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mountain. With the coming of warm days, a snow slide was an event waiting to happen.
    Marquez had seen an avalanche only once in his years on the mountain. The sheer magnitude of its beauty and power as it swept rocks, trees, and snow down a valley in great clouds, along with the rumbling sound of thunder, was something he had never forgotten.
    Finally, he set his hard hat on his head, slipped behind the wheel of the Chevy pickup, and started the engine, letting it idle for a couple of minutes to warm. Then he began cautiously driving up the narrow, unpaved road that led to the mine that once was the leading gold producer in the state of Colorado. His tires had made deep ruts in the snow after the last storm. He drove carefully as the road wound higher up the mountain. Very quickly, the drop-off along the edge stretched several hundred feet to the base. One uncontrolled skid and rescuers would be untangling Marquez’s broken body from his mangled pickup truck on the rocks far below.
    Local people thought him foolish for buying up the claims to the old Paradise Mine. Any gold worth extracting was long gone. And yet, except for a Telluride banker, no one would have dreamed that Marquez’s investment had made him a rich man. His profits from the mine were shrewdly invested in local real estate, and with the boom of the ski resort he had realized nearly two million dollars.
    Marquez was not interested in gold. For ten years, he had prospected around the world for gemstones. In Montana, Nevada, and Colorado, he had prowled the old abandoned gold and silver mines searching for mineral crystals that could be cut into precious gems. Inside one tunnel of the Paradise Mine, he discovered a vein of rose-pink crystals in what the old miners had considered worthless rock. The gemstone in its natural state, Marquez recognized, was rhodochrosite, a spectacular crystal found in various parts of the world in shades of pink and deep red.
    Rhodochrosite is seldom seen in cut or faceted form. Large crystals are in great demand by collectors, who have no desire to see them sliced to pieces. Clean, clear gems from the Paradise Mine that had been cut into flawless stones of eighteen carats were very expensive. Marquez knew he could retire and spend the rest of his life in style, but as long as the vein continued, he was determined to keep picking the stones from the granite until they petered out.
    He stopped his battered old truck with its scratched and dented fenders and stepped out in front of a huge rusty iron door with four different chains attached to four different locks. Inserting keys the size of a man’s palm, he unsnapped the locks and spread the chains. Then he took both hands and tugged the great door open. The moon’s rays penetrated a short distance down a sloping mine shaft and revealed a pair of rails that stretched off into the darkness.
    He fired up the engine mounted on a large portable generator, then pulled a lever on a junction box. The mine shaft was suddenly illuminated under a series of exposed lightbulbs that trailed down the shaft for a hundred yards before gradually growing smaller, until they became tiny glimmers in the distance. An ore cart sat on the rail tracks, attached to a cable that led to a winch. The cart was built to last, and the only sign of hard use was the rust on the sides of the bucket.
    Marquez climbed into the bucket and pressed a button on a remote control. The winch began to hum and play out the cable, allowing the ore cart to roll down the rails, propelled by nothing more than gravity. Going underground was not for the fainthearted or the claustrophobic. The confining shaft barely allowed clearance for the ore bucket. Timbers bolted together like door frames, known as a cap and post, were spaced every few feet to shore up the roof against cave-ins. Many of the timbers had rotted badly, but others were as solid and sound as the day they were set in place by miners who had long since passed on.