They had outrun the smoke, she and the others, and while the fort was still a long way off, Skye at last could see the walls and watchtowers from her place in the wagon box. She drew back on the reins with all her might and still barely stopped the four-horse team. Caney brought the other rig to an able halt beside her.
“I’m going to unhitch one of these horses and ride back!” Skye called to her, and coughed. “Megan can turn the mare loose and drive the wagon the rest of the way—”
Caney’s eyes flashed with temper and resolve. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere, missy, so you can just put that dern fool idea right out of your head! You a mama to that little boy now, and you cain’t leave him!”
She risked a glance down at Hank and found him looking plaintively back up at her. Caney was right, she reflected, but ruefully. She hadn’t even known he existed until just a few days before, but Hank was hers all the same, born of her heart if not of her body. She loved him with a sudden and primitive fierceness that was startling to recognize; this, she knew, was the way her granddaddy, Gideon McQuarry, had loved her and Bridget, Christy, and Megan. It was a gift, that kind of commitment to another person, for the lover as well as the beloved, and more important than anything else on earth.
She sat down in the wagon seat, holding the reins loosely in one hand, and ruffled her stepson’s hair. “I’m staying,” she said simply, and soon, while the cavalry hurried toward Primrose Creek, at least a hundred strong, she and Caney and the others once again set out for the fort itself.
There, they were given quarters in one of the barracks, a long, spacious room cleared especially for them and lined on either side with metal cots. A hot and restorative—if not particularly tasty—meal was served in the mess hall, and Bridget and Christy took informal command of the situation, supervising the collecting and washing of dishes, mugs, and utensils. By nightfall, the other women of the town and its surrounding area were settled in, hopeful if still subdued, resigned to looking after the children and waiting for their men to come and fetch them.
Once the meal was over, though, and the various children of the family had been bedded down, Skye was restless. After making sure Hank was asleep in the cot next to the one she’d claimed for herself, she went outside under a starry spring sky.
She stood looking up for a long moment, the smell of smoke still rife in her hair and the folds of her clothes, even on her skin, and prayed that whatever happened to the land, the timber, and the town, the people up there in the high country would be kept safe. Jake’s image filled her mind and brought stinging tears to her eyes. He could so easily be killed, burned or crushed beneath a falling tree or building, or simply overcome by smoke. He was her husband, and though he had laid skillful claim to her body on more than one occasion, she had never told him that she loved him with all her heart and soul, as well as her flesh. Her silly, stubborn pride had gotten in the way, and now she might never have a chance to make things right.
Despondently, she climbed a stairway to one of the parapets, where she met and passed one of several young soldiers making his rounds.
The place she knew as Primrose Creek, the place she knew as home, glowed bright crimson against a background of darkness. Perhaps it was gone, all of it, even then—the home Bridget and Trace had built with love and hard work, the Indian lodge Christy and Zachary had transformed into a haven. The timber and animals on her portion of land and on Megan’s. The tents and shacks and saloons, the sawmill, and Jake’s grand monstrosity of a house. She closed her eyes against all those images of destruction, told herself that everything would be all right. They would survive, all of them, and rebuild as best they could. In time, the forest animals would return, and the trees would grow again.
A whisper of sound at her right side brought Skye back to the moment. She turned to see Christy standing there, a shawl pulled tightly around her slender shoulders. Although she had just given birth a few days before, and she was clearly tired, Christy’s backbone was McQuarry-straight, and her chin was high as she followed Skye’s gaze.
“It’s the hardest thing in the world,” Skye’s cousin mused, “not being there with Zachary.”
Skye nodded. “I can’t stop thinking about Jake,” she agreed.
Christy sighed. She’d wound her heavy dark hair in a bun at her nape, and it was slipping its pins, ready to tumble down her back, but she seemed heedless of everything but that distant fire and the man she loved, up there fighting the blaze with the rest of the men. “I’d give a lot to be there right now. To know Zachary and the others are all right. Bridget’s frantic over Trace, too, though she doesn’t think anyone can tell.”
