Elizabeth Grayson (26 page)

She’d made her choice. Yet as sure as she was that she must give Chase back his freedom, Ann was going to miss coming here, being a part of this.

Even now a contingent of women was clustering at the foot of the gangway to visit with her and Christina.

“Oh, isn’t Christina the dearest little thing?” Chase’s sister D’arcy crooned the moment Ann’s shoe soles hit dry land. “May I hold her?”

Ann eased the baby into her sister-in-law’s arms and watched D’arcy’s wide mouth bow and her broad face soften as she cooed to her niece. Clearly D’arcy needed children of her own, and Ann decided to ask Evangeline if there was a particular suitor her sister fancied. Then all at once, Ann realized she wasn’t going to be around to see D’arcy marry. She’d never meet Chase’s brother Quinn who was away at medical school, or Millie who’d gone with her husband to homestead in Nebraska.

Ann’s throat clogged with regret when she considered a hundred conversations she’d never have, the family recipes she’d never learn to make, and all the years she’d never share with the people who’d become so dear to her. She might have wept right then and there if Silas Jenkins hadn’t poked his head over Suzanne’s broad shoulder for a look at the baby.

“You know, Ann,” he offered. “She may not have your coloring, but I think Christina is going to have that dimple in her chin, just like yours.”

“And there’s something about the shape of her eyes ...” his wife agreed.

Ann could have hugged both Suzanne and Silas. She hadn’t realized how eager she’d been for someone to see a resemblance between her and her daughter.

“What I want to know,” Benjamin asked as he and Bartholomew insinuated themselves on either side of D’arcy, “is whether that baby is ever going to get real hair.”

“Benjamin!” the women chorused, admonishing him.

“As I recall,” Lydia said, coming up behind her son and ruffling his curls, “you and your brother were bald as horse chestnuts ’til you were a year old.”

“Aw, Ma!” Bartholomew shouted and both boys ran off.

Lydia watched them go, then turned her attention to the baby. “I’m claiming a grandmother’s privilege,” she declared and gathered Christina out of D’arcy’s arms.

She held the baby in the crook of one elbow and stroked her cheek. Christina gurgled contentedly.

Lydia glanced from the baby to Ann. “You’ve taken to mothering like a duck to water, now, haven’t you, girl?”

No words had ever caught Ann so much by surprise or pleased her more than Lydia’s praise. She lowered her lashes to shield a sudden wash of teary gratitude. “Chase and Evangeline showed me what to do.”

“No, it’s more than that,” Lydia continued, beginning to sway. “Some women take to mothering like it’s natural as breathing. I think you’re one of them.”

“Now, me,” Suzanne said, saving Ann from having to answer. “I barely knew which end of my children to diaper until they were six weeks old.”

Then, as if to belie his mother’s words, Matt ran up and threw his arms around her waist. “Can I go with Cal and Barney to see the engine room?”

When she nodded, he ran off whooping.

“It’s not ’til children get about Matt’s age that they get interesting,” Suzanne qualified. Silas slipped his arm around her waist and gave her a proprietary squeeze.

Ann glanced hastily away. She and Chase would never share that kind of easy affection. They would never set off sparks when they looked at each other the way Etta Mae and Will did. They could never aspire to the kind of enduring love that had kept Enoch and Lydia together for more than thirty years.

Just seeing the Hardestys together reinforced her decision to leave. She’d failed as Chase’s wife, and she couldn’t think of anything in her life that had grieved her more.

AFTER TWO DAYS OF TRYING TO SPEAK TO RUE ALONE, Chase finally caught up with his brother just as he was passing out the last of the candy he’d brought for the children.

“That’s all the licorice,” the younger man announced with a flutter of his hands.

“Next time, Uncle Rue,” Katie asked him, “could you bring us
my
favorite candy?”

“I’ll bring anything you want, sweetheart,” Rue promised.

“Then bring peppermints,” Katie cried and scampered away.

“Ma won’t thank you for giving them sweets if it rots their teeth,” Chase admonished as he ambled closer.

“A little treat never hurt anyone,” Rue retorted and produced two cheroots from the inside pocket of his jacket.

