Trail of Passion (Hot on the Trail Book 7)

by Merry Farmer

  “I’m Lucy Haskell.” Lucy stepped in with a smile and an outstretched hand, proving once again that she was far more adept at handling people than Gideon was. “My father is Howard Haskell, of Wyoming. I’m on my way home, although I met Gideon here on the trail and now we’re… well….” Her words trailed off, and she smiled.

  Leopold took Lucy’s hand and shook it with a polite smile. Then his eyes—and his frown—returned to Gideon. “I wasn’t aware that you had an understanding with a woman, Dr. Faraday.”

  Cold prickles of danger raced down Gideon’s spine. “I’m sorry, are we acquainted somehow? Please forgive me if I’ve forgotten.”

  “Do you know Gideon?” Lucy asked before Leopold had a chance to answer.

  He still didn’t have a chance to answer.

  “They found him,” a cry sounded from closer to the fort. “They found Tim. Nelson and Miss Estelle are having a show-down.”

  Lucy gasped and twisted toward Ft. Laramie’s front gate. Gideon’s heart pounded for her, for a change, rather than his own fears. She met his eyes with a look between fear and relief, and said, “We have to go help.”

  Before Gideon could think to stop her, she marched off for the fort. Gideon cast one last, wary glance Leopold’s way before taking off after her. Leopold joined them, keeping close by Gideon’s side.

  “It would be a crime to take that boy away from Miss Estelle,” Joe, the farmer who had played cards with Gideon just the other day, was in the middle of making a speech on Estelle’s behalf by the time Lucy, Gideon, and Leopold joined the crowd that had formed in the fort’s main yard. “She’s a gem, that one.”

  Estelle and Graham stood in the center of the yard, Tim with them, clasped protectively in Estelle’s arms. Everyone who wasn’t watching them had their eye on either Clarence Nelson or the man in the military officer’s uniform who Joe had addressed.

  “No, no,” Nelson protested. “She’s a former slave. She’s a darkie.”

  Lucy huffed in indignation at Gideon’s side. “Are they trying to take Tim away from Estelle?” she asked under her breath.

  “Apparently so,” Gideon said.

  “Well, I won’t have it,” she murmured, then said aloud, “If you don’t let Estelle and Graham keep Tim,” she stepped forward, her hands balled into fists at her sides, “then I’ll tell my papa, Mr. Howard Haskell of Wyoming, that you said so, and he’ll have a thing or two to say about that.” She nodded for good measure.

  Gideon broke into a surprise smile at the gumption Lucy showed at the same time as the fort’s commander, Col. Feiser’s brow flew up. She was far and away the bravest woman he’d ever known, and one of the most pure-hearted.

  Would she be so quick to rush to defend him?

  Pete stepped forward and spoke through the crowd’s mumbling. “Col. Feiser, we’ve had dealings with each other before.”

  “We have,” the colonel agreed with a cautious nod.

  “Now, I’m not saying we’re friends, but I’ve never done you wrong.”

  “True.” The colonel continued to stroke his chin.

  Pete turned to Nelson. “This man’s a politician. He’s been giving me trouble for weeks now. And that man,” he pointed to Isaiah, who was in a heap on the ground, rubbing his jaw as if someone had punched him, “has a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. I fired him yesterday for it too. Don’t listen to a thing those two say. Listen to the rest of them.”

  “But, sir,” Nelson started.

  The pieces of the puzzle in front of Gideon began to come together, just in time for Col. Feiser to hold up his hand and stop any further comment.

  “Son,” the colonel said, walking up to Estelle, Graham, and especially Tim. “Who do you want to be with?”

  “Ha,” Nelson barked. “The boy doesn’t talk. He’s been too afraid, what with—”

  “I want Estelle and Graham to be my ma and pa,” Tim said, clear as day.

  Gideon’s brow flew up in surprise. Like everyone else, he’d assumed Tim was a mute. Beside him, Lucy clapped and squealed in delight.

  “That settles it then. The boy stays with these two.” Col. Feiser nodded, then turned to head back to his office.

  “But—” Nelson chased after him.

  The crowd burst into applause. Gideon almost regretted coming into the confrontation at the last moment. At least Lucy was happy.