Skye smiled at the mention of her sister. Bridget was the McQuarry-est of McQuarrys. She had their granddaddy’s indomitable spirit, and what she lacked in physical stature she made up in grit and intelligence. She was a wildcat at heart, Bridget was, equal to any challenge, and it was a sure bet that if she hadn’t had the twins and Noah to care for, she’d have been at her husband’s side at that very moment. “Don’t you worry about Bridget,” she said, and then touched her cousin’s shoulder lightly, remembering her cousin’s anxiety when the baby was about to be born and Zachary was nowhere to be found. “But what about you, Christy? Are you all right?”
Christy hesitated for only the merest fraction of a beat before nodding. “Yes,” she said, her attention still fixed on the distant fire. Even from so far away, the blaze cast a moving reflection over Christy’s perfect features. “A person can lose all they have, so quickly—”
There was certainly no way to refute that statement, it was patently true, but Skye slipped her arm around Christy and gave her a brief, reassuring squeeze anyway. All four of the Primrose Creek women had known tremendous loss in recent years. The farm that had nurtured them all was gone forever. Their grandmother had passed on, then their fathers and mothers, and eventually, and most grievous of all, they’d had to say good-bye to their beloved grandfather, the cornerstone of their lives. Bridget had seen a young husband march off to war, only to return in a pinewood box. Of them all, though, it often seemed to Skye that Christy always had been the most sensitive and thus the most easily wounded; she was surely thinking of Zachary again, and of what it would mean to lose him.
“We had each other, Christy. You and me and Bridget and Megan. And Caney, too.” She paused, thinking of the family Bible and the secret it contained. “Surely you’ll tell Megan now? About the four of us being sisters?”
Christy shook her head, then sighed philosophically and worked up a faltering smile. That was Christy for you; she was temperamental, proud, and stubborn as a mule belly-deep in mud, but she was also one of the most courageous people Skye had ever known. None knew better than Bridget, Megan, Caney, and Skye herself how afraid Christy had been of giving her heart to Zachary, lest it be broken, but she’d gone ahead and done it anyway, and she’d been happy as a result. Through it all, she still wanted to protect her little sister.
“Everything’s happened so fast,” Christy said, brushing a lock of smoke-scented hair back from Skye’s forehead. “I didn’t get a chance.”
“She deserves to know.”
Christy’s eyes filled with tears. “It will break her heart.”
“Why?”
“She thought the sun rose and set on Granddaddy. When she finds out he lied all those years—”
“He wanted to protect all of us.”
“Maybe,” Christy said. “And maybe he just wanted to protect his son, the worst scoundrel of all, your—our—father.” She sighed again. “I must confess, though, it’s something of a relief to know Jenny wasn’t Megan’s and my mother. She didn’t love us very much, and we always thought it was some fault in ourselves.”
“Did Caney know?” Skye asked gently.
“Oh, yes,” Christy replied. “Of course she did. In fact, when our dear daddy’s lovely mistress came to term with each one of us, Caney was there to attend to the matter and see that no tales were sprea
d. It was Granddaddy who gave two of us to each of his remaining sons and Granddaddy who insisted that we all grow up believing we’d been born to the parents he’d assigned us.”
“I wonder what Grandmother thought.”
Christy gave a chuckle that was utterly without humor. “Granddaddy loved her to distraction, but when it came to serious matters like a firstborn son so intolerable that they paid him to leave home and stay away, his word was law.”
Skye nodded. “Bridget didn’t tell me his name. Our father’s, I mean.”
“Thayer,” Christy said in a faraway and very weary voice. “He was named for our great-grandfather. What a disappointment he must have been to Granddaddy and Grandmother!”
“It’s odd that no one ever mentioned him, that there wasn’t a portrait or a letter—”
“He was what the English call a remittance man. Granddaddy gave him his inheritance and sent him away when he was still very young.”
