    “It’s the she-beast?” I said into the mike clipped to my shirt collar.
    “Hell, yeah. With her fangs sharpened and her little pointy tail switching. Incoming! I mean it, pardner! Cover your balls and run for your life!”
    “She’s huntin’ for bear and once she gets her fangs in you you’re gonna be her bearskin rug, son,” Tex went on in my earphone. “I’ll take over the gate. You haul ass inside the house and hide .”
    Tex Baker was not normally scared of anyone or anything short of his four ex-wives. The tall ex marine had served two tours in Vietnam. He was also a retired cowboy and stunt man who’d wrangled for John Wayne in True Grit and a couple of other films. Now Tex worked for Stone, managing the Stone