Chase accepted one of the cigars, and then a light. He wasn’t sure how to broach the subject he’d come to discuss, but Rue saved him the trouble.

“What you want to ask me is about the landing yesterday morning, isn’t it?”

The hair rippled at the back of Chase’s neck. “Did Skirlin tell you what we were delivering?”

Chase had gone over and over that landing in his mind, doing his best to convince himself it was just like the scores of others they made in the course of a run.

“Skirlin came up to the wheelhouse about half an hour after we got underway,” Rue went on. “He told me we’d missed a delivery on the upstream run and that someone would flag us down.”

Chase licked his lips before he spoke. “Did you—did you think about what Barnaby Greene said that night at Fort Benton?”

“Not until I saw the boxes.”

“Jesus, Rue!” He ran his hand through his hair. “Do you think we just delivered Spencer carbines for the Indians?”

Rue reached across and squeezed his arm. “We don’t know that’s what they were.”

Chase was suddenly glad for the din of half a hundred voices around them. “God knows, there’d be big money in running guns. With the troubles the Sioux and Cheyenne are causing along the Bozeman Trail, repeating rifles are worth their weight in gold.”

“It’s a long pull between here and Wyoming,” Rue argued. “Though that fellow was a freighter, wasn’t he?”

A frisson of recognition ran the length of Chase’s back. He’d noticed the mules and his high-sided wagon parked back in the trees. “You think Curry and Skirlin are the ones behind this?”

“Whatever’s going on,” Rue said with a shake of his head, “we’re going to need proof before we go to the authorities.”

Chase knew that, too.

“And, Chase—” Rue waited until Chase acknowledged him with the lift of his chin. “There’s no way you could have known we were carrying rifles.”

“The
Andromeda
’s my responsibility,” Chase said under his breath. “I should have known.”

They were just finishing their cigars when Lydia Hardesty came bustling in their direction.

“She after you or me?” Rue asked laconically.

“Can’t be me she wants,” Chase murmured.
“I
haven’t done anything wrong.”

But it was him his mother wanted.

“So how’s Evangeline doing on her own?” Lydia demanded once she’d hugged Rue and sent him ambling back to the boat.

Chase glanced toward where Evie bent her dark, curly head close to Mary Alice’s blonde one. “Evie’s been wonderful with Christina,” Chase reported, “and a big help to Ann. She wouldn’t be back to baking if Evie wasn’t aboard to help with the baby.”

“Well, it was time Evangeline saw a bit more of the world than we can show her. She was getting restless,” Lydia confided, “and I wasn’t sure what to do with her.”

“We’re glad to have her.”

“And how is Rue?”

She wanted an accounting, so Chase told her.

“I can see how Ann is. How are you?” she finally asked him.

Chase’s gaze lingered on Ann, the clean, graceful lines of her profile, the way the honey-colored swag of hair draped along the line of her jaw as she bent over their daughter. Something powerful and bittersweet tightened in his chest.

“I’m fine.”

“Are you, boy?”

Ma had always seen through him like he was water, so it shouldn’t have surprised him that she’d recognized the longing in his eyes when he looked at his wife.

“I love her, Ma,” he admitted, “but I’m not sure this marriage is going to work out. She doesn’t want—” Chase flushed at what he’d been about to admit to his mother, then went ahead anyway. “Ann doesn’t want to lie with me. Everytime I try to touch her she draws away. It makes me wonder if something happened. If she was—”

The word stuck in his throat.

Lydia pursed her lips, and Chase thought for a moment his mother wasn’t going to answer him. Then she reached up and smoothed back his hair as if he were a child and not a man towering over her.

“You give Annie time,” she advised softly. “I think she needs all the love and understanding you’ve got to give her. If that’s what happened, then she’s got good reason to be afraid, and probably some things to figure out before she can see her way clear to turn to you. So you be patient.”

“I’ll try, Ma.”

“And when you and Ann come together—”

Chase nodded.

“—you take care with her.”

“I will.”

Her green eyes glowed when she smiled up at him. “You were always such a good boy, Chase, and you’ve grown into such a good man. Your father and I have always been so proud of you.”

