by Kristin Holt
Richard didn’t realize he’d lost the miners. He pressed forward with his speech.
“My wife knows what to do to improve the quality of life in Big Ezra. It was her benevolent idea to pay in cash and compensate workers with three—”
Benevolent? Someone yelled, but who? Where?
“—years with the company shares in Cannon Mining Stock.”
The miners and their families couldn’t listen, wouldn’t listen— no one wanted to hear about change when the mere thought of upheavals frightened them and their immediate needs weren’t met.
Lessie’s peripheral vision caught something dark flying in fast— a bird? Another rock? The brim of her bonnet made it hard to discern. She flinched, ducked her shoulders, braced for impact, and without fully intending to, found herself cowering behind her husband’s much broader form. A rock— a rock the size of her fist slammed against the wagon bed.
If she didn’t act now, they faced the very real possibility of revolt.
All it would take is one rock to strike Richard or her or the foreman, and the mob would stone them.
The people were scared, angry, and grieving.
Somewhere in the midst of this crowd, someone angry enough to destroy fifty-one lives listened… and may have undermined everything Cannon Mining had done to increase safety.
She refused to give up, not yet. Their idea was solid, workable, achievable.
She understood the workers whether they comprehended that or not. Richard had sent for her to bridge this gap, to be the link he needed.
Compassion for the desperate men before her, the anger on their faces echoes of her friends from the mill in Massachusetts the September day they stood outside and watched the factory burn.
Hopelessness. Dread. Fear.
That day, they’d needed someone to tell them their jobs were not in danger, that they still had a place, that their ability to support themselves and their families would proceed uninterrupted.
Lessie put two fingers to her lips and whistled loud, long, and shrill.
The cacophony diminished and she pounced before they recaptured control. “One month ago I worked in a factory in Massachusetts. Eighteen hour days in a red brick building with windows that did not open. I slaved in that summertime oven sewing clothing I could not afford to buy.”
She’d snagged their attention— most of them, anyway. Passion vibrated in her voice and she forced emotion into the recesses. She couldn’t afford to choke. Now was the time to speak with clarity and purpose and intent. “I had holes in my shoes, holes in my stockings, and one spare dress that had been repaired so many times it was more patches than fabric. I went to sleep hungry and I awoke hungrier.”
She met and held the attention of one woman after another. “I had fifty cents to my name. Fifty cents. Rent came due and I couldn’t pay it because the factory burned to the ground and more than one-hundred women were out of work. My twin sister and I walked the streets from sunup to sundown searching for work, for any possibility of wages.”
She did choke now, and fought to get the words past the lump in her throat. “I tried to make my own wages stretch far enough to also feed my twin when she lost her job two months before were left Massachusetts.”
“I know hunger.” Desperation echoed in her voice. More of the women had turned to her, listening with compassion mirrored on their faces. Now even the men listened. A few had pulled their caps off, bowed their heads… as if in solidarity?
A breeze heavily scented with autumn, dying vegetation and cooling temperatures teased past her face, tossing a curl that had worked its way loose from her twist. She met the shopkeeper’s gaze, then the day shift supervisor’s dark-skinned face— but his name eluded her memory. Her attention held one widow’s for several long seconds before settling on Bathsheba’s. Two women who’d lost their husbands the morning they mucked out the fallen rock and the rock tumbled upon them.
“I was desperate. I’ve worked to support myself since I was seven years old. I received less than one year formal education.”
Someone in back, a male voice shouted, “Amen!”… as if this were a religious revival.
But others picked up the response. “Amen” and “amen” murmured through the crowd. Perhaps she’d helped them to see through the new woolen skirt and bonnet, the fine velvet cape.
Perhaps she’d salvaged her mistake of appearing before them without her humble, threadbare clothing from her life before Richard Cannon.
“I am a woman who worked for her daily bread since before I can recall. We were orphaned in young childhood. I managed to keep my sister and me together until a week ago when she married Adam Taylor and I married Richard Cannon.”
Muttering erupted anew. She couldn’t lose them now. She shouldn’t have mentioned Adam and Richard— especially not in context of separating her from her sister. “I know fear.”
More naysayers. “I have a plan to change things in Big Ezra for the better. Significant changes that will ensure better conditions, better living, for all.”
A shout erupted from off to Lessie’s right.
Too many had stopped listening. If they’d only understand she wanted to help! The plan was solid, specific, clear. And it would benefit so many lives.
She raised her hands in a pleading gesture, searched the crowd— many eyes were still on her, others distracted by those shouting.
Of a sudden Lessie stumbled backward half a step, then two. As if someone had shoved her, hard. But who?
Sound tunneled, faded, seemed to disappear all at once.
She lost her footing, went down hard onto her behind. The thud reverberated, as if the wind had been knocked out of her. Drawing a breath seemed nigh impossible.
Had a thrown rock struck her in the chest?
Richard?
Where was he?
Commotion swelled as men darted away from the wagon. At her side, the foreman, Gibbons, leapt from the wagon.
