A movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention, and Drake turned in time to see a darkly clad figure disappearing behind the line of bordering trees. Not breaking stride, he continued running for the pump. But the memory remained planted in the back of his mind as he thrust the bucket beneath the rusty spout.
Hope forced the pump lever up and down in frantic motions. The water splashed into the wooden bucket in rhythmic gushes as she screamed to terrified neighbors who had left their own cabins to bring her more pails.
Except for the ones who had their own fires to fight, most complied in an astoundingly short time. In less than five minutes, they had formed an assembly line, with Hope on one end, frantically pumping water into empty pails, and Drake on the other, trying in vain to douse the fire.
As she worked the pump, Hope’s eyes eagerly sought each bedraggled face, praying to catch a glimpse of one of her own. She doggedly questioned any new man who arrived, asking if they’d seen any of her family alive.
Although it seemed like hours, in reality it took less than ten minutes for all four walls to catch in white-hot flames. She kept pumping, glaring at those who shook their heads sadly, passed on the bucket, then turned away. The assembly line shortened. People drifted back to their own cabins—the cabins the rain had saved. Hope hurled angry accusations at their retreating backs and kept on pumping.
Exactly when she began to refill buckets that were already full, she didn’t know. Numbly, she kept working the pump. When people drifted away, she picked up their pails and threw water onto the roaring flames herself. The heat of the fire seared her cheeks as she turned to run for more.
She picked up empty buckets as she ran back for the pump, sliding in the mud more times than not. She filled two, sometimes three pails at a time, carrying them all at once. The rain pouring down from the heavens helped, but not a lot. The cabin continued to burn with alarming speed.
“Stop it, Hope,” Drake growled. He reached out an arm, catching her around the waist in mid-stride.
She kicked and screamed like a wild woman at the unwelcome restraint. “Let me go! I have to get them out!”
“It’s too late, Hope. You did all you could, but it’s too late.”
“No!” She shook her head vigorously, her wet hair slapping her cheek like the tail of a whip. Frantically, she lashed out at the golden head with an empty bucket. Her voice trembled with a sob as one of the walls gave a mournful groan. “It isn’t too late. It isn’t! Help me, God damn you!”
She tried to break away from his grip. Drake held strong.
Another shot ripped through the night, and Drake heard the bullet whistle close to his ear. “Son of a bitch!”
Without a second thought, he scooped a squirming Hope under his arm, carrying her as he reached out to grab the reins of a bolting horse. The move would have sent a lesser man toppling to the ground. As it was, Drake had his hands full between balancing them both and yanking the skittish horse to a stop.
He set Hope down but gave her no time to pull away as he hugged her close to his naked chest and swung them onto the saddle.
“No!” she screamed, fighting the steely grip around her waist in an attempt to slide off the animal’s back. “Stop! Let me down! I have to save my family!”
“It’s too late to save them, Hope,” he bellowed in her ear as he urged the horse in the direction of the cabins that still stood. “You have to save yourself.”
The reality of his words hit Hope so hard she felt like she’d just been punched in the gut. “No,” she sobbed weakly, collapsing against his rain-slickened chest. “No.”
Another shot rang out. Hope felt pain explode in her heart a split second before it exploded in her shoulder. Fingers of black velvet reached up to claim her. The numbness was a relief, and she surrendered to the painless, yawning gap.
Chapter 9
I want to die!
Through all the pain, through all the muffled voices and bone-jarring movement, that was the one thought that remained constant.
Twice Hope had come close to losing herself to the all-consuming, blissfully painless darkness. Both times, a husky voice and a sea of green had penetrated the agony that enveloped her, forcefully pulling her back when she would rather have slipped quietly away.
Her mood shifted between numbness and pure terror. She dreamed of her father, and Luke. When the nightmares came, she tried to run from them, tried to hide. But she never went far before a firm arm would pull her back, and a husky voice would demand she stop fighting. Eventually, she gave up and slipped back into the dark, healing oblivion.
Drake reached out and fingered a chestnut curl that clung to Hope’s sweat-dampened forehead. The fever still raged, and her skin felt close to boiling as his hand brushed against her moist brow.
Sighing, he let the strand of hair fall back into place as he took a rag from a bowl of rainwater. Squeezing the moisture from it, he ran the cloth over her forehead, her cheeks, the long taper of her neck. He took special care to be gentle as the passed the lump of bandage wrapped around her shoulder. After he had finished sponging the alabaster skin on her front he carefully rolled her on her side and did the same to her back.
Once the chore was completed, the rag was tossed back into the bowl. He rubbed her skin dry with another strip of cloth. A soft moan escaped parted lips as he tenderly covered her body with a tattered old comforter.
There was no chair on which to sit in the close confines of the wagon, so Drake scrunched down in what little space was free on the floor. His legs were drawn up to his chest, his elbows pillowed atop his knees as his hands dangled helplessly between his calves. His backrest was a fifty-pound sack of flour.
She was quiet again, he thought as he watched the thick fringe of ebony lashes flicker against a deathly pale cheek. For now. Who knew when she’d call out again, when she’d throw the comforter to the floor and try to run from the wagon, as she had just now?
He’d been lucky. So far Hope’s fits, as he’d begun to call them, were confined mostly to the night hours. That gave Drake time during the day to drive the ox and wagon he’d bought. Considering the circumstances, he’d made good time. In the two weeks since the fire, he’d put the worst of the journey behind them. The Mother Lode was nothing more than a memory, a ragged outline of jutting mountains in the distant horizon. Ahead stretched the dry, flat plains.