He turned to look at the tall, broad-shouldered man talking to Rue at the foot of the
Andromeda
’s gangway.

The notion that his father might be proud of him whip-sawed through him, cutting once with the quick, sharp joy of thinking it might be true and again with a bitter surge of disbelief.

“I’m glad, Ma,” he said with an edge to his voice.

Lydia opened her mouth and closed it again.

Just then, Joel Curry shouted that the wood they’d needed was stacked in the bow. Chase could hear that Cal was limbering up the paddle wheel.

He bent and gave his mother a final hug, then stared toward the steamer. It was time to go.

And maybe he was glad of it.

chapter twelve

ANN CHERISHED EACH DAY OF THE ANDROMEDA’S second packet run as if they were pearls on a string. She took joy in the boats they passed, the landings they made, the banks lush with summer growth. She lingered over the luminous dawn and glowing sunsets, savored the sound of crickets
cheep
ing in the dark and the sultry scent of the evening breeze.

She spent extra time with the passengers and the crew. She visited with the women in the ladies’ salon and sat with Barney and Cal after supper when Cal smoked his pipe. She helped Beck Morgan write a love letter to a girl in Cairo he was sweet on, and did another mountain of mending for the roustabouts. She took delight in her nights in Frenchy’s galley. She savored their outbound stop at Hardesty’s Landing—the second to last time she and Christina would visit Chase’s family.

She hoarded memories of everyone aboard—but especially of Chase. How he’d brought her an armload of black-eyed Susans one afternoon while they were wooding up. The way he tucked Christina into the crook of his arm and carried her around as he went about his duties. How sometimes when he was standing watch on the hurricane deck, he’d grin like he owned the world.

Now that she was leaving, Ann realized just how deeply she’d fallen in love with Chase. But instead of that love bringing her joy, it intensified the ache of regret. Loving him couldn’t free Ann from the past; it didn’t change who Christina’s father was. It didn’t alter that no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t be the wife Chase needed her to be. She had to leave for all their sakes, before she ruined everything.

The
Andromeda
was a day and a half out of Sioux City on the downstream run when one of the deckhands
thump
ed on the door to Ann’s cabin.

“Mr. Watkins said to come see if you have anything for burns,” he told her.

Since the incident with the bees, Ann was the one the men came to when they needed tending. So she left Christina in Evie’s care, and grabbed up her basket of ointments and bandages.

When she reached the steamer’s wide main deck Cal Watkins was ranting at two young rousters who were stripped to the waist and draped in dripping compresses.

“You damn fools!” he fumed. “Why the devil were you sleeping under those steam gauges? Didn’t you know you could get burned?”

Judging by their reddened skin, neither Billy Martin nor Nate Ogden had realized the danger.

Ann hunkered down among the barrels and crates in the open section of the steamer’s lower deck and quickly examined both the men. “Those burns may hurt,” she sympathized when she was done, “but they really aren’t all that serious.”

“It was good of you to come down, Mrs. Hardesty,” Cal offered in aggravation, “to look after such fools as these.”

“Well, I’ve got just the thing for those burns,” she said, and pried the lid off a jar of thick, brownish ointment. All three of the men leaned away to escape the smell.

“I don’t know which is worse, Mr. Watkins,” Billy Martin began, “the burns or
that a-romer
!”

Just then the bells in the engine room rang, and Cal hurried off to answer them, with Barney romping at his heels.

“Go ahead and use that stuff on them,” he shouted back. “Can’t make ’em smell much worse than they do already!”

Ann was still dabbing Nate and Billy when Rue happened by a few minutes later. “Why on earth are you anointing those boys with that noxious goo?” he demanded, taking out a handkerchief to wave beneath his nose.

“We run afoul of them steam gauges,” Billy spoke up. “This stuff may be rank as a skunk’s hole, but Mrs. Hardesty claims it works wonders on burns.”

“Well, it does,” Rue agreed, flashing a grin. “But I’d think twice about letting her dab me with a mixture of bear grease, scorpion gizzard, and horse piss!”

Both men turned to Ann askance.

Ann refused to be outdone by Rue’s blandishments. “It’s an old family recipe,” she averred, “passed down from a witch in medieval France.”