Why was everyone running away?
Richard knelt at her side, panic and terror marring his handsome face.
He shouted, but no sound came from his lips. He yelled, the strain staining his face with red and bring a vein on his forehead into stark relief.
Why couldn’t she hear him?
Was she lying down? Had she fallen? Patches of blue sky and wind-tossed clouds around Richard’s dark head. He knelt over her.
He’d pressed two hands against her left shoulder, pushing down with far too much force. She tried to slap his hands away but didn’t have the strength. Surely he hadn’t shoved her to the ground and knocked the wind from her lungs?
Blackness encroached, crowded out everything but Richard’s dear face. Just one more breath, that’s all she needed. Just one.
Tears ran down Richard’s beloved face.
Don’t cry, Richard.
I love you.
Blackness dragged her under.
Chapter Nineteen
Richard shook off the panic, dropped to the earth beside the wagon, and reached inside to take Lessie in his arms.
Someone had shot his wife.
In the chest.
Women screamed. Babies bawled in terror. Men ran and to and fro and Richard stood there, torn between carrying Lessie inside the nearest cabin, making her as comfortable as possible— fighting to save her life…
… and hunting down the mangy dog who’d murdered his wife.
He kicked in the nearest door, shouldered his way inside. A woman shrieked and backed into the corner, protecting her young ones behind her skirt.
Lessie drooped in Richard’s arms, blood staining the black cape, spreading in a circle now as large as a dinner plate.
Heaven help them all. His brave, determined wife had only wanted to help She’d done a fine job of it. She’d stood beside him then spoken with such fervency, hope, brilliant optimism for people—
And one of them had shot her.
The bed. In the corner. Richard stumbled that direction, set his bri
de on the rumpled covers as gently as a newborn.
The cape had to come off. His numb fingers fumbled with the clasp. Finally realizing he could access her wound by tossing the lined velvet back, his gorge rose at the odor of fresh blood.
So much blood.
“Light.” He ordered. “I need light.”
Wrenching free of his own coat, he ripped his shirt over his head, wadded the fine cotton in a ball and pressed it against the wound in Lessie’s chest. Despite the pressure, she bled profusely.
The black silk of her blouse made the blood seem dark and the blood loss obscene.
The woman struck flint, lit the wick, and held the lamp high. Her trembling hands cast golden light flickering all over the cabin walls and the bed. The bare wood had darkened with time, absorbing all the light and did little to reflect it. He didn’t realize how much pale walls at home did to maximize artificial light.
“Get the doctor.” He pushed harder against Lessie’s wound. The slightest of breaths rattled in and out. Alive. She was alive— for the moment. “Get the doctor now.”
“We don’t have a doctor.”
The woman wasn’t making any sense. None at all. Richard ripped his gaze away from his wife’s unconscious form, tried to lock on the woman’s gaze.
Watered down, gray. In skin-tone, in the ancient dress she wore. Pale and gray and weak. “No doctor in Big Ezra. Everyone knows that, Mr. Cannon.”
Richard squeezed his eyes shut, blocked out the sight of this gray woman and her dingy little house, exerted greater pressure on Lessie’s wound and fought to remain conscious. He wanted to collapse over her inert form, give up the ghost the moment she passed from the world.
No doctor.
No doctor!
How could there be no doctor in this mining camp?
What could he possibly do to save this woman, his wife, his love?
Desperation, cloying and panic-driven surged through him. He had to think clearly, had to do something, anything, to save her.
Madly, he searched the dismal interior of this miner’s cabin, looking for anything he could use. Anything.
The gray woman shook her head sadly, seemed to wilt into the only chair at the small table.
Is this what his people lived with? A gaping void of hopelessness? A sense of inevitability…
“What do you do when someone is injured?” He shouted the demand at the woman.
She flinched. Her little ones crowded behind her, obviously terrified.
But Richard needed answers! “Who does the doctoring? Who sets broken bones? Who stitches lacerations?”
The woman shook her head, then picked up her toddler, cradled the child tightly and crooned to it, rocking back and forth.
Things were going to change in Big Ezra… and change they would. They needed a doctor up here, and they’d have one.
“Come here, woman.”
She hurried to obey, obviously fearful of him. She set the crying child on the floor.
“Put pressure on the wound.”
The moment the woman in gray had taken over, Richard ran outside, spun to orient himself, then bolted straight for the office and telegraph key.
He’d find someone, anyone, who understood code and send for a doctor out of Ogden City or Huntsville or Eden— perhaps two from everywhere possible.
And to expedite the impossibly slow process, he’d send two men on horseback down the canyon with orders to return with a doctor.
Two extraordinarily long days later, Richard sat at Lessie’s bedside, keeping the towel on her forehead wet.
He squeezed a clean cloth into her mouth to moisten her tongue, desperate for her to swallow at least a few drops.
The doctor had made it clear if she would survive, the fever had to break and they had to force liquids into her.
How long until she wakes, Doctor?
The longer she stays unconscious— to a point— the better.
