Maeve hadn’t always felt this way. As a child she’d been enchanted by its history--Bennett Avenue with its trolleys and elegant National Hotel; Myers Avenue, one block south, teeming with  brothels, opium dens, dance halls and cribs for miners too poor to afford the high class whores at the Old Homestead House on the opposite end of the avenue. She too had been familiar with ghosts, though not the kind Nana Grace peddled. They peeked out from fading photographs in the Mooney library and local museums; flitted about Mt. Pisgah cemetery; watched and waited like shy children until Cripple was quiet save  for the occasional ding-ding-ding of slot machines, signaling it was safe to come out and play. 

 

What had it  been like when ragtime music wafted from saloons, when miners trooped in and out of assay offices, hardware, and department  stores, when workers and their wives dressed in their best to enjoy Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt at the  Cripple Creek Opera House? When mine explosions shook the earth and whistles shrieked shift changes or warned of  danger in the tunnels; when miners burrowed like voles thousands of feet down, extracting tons of ore in order to produce one ounce of gold? When newsboys shouted the day’s headlines  and swaggering mine owners displayed gold pocket watches adorned with jewels? When her great-great grandfather, Saint Paddy, as her family referred to him, had been responsible for turning the Western Federation of Miners  into Colorado’s most powerful union? 

Even now, their presence lingered like steam rising from a winter pond, though Cripple Creek had been reduced to T-shirt clad tourists and dead-eyed seniors with portable oxygen tanks mechanically yanking the arm of a slot machine. I’m destined for a much wider world, Maeve thought, glancing at her cellphone for the time. And nothing will stop me.