“My ma’s folks was from the middle of France,” Nate put in.

Rue burst out laughing. “Well, the captain certainly does swear by that salve’s curative properties.”

“You used this on the cap’n, ma’am?”

“The night he brought those two tykes out of the fire,” Ann assured them. “Only the captain didn’t snivel about the smell.”

Both men looked awed, as if they hoped the ointment would inoculate them with that same kind of daring. “Well, you know,” Billy ventured, “it
does
kind of smell like horse piss!”

Ann bit back a laugh and glared at Rue. “Thank you so much for opening this particular avenue of conjecture.”

Rue grinned back. “Glad to help.”

But when Ann glanced up a moment later, Rue seemed intent on something going on at the far side of the deck. Though Ann craned her neck, she didn’t see anything unusual—just Joel Curry and Jake Skirlin wrestling boxes out of the hold.

“Rue?” she began.

Though Rue gestured her to silence, Curry turned at the sound of her voice. The mate said something to Skirlin, then Skirlin looked across at them, too.

It was an odd moment, though Ann couldn’t say exactly why.

Then Rue pushed to his feet and ambled toward them. He made some comment Ann couldn’t hear, laughed at Skirlin’s answer, then continued on back to the engine room.

Ann had just finished bandaging Nate and Billy’s burns when Barney started barking on the far side of the deck. Something about the sharp, frantic sound of it brought Ann to her feet and sent her rushing in that direction. She reached the starboard side just as Rue crashed through the steamer’s railing and fell backwards into the river.

“Rue!” she screamed, knowing he’d be dragged right under the boat and into the paddle wheel. “Rue!”

“Man overboard!” Curry bellowed from just behind her, then flung one of the steamer’s long, cork floats into the water.

The
Andromeda
’s speed immediately lagged.

“Rue!” Ann yelled, leaning over the edge of the deck and peering into the water. “Damn it, Rue! Where are you?”

There was no sign of her brother-in-law. Not so much as a trail of bubbles.

She heard footsteps thunder overhead and a man leaped from the deck above. As he plunged into the water, Ann caught a glimpse of his clothes and hair—and realized it was her husband.

Ann grabbed one of the uprights and hung as far over the guard as she dared. How deep was the water here? Were there rocks at the bottom to break Chase’s legs, or branches to snag him? Could Chase even swim? And if he could, what chance did he have of finding Rue down there in the silt and the darkness?

Endless seconds dragged by. Ann’s heart rattled around inside her chest like a coin in a box.

“Please,” she whispered, her entire prayer in a single word.

At last Chase bobbed to the surface a good way upstream and off the starboard side. He glanced around to get his bearings, gasped for breath and dove again.

Beck Morgan leaped into action. “Throw more floats!” he shouted. “Prepare to launch the yawl!”

The deckhands scrambled to obey.

Once the skiff was afloat, Morgan, Curry, and several deckhands climbed aboard. They rowed out a half a dozen yards and held their position, preparing to haul either living men or dead ones out of the river.

Ann stared at the water, but could see no more than its dark, impenetrable surface.

Her breath quivered in her throat. How could Chase hope to find his brother in that murk and debris? If finding Rue became hopeless, would she be able to convince him to stop looking?
And if Rue died, would her husband be
able to live with himself?

Then from near at hand Ann heard a tremulous, high-pitched whimper and turned to find Evangeline standing at the foot of the stairs clutching the baby against her chest.

“Oh, Ann!” Evie sobbed. “Did Rue really fall overboard?”

“Chase has gone in after him,” Ann reassured her, sweeping both Evie and Christina up in her arms. “Beck Morgan’s taken out the yawl. He’ll pick them up as soon as they surface.”

“Chase
will
save Rue, won’t he?”

Ann looked into Evie’s teary eyes. “Hasn’t Chase been pulling Rue out of scrapes his whole life long?”

Evie’s sniffle ended in a nervous giggle. “Then of course he’ll rescue him!”

Ann held Evie and the baby close as they waited.

“There!” someone on the boiler deck shouted. “There’s someone in the water a hundred yards astern and off to starboard.”

