Betina Krahn (40 page)

She wanted to shake him, to make him turn back to
her, to make him answer all the whys in her reeling mind and heart. But she realized he wasn’t just looking away, he was looking
at
something. The brightness beginning to light the horizon seemed oddly gray, though it was nowhere near the recently set sun. He was watching what seemed to be a distant horse and rider. She followed his gaze as he whipped it around to scan the southern horizon, and there was another dark form on horseback … with a similar plume of gray rising in his wake.

“Dammit!” Bear pivoted and charged back toward the train, bellowing from the bottom of his lungs “Fire—range fire!”

She stood for a moment, watching those horses and riders on distant rises, realizing numbly that they were dragging something behind them that was setting the prairie grass ablaze. She quickly looked from north to south … then to the west, where the dim glow of the sky silhouetted a third rider. Fire. On all sides.

Seizing her skirts, she began to run toward the train. Fire would soon be racing through the dry grasses toward them, closing in from all directions. By the time she reached their train car, she could hear Bear in the middle of camp, roaring orders, and could hear the shouts and scurrying of the men trying to rescue supplies and equipment. She raced toward him as he ordered men into the cab of the engine, and he turned just in time to catch her.

“Get in the car!” he ordered above the chaos. “Seal up the windows!”

“But Robbie—”

“I’ll find him!” He gave her a shove in that direction. “Go!”

She barely had time to reach the steps before she heard the sound of coal hitting the metal of the firebox. They were going to try to move the train before the fire closed in. She looked up from the platform and saw the night sky
filling with feathers of gray smoke around them. In the last few days they had made so little progress on the track, they had let the engine cool considerably. There was no guarantee they could get it hot enough to generate power in time.

Bear was apparently coming to that same conclusion. He began ordering the men to grab shovels and head toward the fire. Diamond watched them hesitate and look at each other, then at the train that was preparing to move and leave them behind.

“Come on—we’ve got to build a firebreak—clear the brush out of the way!” Reading their hesitation, Bear stalked back and picked up a shovel himself and started off toward the rising smoke. A handful of men followed; the others hung back, muttering among themselves, uncertain whether Bear’s orders would lead them toward safety or toward greater calamity.

Diamond watched with her heart in her throat as they judged Bear’s leadership and found it wanting. He hadn’t exactly endeared himself to them with his constant pushing and his volatile behavior. And now when the chips were down …

Just then Robbie came running up the track and Diamond grabbed him by the arm and turned him back around. “Go find Silky and stay with her!” She gave him a maternal shove toward the kitchen car, then jumped off the platform and headed for the center of camp.

She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do until she reached the middle of camp and scorched the lot of them with her most compelling glare.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” She reached for the nearest shovel, pulling it from the startled man’s grasp. Lets go.

It took only a split second for them to realize that she was going with her man to fight this fire. If
she
had that
much faith in his judgment, then … They headed after her, dipping their kerchiefs in a bucket as they went. They spread out into a line, each man keeping within sight of the others. Somewhere along the way, someone handed her a wetted kerchief and she looked over to watch him tying his own over his nose and mouth. She followed suit and soon realized why. The smoke that had seemed so clear and defined was suddenly all around them, threatening to engulf them and take away all sense of direction.

“Clear the brush!” The order came down the line, passed from man to man. “Back ten feet. “Turn dirt only when you have to!”

They fell to work with a fury, pulling clumps of grass, hacking at roots, jabbing spades of dirt from the earth … ripping back the dry vegetation with hands and shovels and ballast forks. The smoke thickened around them, threatening to isolate them from each other, and they called to each other to work faster and pull back.

The sharp-edged grasses and tough stalks of scrub sage bit into Diamond’s hands and her foot slipped again and again from the shovel, causing her to scar her boots and grit her teeth. Before long her back ached and her shoulders were screaming and her hands and lungs both felt raw. But the earth barrier was widening and when they reached the ten-foot margin she was able to straighten, rest her shovel on her shoulder, and arch her aching back. She didn’t have long to rest.