“We had different mothers, though.” Bridget had told her that much, though she hadn’t been entirely forthcoming where the family scandal was concerned.
“How do you know that?”
Once again, Christy sighed. “Granddaddy left a letter. It was written on thin paper and tucked beneath the lining of the back cover on the Bible.”
Skye let out her breath, feeling a little angry herself now. Bridget and Christy, being the oldest, had naturally thought they knew best, but they had been wrong to keep the secret as long as they had. Skye and Megan were not children, and they had a right to know who they were.
“I see,” she said.
Christy squeezed her hand. “I’m not sure you do. There’s more, Skye.”
Skye braced herself, sensing that this last bit of news would be the most startling of all. “Tell me,” she insisted. When she saw Bridget again, she would tell her off three ways from Sunday for hiding so much from her.
But Christy said nothing more. She merely resumed her vigil, gazing toward the fire and waiting for Zachary. Plainly, for that night at least, the subject was closed.
The heat and glare of the fire were nearly unbearable, and Jake watched with hot, itching eyes as the roof of his mansion fell in, sending a shower of sparks and flames shooting toward the smoke-shrouded sky. The mill was gone, and so was most of the rest of the town—only the marshal’s office, that pitiful shack of a schoolhouse, and Diamond Lil’s saloon were still standing.
Someone slapped him on the shoulder. “The worst is over,” a voice said. “The fire’s turning back on itself.”
He recognized Trace Qualtrough, though it was God’s own wonder that he could, for the man was black with soot from the top of his head to the soles of his boots. The whites of his eyes stood out, and when he smiled, Jake actually blinked at the brightness of his teeth.
“You reckon the women are all right?” he asked.
Trace nodded. “Yep.”
“Your place—at Primrose Creek?”
Trace ran a forearm across his brow, and afterward he was as dirty as before. “I’ve been on the mountain most of the day, but Zachary rode out home as soon as we could spare him. Says everything’s still standing.” He had the good grace to look a little chagrined, Trace did, though Jake wasn’t precisely sure how he’d been able to discern the fact, given all that soot. “You still have Skye, and the land, and her timber,” Trace said, more gently. “A man’s got a McQuarry woman at his side, he can do anything.”
Jake thrust a hand through his hair and looked around behind him. He couldn’t talk about Skye just now, couldn’t even bear to think about her. It was as if he would somehow jinx her if he let her into his mind, and she and the boy would be in greater danger than they already were. “Anybody hurt?”
“Mike Finn is in a pretty bad way,” Trace answered solemnly. “Reckon he breathed in too much smoke. And Malcolm’s got some nasty burns on his right arm.”
“They’re being tended to?”
Again, Trace nodded. “Captain Tatum came up with the troops. He does the doctoring down at Fort Grant.” He sighed. “There’s already some talk about giving up on this town, starting over someplace else. You wouldn’t be thinking along those lines, would you, Jake?”
There were folks who said Trace Qualtrough could get inside a horse’s head and read its mind. Just then, Jake wondered if the man possessed the same uncanny skill where human beings were concerned. “Either way,” he said, “we’ll have to start over. Might as well be here as anyplace else.”
Trace grinned, pleased, and slapped Jake’s shoulder again. Ashes rose from the fabric of his shirt. “Might as well,” he agreed.
That night, when the last blazes were out, men took turns standing watch, lest the few remaining buildings be consumed. Jake let himself be persuaded to ride out to the Qualtrough place, where he took a bath in the creek and slept in the bed that had been Skye’s before they were married. The scent of her skin and hair lingered in the linens, and, comforted, he fell into an immediate, consuming sleep.
Despite the old adage that things usually look betterin the morning, the plain light of day had a sobering effect on just about everybody. Most of the horses and cattle had been turned loose as the fire drew nearer, so they’d have at least a chance of escaping the heat, flames, and smoke; now, those that had survived would have to be rounded up again. Newly planted crops were either burned or blanketed in ash, and a thousand trees, most of them on Jake’s own land, loomed black and brittle and spindly-limbed against the sky.