The men in the yawl set off rowing.

Ann shaded her eyes, trying to pick out a swimmer amid the tucks and the ruffles in the steamer’s wake.

“I see them!” Evie crowed.

Ann struggled to find the single dark shape on the river’s shifting surface. It was too far away to say if it was one man or two. She held her breath until the skiff pulled up alongside, until she saw Beck Morgan drag first one body and then a second into the boat.

A cheer went up as the yawl turned toward home.

Ann’s knees wobbled with relief. Then, because she didn’t know if both Chase and Rue were even going to be alive when the yawl pulled up alongside, she steered Evie toward the stairs.

“You take the baby on up to your stateroom while I—”

“Please, Ann!” the girl begged. “Don’t send me away.”

“I’m going to be busy taking care of your brothers,” she argued, “and I need to be sure Christina—”

“I
have
to know if they’re all right!”

Before Ann could think what more to say, the yawl bumped up against the side of the steamer. Chase sat hunched in the bottom of the skiff with Rue’s head pillowed in his lap.

“Is Rue all right?” Evangeline demanded.

“He’s still breathing,” her brother answered.

Ann read volumes in those three words. “There, you’ve seen your brothers,” she said. “Now go and do as I asked.”

Evie cast one last glance at where the deckhands were lifting Rue out of the yawl, then she started up the steps.

HE LOOKS LIKE HE’S ALREADY DEAD.”

Ann did her best to ignore her husband’s words as she worked over where Rue lay limp and gray in the center of the captain’s bunk. Except for the faint rattle when he breathed and the bloom of red seeping through the bandage around his head, she might have thought that, too.

“Are there any doctors aboard?” she asked him. “Does anyone know more about taking care of an injured man than I do?”

“Skirlin says there’s a faith healer among the deck passengers. He’s offered to lay on hands.”

What could it hurt?
Ann found herself thinking as she ran her palms along the sleek, angular lines of her brother-in-law’s body. She checked Rue’s right leg for breaks, then gently rotated his left to a more natural position. She braced it with pillows and wondered what she could use for splints.

“How is he?”

She could hear the dread in Chase’s voice and looked across to where he stood braced in the doorway between the bedroom and the sitting room. He was battered and scuffed himself, shivering in spite of the heat, and dripping all over the floor.

He could have been hurt every bit as badly as Rue. He might well have drowned trying to rescue his brother. Her hands shook knowing that, but she stifled the need to go to him, wrap Chase up in her arms, and hang on forever.

She turned to Rue instead. “Since he hasn’t stirred,” she began, “I think it’s likely he’s suffered a concussion. His left leg is broken, and while he’s unconscious I’m going to do what I can to stabilize it.”

Chase crossed the room and stood looking down at Rue.

“Considering how long he was in the water,” she went on, “his lungs sound remarkably clear.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Chase asked quietly.

“What isn’t good,” she said and dabbed at the bright pink foam forming at the corners of Rue’s mouth, “is that there’s blood in his saliva....”

Ann couldn’t say what that meant exactly, but she did know enough to be afraid for Rue’s life.

“I’ve given Lucien Boudreau orders to Hardesty’s Landing,” Chase went on.

She knew he’d do that, run for home. For Chase, home meant care and security and people who would be every bit as concerned for Rue as he was. If there had been a sizable town between here and Hardesty’s Landing, Ann might have argued. As it was, getting Rue to Lydia seemed his best chance for survival.

God knows, it was pure serendipity that young Boudreau, a pilot who’d begged passage downstream, had been in the wheelhouse when Rue went overboard. If he hadn’t, Chase couldn’t have left his post, and Rue most certainly would have been lost.

Ann slid her arm around her husband’s waist and, though it broke her heart to say the words, she knew Chase had to hear them. “You’ve got to accept that Rue may be too badly hurt for anyone to help him.”

He shook his head. “We’ll get Doc Meyers to tend him,” he insisted, laying a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Doc pulled Pa through snakebite and some of the younger children through scarlet fever. He’ll get Rue through this, too.”

Just then Rue coughed again and the froth of pink bubbled to his lips. Ann wiped it away, fear weighing on her heart.