“Good enough here—let’s move!” came a familiar roar that seemed smoke-strained and hoarse. She turned to find Bear charging down the line, waving the workers on to a new section. He saw her, standing there with her face half-covered with a kerchief, her eyes red from smoke, and her skirts raised and tucked out of the way, and stopped dead. She was too tired and air-starved to try to evade him.

Above the kerchief he wore across his lower face, she
glimpsed both fury and pain in his eyes. But a moment later, he waved her and the others on. As she lifted her shovel and hurried past him, he wrapped an arm around her waist and propelled her along with him.

She had no time to think, beyond the fact that he had grudgingly accepted her presence among them. When they reached an area where the fire was some distance away, she took a place in line and began once again to grub out vegetation to extend that fire break.

The digging and pulling and spading and cutting seemed to go on and on. They worked around in a circle until they reached the tracks then hurried across them. Spotting the plumes of smoke on the other side, they staked out a line and began all over again. Just as they were beginning to flag, Halt arrived with a score of men from the forward camp and bolstered their sagging effort.

Nearly two frantic hours after they had begun, the fire reached the first firebreak, stopped, and began to burn itself out. Their only assurance of that was a lessening of smoke in the area they had first cleared. Then the breeze shifted slightly, the smoke began to lift, and they were able to send a detail with shovels right up to the fire itself. The crews beat and shoveled dirt on the smoldering grasses until the greatest threat was past.

Posting linesmen to walk the fire line, checking for restarts, Bear pulled the kerchief down from his face and waded into the middle of the men sprawled on a gentle slope overlooking what had been their base camp. The tents were sagging and forlorn, there were heaps of crates and boxes here and there, and piles of wood being dressed for ties. He leaned on his shovel, staring out over the smoky, blackened earth that ran like a jagged scar across the rolling countryside. Through the center of that blackened ring, like an arrow caught in flight, ran a pair of empty steel rails. The engineer had managed to get the
engine running and backed the train down the track, leaving nothing visible except the rails they had labored so hard to lay. A track that went nowhere. For a railroad that didn’t exist.

He had worked so hard, struggled for so long … for what? For a pair of steel rails that ran across a wasteland into nothingness? Unable to bear the sight and the emptiness it opened inside him, he turned away, and spotted Diamond sitting on a rock outcropping on the top of the nearby ridge. She was hanging on to a shovel and had propped her head against the handle. Her forehead and hair were sooty from the smoke and her once-pristine clothes were as grimy as any of the men’s.

Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined her like this. Duty, exhausted, hands probably full of blisters—for the first time. She hadn’t tucked herself safely away, hadn’t hidden from the terror around her. She had picked up a shovel and charged into the smoke and flames ahead of many of his men.

Why would she do such a thing? Why the devil would she risk her health and safety to help him save his railroad when—like a giant horse’s arse!—he’d just told her that he didn’t
need
her?

“You’re so determined to keep the Montana Central and Mountain all to yourself …” Her face appeared in his memory. “… selfish and prideful and hurtful …” He
had
hurt her. He had tried to put her in her place, to demand that she sit still and behave like a good little wife while he strutted and roared … and floundered … trying to prove that there was something of value inside him.

And still she rushed out to help him.

She was who she was, her actions said. He couldn’t change that. Nor, he realized with humbling insight, would he want to. Then what was he trying to do? He
loved her just as she was … the helpful, ingenious, interfering, loyal-to-a-fault, forgiving woman that she was. Loving woman that she was.

He
loved
her.

He suddenly felt as if blinders had fallen from his eyes. A wave of weakness hit his knees. He was stubborn and prideful and ridiculous and selfish and arrogant. And she still came out to help him. He had tried to keep her at arm’s length while still trying to hold her. And still she came out to help him …

“Bear!” Halt came trudging up the slope, using his shovel as a support.

Bear tore his gaze from Diamond. “Damned good thing you got here when you did.”

“We’d ’ave been here sooner, but we run into a bit of trouble. Come wi’ me, lad.” He struck off for the remnants of camp, pulling Bear along with him. A number of Halt’s men had gotten their second wind and shoved to their feet to head back to camp with Bear and Halt.

When they reached the middle of the camp, Bear found two men lying on the ground, trussed hand and foot. Halt rolled one over with his foot.

