LITMIR.BIZ

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      Even as she ran, however, she heard solid footsteps coming up behind her. She could imagine she felt the shaking of the ground when she heard the rush of heavy breathing. She looked to find one of the older men, Mr. Reich, racing by her, slipping and catching himself on the wet grass and mud, paunch hanging past his belt. The wagon train’s scout, long-legged, raw-boned McDonald, ran barely a stride’s length behind Reich. Victoria tripped over another vine and finally lost her balance for good to land in a patch of muddy grass. Others rushed to her to help her up, but she urged them to follow Reich and McDonald.

      There was a sudden throng of rescuers, including Luella Ladue with her daughter. Luella surpassed all but the two first men, her light brown hair flying. She jumped into the creek with her grip on a thick vine connected to a gnarled oak tree.

      Victoria sat where she was for a few seconds, glad for the rescuers but still anxious. No one should be in the water. True, it wasn’t stagnant, but who knew how many stagnant pools and contaminated ponds now mingled with the running water? She’d seen too many cholera victims in her ten years of medical practice.

      Mrs. Ladue locked her free arm around her son’s middle. Luella was a strong woman, as she’d had to be since her husband’s death last year, but Victoria feared she might not be strong enough to fight the water and the tossing logs and trees...even worse, the contamination that could lurk in the water.

      “Luella, you’ve both got to get out of there now!” Victoria pulled herself to her feet. Despite her warning, others followed Luella’s lead and jumped in to help push Claude up. “Please, stay out of the water. It could be poison!” And yet, she saw no other way for them to haul the weakened boy from the fierce rush of the creek.

      Mr. Reich and Mr. McDonald had flopped onto their bellies at the edge of mud, ready with arms outstretched to pull the others to shore. Typically the first person to help out when needed, Mr. Reich had a heft about him that suggested more padding than muscle, but he was as strong as a warhorse. Mr. McDonald, wiry and tall, matched his friend’s strength.

      The men and women of their group stood along the bank or knelt over the side to help, and several made use of the same vine Luella had used to lower herself into the dirty creek water. It appeared to the onlookers, of course, that Claude was safe for now as his mother grasped him and their rescuers formed a chain to aid his rise from the flood.

      Knowing Luella, Victoria knew Claude was in for the scolding of his life, after his mother had smothered him with kisses.

      “Victoria?”

      She heard the voice and turned to see the man who had, to her shame, held her heart captive for ten years. He came running through the camp with a load of wood in his arms, his strength making the load look insignificant. Captain Joseph Rickard was a title she’d never become accustomed to these past four weeks of tedious travel through unmarked hills and over rocky terrain. After the first few days of attempting to use the formal address, she’d felt so awkward she’d reverted to calling him Joseph, despite a few raised eyebrows. After all, had he not abandoned her in St. Louis with Matthew, they would be married. It was his decision, his rejection, that had helped her keep her distance from him...most of the time.

      By now everyone who traveled with them knew that she and Joseph had been friends long ago. Few knew about the depth of that friendship. She was, after all, still in mourning, and women of society didn’t feel it seemly for a widow of seven months to spend her available hours with an unmarried man—not that she’d ever been particularly concerned about the women of society. A female physician would always be sneered at by those women, so why waste her time?

      The last time she’d seen Joseph before he left for his father’s plantation in the South, she’d been sobbing in his arms, begging him not to leave, all dignity replaced by abject pain at the thought of losing him.

      “I heard the shouts.” He tossed the wood beside the Ladue wagon and rushed to Victoria, his attention drawn to the mud on her dress. “What happened? Are you all right?” He brushed at some of the heaviest clumps from the black cotton.

      “Never mind me. I slipped while trying to get to Claude.” She pointed toward the crowd, where everyone hovered around the boy, slapping his back as he choked up dirty water.

      “He fell in?” He took her arm and started in the direction of the crowd.

      She went with him. “I haven’t decided yet. Nobody seems to know what happened.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “At this point, considering his choice of companions and their determination to prove to the grown-ups they could cross that water—”

      “The Johnston brothers. Again.” Joseph looked up the creek toward the blond-haired boys, who had just managed to untangle the mess of knots in their rope and untie it from the tree. He frowned at the brothers, his dark eyes narrowing. “Claude wouldn’t just fall in for no reason.”

      “That’s my concern.”

      Joseph turned to her. “What concern?”

      She pressed her lips together, sorry she’d been so quick to speak her mind. “Only that he could have been pushed.”

      Joseph’s thick, black eyebrows rose. “You can’t think Buster or Gray could have pushed him.”

      “Of course not, Joseph. Give me credit for a little common sense. Believe it or not, those boys are the least of our troubles if my suspicions are correct.” She shivered and glanced around them through the shadows of the forest once again.

      “Victoria?”

      There wasn’t time to get into that conversation at the moment. Soon, though. “Please disregard my chatter. I’m simply overwhelmed at the moment. Those boys were supposed to be helping gather wood for a fire to dry things out, and instead they’re doing what you told them not to. They need a firmer hand, Joseph, or they need to return to their father.”

      Joseph crossed his sun-browned arms over his chest and shook his head. “All of us were supposed to pitch in, Doctor, and I’m not their nanny.”

      She took umbrage at his defensive posture. “Not their nanny, but certainly their captain, and from what I understand, their father convinced you to bring them along. I thought you had nearly ten years of experience with captaining a wagon train.”

      She pressed her lips shut at the brusqueness of her own voice and glanced toward the rescuers, who were having success in getting everyone out of the water. She needed to check on her patients soon and let go of this petty little ten-year resentment that had been doomed to cause friction between the two of them.

      “I’m sorry, Victoria.” Joseph sighed, and the familiar deep voice that once whispered words of love in her ear held a note of sadness.

      “Sorry?” Eyebrows raised, she turned back to him and was captured by the depth of those dark brown eyes, as she always had been. But she’d learned the hard way to look past a man’s words and mesmerizing eyes to the character beneath. His behavior had taught her to beware of other men, though that lesson had come too late for her to avoid his impact on her life.

      “We seem to be at odds on this trip when we’re not avoiding one another,” he said. “It wasn’t what I’d hoped for.” Gone was the typical display of golden sunlight in eyes that were often touched with humor. She missed that.

      She also missed the man she’d once thought Joseph to be. “Don’t lecture me about avoidance. I wasn’t the one who stayed away for ten years like a sulking child. You knew where Matthew and I were anytime you came to St. Louis.”

      “That’s right.” He said the words with an emphasis that implied he’d explained it all, when in truth he hadn’t explained a thing.

      “Don’t doubt my gratefulness, I do appreciate your arrival at the perfect time for me to escape an ugly situation, but I don’t understand why you asked me to join you on this trip.”

      “I wanted you out of St. Louis.

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