Miracle Jones (15 page)

Harrison shot her a wry glance.
“Looks like it might hold,” he said in a tone that suggested it might just as easily not.

Miracle frowned at the temporarily mended wheel.
In her peripheral vision she saw Harrison lean negligently against the faded gold, red, and blue carnival scrolls painted on the side of the wagon.
“Uncle Horace’s Tinctures and Elixirs for Uncommonly Good Health” had faded some, but the smiling face of Uncle Horace was still visible right down to his gold-capped tooth.

“It might,” she agreed, testing the bowed out spokes with one hand.
“And then it might not.”

“I guess we’ll have to try.
You want to drive, or would you like me to?”

“I’ll drive,” she answered, hiking up her skirts and stepping back to the front of the wagon.

His mouth quirked, but he didn’t argue.
Harrison was used to hardheaded females.
His sister, Lexie, was as stubborn as they came.

The wagon seat creaked in protest as he levered himself up beside her.
Miracle’s gaze was trained straight ahead, her mouth set.
She flicked the reins against the horses’ swayed backs.
“Giddyap,” she ordered crisply.

One of the nags stomped its hind foot and switched its tail.
The other didn’t move.
Harrison hid a smile.
He’d been a horse doctor for nearly ten years and had learned more about horses’ temperaments than he could ever put into words.
These two were worse than lazy.
They’d lost interest years before in anything other than a bag of grain or tuft of hay.

Miracle’s blood boiled with humiliation.
“Giddyap,” she yelled again, more fiercely.
The reins slapped against the beasts’ tough hides.

Without a word Harrison grabbed the reins from her hands.
As soon as the nags felt his stronger, tighter grip, their ears flicked back and forth anxiously.

“Get on!” he yelled, jerking the reins once hard and stomping his foot on the running board.
Startled, the team jumped forward, and Harrison urged them on, clicking his tongue and snapping the reins harshly on their churning hindquarters.
The noise he made spooked the nags into moving forward, dragging the listing wagon with them.

It was an indignity Miracle was forced to suffer for the sake of progress.
They had to get moving if they wanted to reach Rock Springs before nightfall.
She had no wish to be on this stretch of road after the sun went down.

Harrison turned the wagon toward the road and carefully guided the team across the uneven ground.
The tinware tinkled and glasses shivered as the wagon jerked and bumped along.
Several times Harrison shot a glance at Miracle, who merely stared straight ahead, her fingers clutched around the edge of the seat to keep her balance.

Near the main road, he commented dryly, “Nice pieces of horseflesh.”

Miracle gave a totally unfeminine snort.

Harrison grinned, then concentrated on keeping the peddler’s wagon upright as the horses pulled it up the shallow ditch and onto the road.
He was amazed how far Miracle had managed to drive the wagon into cover.
It had taken the better part of thirty minutes to get the horses, wagon, tinware, elixirs, and Miracle’s other worldly goods back on the dusty track of road that connected Malone to Rock Springs.

As soon as they were facing toward Rock Springs, Harrison glanced backward in the direction he knew the burned barn must be.

Miracle glanced back also.
“Do you think anything’s left?” she asked, her thoughts mirroring his own.

Harrison was thinking of Jace Garrett.
Had Garrett survived?
The greed of the men who’d kidnapped Miracle should have ensured Garrett’s safety, but Harrison hadn’t forgotten that at least some of the barn’s patrons were murderers; that fire had been set deliberately, and it stretched his credulity too much to believe Miracle had been kidnapped by a
different
band of renegades from the ones who’d killed those other women.
It was highly possible they’d killed Jace anyway, and though Harrison had no love for the man, he didn’t wish him dead.

“No point in looking now,” Harrison muttered, his expression darkening with the path of his thoughts.
“When we get to Rock Springs we’ll get some answers.”

“Would you mind if I drove now?” Miracle asked, holding out her palm for the reins.

With a solemnity that convinced her he was laughing at her, Harrison handed over control.
Miracle slapped the reins, and this time, for reasons of their own, the nags broke into a slow, steady plod.

Wisps of clouds had begun to settle near the ground, giving the late-afternoon shadows a soft, mystical blur.
Remembering her last trek down this stretch of road lifted the hairs on Miracle’s arms, and she was suddenly very glad to have Harrison seated beside her.
Even in the light of day she wasn’t convinced that one of the kidnappers wouldn’t be lying in wait.

As they neared Rock Springs, Harrison shifted in the seat.
Shooting him a look from beneath her thick lashes, Miracle realized with a pang that his wound was bothering him.
His hands were balanced against the shaking board seat so that his shoulders didn’t connect with the seat back.

Miracle’s heart twisted with remorse.
Inwardly sighing, she wondered if she would ever stop feeling so guilty.

They crested a last small hill, then plodded another mile before the faint skyline of the town grew visible.
Rock Springs lay quiet in the fading twilight, yellow light spilling from the windows of Garrett Mercantile, Garrett Livery & Feedstore, Garrett Tannery, and so on and so forth.
Behind the false fronts of the northern buildings a rock cliff rose majestically to a purple sky.
Spouting straight from the cliff was a tremendous rushing white waterfall.
It spilled downward and seemed to fall right to the center of town.

“Fool’s Falls,” Harrison said, his gaze following the path of hers.

Miracle gazed at the town with rapt interest.
This was where her father lived.
She could feel it.
Her hands tightened on the thick leather straps as she guided the wagon to the center of town, where the north-south road dead-ended into a pool at the base of Fool’s Falls.