Richard had been so distraught, he hadn’t thought to ask the surgeon how long was too long to remain asleep.
All he could do now was wait.
And tend to her.
And pray.
The woman in gray— Bathsheba, he’d learned, had been widowed in the early morning delayed rock fall the day before Lessie arrived in Ogden City.
He’d learned quite a bit about Bathsheba in the two days since he’d barged into her home and appropriated her bed and space.
The woman had a brother she could turn to for ongoing help and support… if she could get off this mountain and to him in Murray. Richard would see to it Bathsheba and her children had all the help they needed if he had to drive her there himself.
But Lessie had to decide whether to live or die first...
Live.
Lessie, I need you, Sweetheart.
Richard had returned from sending two riders down the mountain and ordering a wire sent, to find Bathsheba and one of the other women gathering crude doctoring supplies to remove the bullet from Lessie’s flesh.
The mere thought of untrained women digging around in her body for a bullet had panicked him.
Are you going to help her, Bathsheba had demanded, or will you allow us to try?
With anguish more acute than he’d ever known, he finally nodded his head, allowing the women to do what they could.
After all, it could be hours before a doctor arrived.
Lessie could be cold by then.
Much to his surprise, Bathsheba boiled water covering the knife, tongs, and spoon she’d gathered. She even boiled her needle.
Richard shook off the memories and squeezed a few more drops of water into Lessie’s mouth. More of it dribbled past her chin than stayed inside, but he didn’t dare move her to tip her head back. What if she choked?
She’d lot fragments of bone, too, along with that bullet. After her clothes had been cut away he’d seen what he’d believed to be a shot near the heart and through the lung had been much nearer her shoulder.
She could have died instantly.
On a person her size, the heart had been spared by mere inches.
If she lived, she might lose movement in her arm. Or maybe she’d suffer pain for years to come in that limb.
The doctor had arrived to find the bullet out and Bathsheba’s stitches already set. The bleeding had slowed.
The doc had examined Lessie with care, listening to her lungs and heart, then holding the bullet close to the lamplight and studying the bone fragments and turning them over in his hand.
Doc, will she live?
Please, God, spare her life.
Somewhere in the middle of that second night, he realized why he hadn’t given the murderer a second thought… and why the impending loss of his wife made him numb to anything and everything else.
He’d fallen in love with Lessie.
Desperate, irrevocable love.
The kind of love Adam had wanted from the very beginning. At three-o’clock that bitterly cold morning, alone in Bathsheba’s cabin with only Lessie’s unconscious form, Richard’s heart hollowed out.
I want that kind of love.
And he’d found it, in his precious wife… He wanted to be in love with his wife, but not like this.
Not as fever burned her up from the inside out and not as she lay silent as death.
So, this was what his employees suffered when their friends, husbands, brothers, and employees went into a mine and never came out.
The agony of loss, so poignant, sharp, and inescapable. Bathsheba had been widowed so recently, the sight of this bed— the space she’d shared with her husband must bring her unbearable, unspeakable grief.
No wonder the woman appeared ashen and gray. She must think of her lost husband day and night.
If their places were reversed, Richard’s thoughts would be on Lessie, every moment of every day.
Selfish though he might be, he wanted Lessie to live. Even with permanent damage. Even with lasting pain.
Could he ask that of her?
How could he not?
Please, Sweetheart.
Come back to me.
Chapter Twenty
Lessie hurt. All over.
Her mouth was dry as paper. Even as she tried to open her eyes and moisten her tongue enough to speak, she heard Richard’s encouraging voice.
“…Lessie. That’s right…”
What had happened?
She moved, just a little, and fire lanced through her shoulder and down her back.
“Lie still.” Richard’s voice, pressing a blessedly cool cloth to her forehead and another to her lips. “You can’t sit up yet. Suck on this. It’s clean.”
She didn’t want to drink from a wet cloth but the water tasted so good, so refreshing, she drew as much life-giving moisture from it as possible.
She fought to open one eye, then two. A blinding headache and a glimpse of Richard rewarded her efforts.
“You gave me quite a scare, Sweetheart.”
“I did? What—?”
“Shh. Sleep.”
“I can’t.” She tried to wet her tongue. “Until I tell you… something.”
Already darkness crowded in, threatening to steal her away.
“I’m here, Lessie. I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“I love you.”
Richard stilled. His soothing touch to her cheek halted.
It didn’t matter if he preferred not to hear confessions of love. The fact of the matter was she loved him and—
“Thank God.” His lips pressed the gentlest of kisses to her cheek. “I love you, Lessie. I love you more than I can say.”
Truth echoed in her husband’s dear voice.
He loved her. And she loved him.
That was worth living for.
Lessie gradually grew stronger and Richard dared leave her side for brief periods. He found he trusted the women, particularly those like Bathsheba, who’d helped him when he needed them most. The same women had asked thoughtful questions about the improvements planned for Big Ezra.
A light snow had fallen the morning he met the two shift managers outside the camp office. He found the shooting had separated things that mattered from those that didn’t…