scowled at the thought, but she realized that, deep down, she’d been as hopeful as Buster that there would be a way past the flooding so they could cross, though they each had widely divergent motivations. She knew Buster wanted a fresh start as far from home as he could get, and he was in a hurry to get there. He’d suffered deeply after knocking over a lantern where he worked and burning down the general store in their town. A man had died because of Buster’s clumsiness. Anyone his age would go in search of a new life after that. What she feared was that the clumsy bear cub would leave a path of destruction behind him.
She, on the other hand, wanted to scout ahead of the others and scour the fresh mud for familiar tracks. For the first couple of weeks she’d been able to put aside her thirst for revenge as she’d settled in with the friendly people of the wagon train, especially the Ladues. Last week, however, she’d seen evidence that the killer, Thames, had been through the town where the Johnston boys had joined them. She’d seen the unique hoofprint three times along the trail they now followed—a horseshoe that had an inch of length broken off on the right front hoof of Thames’s crimson-colored horse.
She owed Matthew so much; finding his killer was the least she could do to honor his memory. She knew Joseph had wanted her to come with them as their physician—though she felt herself to be a poor substitute for her late husband—but she had her own reasons for coming, and the murdering slaver was never far from her thoughts. He terrified her and he enraged her, and she couldn’t tell which emotion controlled her at any given time. What she knew, however, was that she could not rely on her emotions. They could betray her as ruthlessly as Joseph had done a decade ago.
But Joseph didn’t belong in the same league as Broderick Thames. A man who killed for the simple pleasure of beating his political opponent was a monster, indeed. What would he do if he knew this wagon train was filled with abolitionists set on building a slave-free community in Kansas Territory? He would find a way to destroy them all, and he had the connections to do it.
“Someone, please!” Heidi’s high-pitched voice echoed down to Victoria as she searched around the camp. “Dr. Fenway, look!” The girl’s voice spiraled upward in terror, echoing against the cliffs that halfway surrounded the wagon train on the eastern side of the flooded creek.
Victoria saw Heidi pointing and turned to find that Claude no longer held on to the stump. Only a lone hand stuck out of the water. It grasped upward, much farther downstream than expected. The stump floated away, roots pointing toward the sky as if they were hands grasping for a firm foundation. The water was carrying Claude.
Before she could catch up with his progress, he shoved away from the tumbling log and lunged toward the bank, at least fifty yards from where the Johnston boys continued to wrangle with their rope.
She raced toward him, stumbling over vines that had been washed ashore. The Ladue family had already lost their father. What a nightmare if Luella and Heidi were to lose Claude, as well.
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