Rock Springs was growing east and west and south, but the center of town lay on Main Street, where clapboard buildings and boardwalks marched in an ever-lengthening line, the farthest points at each end being the skeletons of half-formed buildings.
There were no gaslights, nor was there electricity at such a rural, sleepy outpost as Rock Springs.
Still, the town was alive with activity.
Noise swelled from the chorus of voices within the saloon, the rush of the falls, and the beat of hammers.

Miracle lurched the wagon to a stop in front of Garrett Mercantile.
She jumped to the ground, hitching the horses to the post.
Harrison climbed down more slowly.
Dusk had accumulated in his wheat colored hair and had marked a mask around his eyes.
With thoughts of her own appearance uppermost in her mind, Miracle swiped at her cheeks self-consciously.

“You look fine,” he said, and though his words were merely polite, Miracle blushed furiously.

“Where – um – do you live?” she asked.

“On a farm out of town.
I live with Lexie and Tremaine, although I won’t for much longer, I suppose.”

Miracle was about to ask him why, but the words shriveled in her throat.
Behind Harrison, strolling along the boardwalk, was a pot-bellied man in a tan shirt, a gleaming gold star on his breast pocket.
The sheriff, she recognized, her pulse jumping with dread.

“Harrison,” she said in a strangled voice, reaching for him.
He glanced down at her, his eyebrows shooting skyward at the way her fingers clenched into the rough fabric of his shirt.
“You do understand that what I did, I did in self-defense, don’t you?”

“Miracle.” He drew her tense fingers into the warmth of his hands.
Her chin lifted, and she waited anxiously, searching his face for the forgiveness she needed to see once more.
His green gaze met hers, and she felt a closeness to him that drew her one step closer.
“Stop worrying,” he assured her.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“But about the sheriff,” she persisted, sweat traveling down her back as the lawman moved closer.
“You won’t press charges with the sheriff, will you?”

“I –”

Behind her a male voice suddenly shrieked with excitement, and Miracle jumped in alarm.

“Mr.
Harrison!
Glory be to God!
You’s alive!”

Miracle turned to see a young man near her own age with curly brown hair hurl himself at Harrison and throw his arms around him, hugging him with fevered relief.
Three of the fingers on his right hand had been chopped back to the first and second knuckles.

Harrison took the exuberant greeting with an intake of breath.
It took him a moment to drawl, “Well, of course I’m alive, Billy.
You didn’t think I’d met my maker yet, did you?”

To Miracle’s surprise and Harrison’s astonishment, the young man swallowed hard, as if to keep from crying.
“Yessir, ah did.
And it’s made your mother turn quite poorly.”

Harrison’s left arm shot out.
He gripped Billy by the collar, his green eyes intense.
“What do you mean?”

“She’s got diphtheria,” he revealed in a pathetically sorrowful voice.
“Doc Danner don’t think she’ll make it.”

Miracle turned anxiously to Harrison.
His gaze was riveted on Billy’s face, burningly so, as if the sheer power and fury of his glare would make young Billy take back his words.

“I’ve got to see her,” Harrison muttered, releasing Billy and turning blindly toward Miracle’s wagon.

“I’ll drive you,” Miracle said, placing a booted foot on the lower step.

Billy stood helplessly on the plank boardwalk.
Harrison growled, “Get in,” to him.
Without further instruction, Billy clambered in the back.

Miracle was full of questions.
Who was Billy, and what was his relationship to Harrison?
But the urgency of the moment, and the closed expression on Harrison’s face, didn’t invite conversation.

“Which way?” she asked softly, and he pointed to the southeast.

For once Tillie and Gray put some effort into their steps as they headed down the road out of Rock Springs.
Soon the wagon was meandering past farmhouses and fields.
It took the better part of an hour before Harrison directed her to turn onto a small rutted track.
Through the red-orange leaves of the stand of maples, Miracle caught sight of a long, winding driveway on her left, but though she glanced at Harrison, it was clear this was not his destination.
She kept the horses on the wider road.

They’d nearly reached the clearing at the end of the road when the wagon jolted over a rock, half- unseating Miracle.
She heard a thunk and grind, and one of Harrison’s spokes sprang from the wheel, shooting out like an arrow.
The rear of the wagon dropped with a screech of torn wood.

“The wheel’s broke!” Billy yelled at Miracle and Harrison.

“Stop here,” Harrison ordered, climbing off the wagon bed.
He headed toward the house with ground-devouring strides, and Miracle jumped down after him, abandoning the nags and her wagon in her need to help Harrison.

It was while she was hurrying after him that she was struck by her actions.
She was actually a stranger to him.
She had no purpose in his life.
Yet she couldn’t have left him now if her life had depended on it, and though that thought struck her as dangerous, she pushed it to the back of her mind.

The house that suddenly appeared in the small clearing ahead was magnificent.
Two-story, gleaming with whitewash, it sported a portico with four square pillars.
A steeply shingled roof above gave way to a widow’s walk.
Yellow light streamed through the downstairs windows, lighting the front steps and a pair of carved oak doors.

Harrison threw open one of the doors with such force that it banged against the inside wall.
Miracle ran up the steps after him, stopping short in awe in the main hall.
Ahead, a wide oak staircase curved upward, its mellow polished steps crowned by a blood-red carpet that rippled over the steps in a crimson wave.

Harrison strode up those elegant stairs two at a time, oblivious to the dusty tracks he left in his wake.

Miracle stood like a statue, uncertain whether to follow after him.
The impropriety of such a move kept her rooted to the spot, but her gaze followed after him longingly.