“Caught them two and one of Beecher’s hired guns pourin’ pitch over brush … preparin’ to set it afire and drag it. Beecher’s man got away, but we got these two.”

Bear stalked closer, scowling at the battered face and recognizing the man. He quickly jerked the other one over and the fellow coughed and spat dust.

“Carrick and Sikes.” He wasn’t too surprised. “Dammit—I should have known. You two have been nothing but trouble since the day I took you on.” Rage filled him. He grabbed Carrick by the collar and hoisted him up, shaking him like a dog does a bone. “You lyin’, sneakin’, low-down—you tried to burn us out!”

Halt stepped in to keep Bear from venting his full fury
on the pair. When Bear dropped Carrick back on the ground, the thug managed a chilling laugh.

“Yeah, we done it. Set this here fire. Beecher told us to.”

“And the tools”—Bear insisted—“you took them, too!”

Sikes snorted, his eyes filled with sullen defiance. “Ain’t all we took.”

There was a taunt in his tone that made everyone in earshot brace.

“Yeah?” Bear set a boot down on the wretch’s throat. “What else?”

There was a long, suspenseful moment while Sikes realized that both the fury in Bear’s eye and the pressure from his boot would only worsen. The answer, whispered hoarsely, had the effect of a thunderclap.

“Dynamite.”

Bear looked up at Halt, who wheeled and headed for the sagging supply tent. Moments later he was back with a grim confirmation. A good portion of their dynamite was missing. Bear’s blood suddenly ran cold in his veins.

“Talk!” He jammed his boot against the thug’s neck again. “What’s he going to do with it?”

“Too late, boss man.” Sikes gave him a malicious smirk that showed the blood on his yellowed teeth. “It’s a’ready done.”

Bear wheeled, his mind racing, and ordered the camp torn upside down. They were sitting on a powder keg. But as Halt and the men raced to uncover the dynamite, Carrick gave a nasty laugh.

“Ye’ll never find it.”

Bear looked suddenly at the track—the train! They had planted it aboard the train! As he grabbed a crew of men and sent them rushing to saddle horses, he spotted Diamond and a number of the others returning to camp. He groaned and headed for her—thinking that he had to get her away from the camp.

Then it happened.

The ground rumbled. They felt deep, powerful vibrations that trembled them all the way to their fingertips. The sound seemed to go on forever, quaking them, unnerving them. But then it stopped and all was deadly quiet.

It was a minute before the full impact struck Bear. There had been a blast, but where? His first thought was the train, but there was no light or smoke coming from the horizon north and west, along the track leading to their engine and cars. He scanned the rest of the horizon until he came to an eerie light blooming along the northeastern ridge.

“That’s not our track or the forward camp. What could Beecher possibly—” He looked at Halt, then at Diamond, frowning.

“The closest thing in that direction,” Diamond said, scarcely realizing what she said, “is the Danvers place.”

A few shocked heartbeats passed.

“Oh, God …” Bear closed his eyes, but quickly reopened them. “The Danverses. The bastard’s dynamited their farm.”

For the second time, Bear ordered his men to grab shovels and blankets. This time they mounted horses and piled into the two supply wagons, setting off at a breakneck pace over the rolling plain toward the Danvers farmstead.

Diamond had struggled to saddle a horse, and Bear—thinking of the fire, devastation, and perhaps even death that might lie ahead at the Danvers place—had almost ordered her to remain behind. Then he thought of Luanna Danvers and of Diamond’s determined and much-needed help earlier. He shouldered her aside and lifted the saddle into place and tightened the cinch for her. When he
helped her up into the saddle and glanced up at her, her eyes were glistening strangely.

By the time they reached the last rise overlooking the Danvers farm, they already knew there was fire, and plenty of it. Columns of smoke illuminated by flames below had been visible for some time, and the smell of burning wood—so different from the smoke of the brush fire-reached them well before they arrived. Still, none of them was prepared for the sight of wooden buildings lying in a thousand pieces all over the yard. Timbers and boards, twisted bits of metal, and charred grain had been blown in all directions. The surrounding slopes were littered with debris and the remnants of the house and main barn were both still burning.