Jake had managed to keep the bay stallion tethered in the schoolyard with a few others, when the livestock was scattered to the four winds, and that morning he was glad, for, by his reckoning, the bay was all he had left—when it came to material things, anyway. Skye and Hank were safe at Fort Grant or in Virginia City, and that mattered more than anything else.
The town, when he reached it, was mostly charred rubble. He rode past the mill he’d spent five years building, past the once-grand house where he had brought his wife on their wedding night.
“Mr. Vigil?” The voice was masculine and, given that Jake knew most everybody in town, flat-out unfamiliar.
He turned in the saddle, saw a fussy-looking little man standing nearby, wearing a dusty suit and a bowler hat. “Ace Thompson,” he said, extending one hand. Jake had already leaned down to accept the handshake before Thompson went on; otherwise, he probably would have kept his distance. “I’m with the railroad.”
Jake swung a leg over the bay’s neck and jumped down to face his visitor. Hands resting on his hips, he sighed. “Well, Mr. Thompson, it would seem that you and I are both out of luck. There’s no timber and no place to mill it, anyhow. I reckon you could take my house, but that’s gone, too.” He folded his arms. “I’ll be damned if I can come up with a solution.”
Thompson looked surprised. “Well, it’s true that you’ve suffered some serious losses here,” he said. “No one is denying that. But we have the timber rights we acquired from your wife, and we’d like to lay tracks between here and Virginia City. If you’ll agree to cut and plane the ties, we’ll finance new equipment—”
Jake frowned. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Whoa. What do you mean, you have the timber rights you acquired from my wife?”
The other man blinked behind smudged spectacles. He wrenched them off, breathed on the lenses, and polished them vigorously with a corner of his handkerchief. “We certainly assumed you knew.”
“Well,” Jake growled, barely able to refrain from grabbing the little fellow by the lapels and yanking him up onto the toes of his boots, “I didn’t. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Mrs. Vigil—your wife—offered to sell us whatever timber we needed.”
The implications of what had actually happened struck Jake with a physical impact. How could she have done such a thing? How could she have done business with these vipers behind his back?
Thompson cleared his throat, and his glasses, Jake noticed, were still smudged. �
��Mrs. Vigil?” he prompted weakly.
“I know her name,” Jake snapped. He was reeling inwardly. How could Skye have deceived him like this? She’d refused his offer to buy her surplus timber before they were married and then gone behind his back as soon as she had a ring on her finger and sold the logging rights out from under him. He was hot with betrayal, frantic to see his bride and demand an explanation. All the time she’d pretended to love him, she’d been planning his downfall.
“I’m sorry,” said the little man. “It would seem that you were not apprised of your wife’s intentions. However, I’m afraid we must insist that the deal be honored.”
Jake turned away, groped for the bay, and swung up into the saddle. “Your bargain is with my wife,” he said. “I won’t interfere.”
Thompson pushed the bowler hat to the back of his head and looked up. The sun blazed off the lenses of his spectacles, and he tugged at the hem of his suit coat with small, nervous hands. “I have more to tell you,” he said.
“Sorry,” Jake responded with a bitter smile. “I don’t have time to listen.” With that, he was gone, riding out of town.
Two hours later, he arrived at Fort Grant, and apparently the guards had seen him coming a long way off, for the towering, spiked timber gates swung open at his approach. Skye was waiting for him when he rode through, her head high, her chin out, and her eyes shining.
At the sight of him, she burst into tears. “Thank God,” he heard her say, through the thrum that had filled his ears since he’d learned what she had done. “Thank God!”
He dismounted, approached her slowly. “You’re all right, then, you and the boy?” he asked. A young soldier came, took the bay’s reins, and led the animal away to be watered, fed, and groomed.
She nodded and dashed at her wet face with the back of one hand. She looked as though she wanted to fling herself into his arms, but she didn’t. She just stood there, as if she’d been frozen, watching him. Consuming him with her eyes.
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