  “Oh, I just knew it would work out for the best,” she said, still clapping her hands and bouncing as she rushed in to hug Estelle and Graham. Gideon followed, thumping Graham on the back, wishing he’d been the one to defend his friend.

  “About time someone spoke some sense,” Pete said.

  “I knew it would turn out well,” Josephine added.

  They went on congratulating each other and rejoicing. Gideon only wished he felt as happy for them as they deserved. As his friends continued to hug and celebrate, he turned to glance over his shoulder at Leopold. The man was still watching him with an icy stare that promised some sort of retribution.

  The rest of the evening was such a whirlwind of joy and relief that Lucy could hardly sleep that night, in spite of the fact that Gideon quietly hopped into her wagon after the encampment around Ft. Laramie had settled down. He didn’t make love to her, though. He didn’t do more than kiss her and hold her close. A little too close. Something was wrong.

  By the next morning, that feeling had grown, but there was little she could do about it.

  “One thing you’ll learn about the Oregon Trail, Mr. Driver,” she explained to the man who was joining their train, the man who knew Gideon somehow, “is that when you’re walking across endless miles of nothing but tall grass and wide sky, all you want to do is reach a fort and stop for a rest, but once you reach a fort, all you want to do is keep moving so that you can get that much closer to your destination. We’re so close to home now that I can practically smell Papa’s ranch in the breeze, though it’s still a good few weeks away at the rate we’re traveling.”

  Mr. Driver let her talk on and on. Gideon didn’t try to stop her either. He was busy fiddling with Graham’s wooden leg, while Mr. Driver was sipping the coffee she’d made for them all, in a pensive mood.

  Lucy didn’t like the subdued mood, not when there was so much activity all around them from the rest of the wagon train and the fort. She filled the space the only way she knew how.

  “The first thing I’m going to do when I get home—after giving my Papa and my aunt Virginia gigantic hugs, of course, and maybe my brother Franklin too—is to take one of Papa’s horses and ride out across the whole entire property. I miss the streams and the trees and even the big, flat stretches of pasture so much.” She tilted her head to one side. “Of course, I hope I won’t show up back home by myself. It would be rather nice if I had somebody to introduce to my Papa once I got there.”

  She peeked at Gideon to see if he’d caught her hint. Somehow she wasn’t surprised to find him frowning at the wooden leg as he measured the bit around the ankle and marked it with a pencil. He hadn’t heard a word she said. She glanced to Leopold. He too was staring into his coffee, thoughts far off.

  “It would be something else if I came right out and told them everything I’d been doing on this journey, don’t you think? Why, I can just see the look on Franklin’s face right now if I told him I’d been sleeping alone in a wagon with a man this whole time, or that we’d been painting ourselves blue and dancing in the moonlight every night. Not to mention eating live grasshoppers and feeding peppermint sticks to the oxen.”

  Nothing. Neither man was paying attention. In Josephine’s camp, next to theirs, Muriel Chance snorted with laughter as she stirred a pinch of sugar into her tea. Lucy planted a fist on her hip and shook her head at Muriel as if to say, “Men!” Muriel only slapped a hand over her mouth and continued to giggle.

  “I’m sorry, you were saying?” Gideon glanced up from his work, likely because he’d noticed no more noise was coming from her direction.

 
Rather than call him out for his complete lack of attention or asking him to please—for the love of all that was good and holy—tell her what was bothering him so that they could move past it, she faced Leopold and asked, “Where are you from, Mr. Diver?”

  Leopold snapped out of his reverie and sat straighter. “New York, originally,” he answered. “Lately of Chicago. On my way to… the West.”

  Gideon sent the man a sideways look—one that convinced Lucy the two knew each other, though neither was admitting from where or how.

  “What about family?” she asked on. “Don’t you have a wife to come with you?”

  It was the wrong question to ask. Leopold’s whole face plunged to despondency. “My lovely Sandra passed away eighteen months ago. Just about the time our boy, Michael, was killed in the war.”

  Gideon flinched, darting a sidelong glance to Leopold and turning bright pink. That and Leopold’s confession caused a hitch to form in Lucy’s throat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Too many fathers have lost sons in that terrible war. I’m extra sorry that you lost your wife as well.”

  Leopold shook his head, his eyes red-rimmed. “She died of a broken heart. Michael was our only child. She doted on him. Losing him was… was too great a blow.”

  “Where was he killed?” Gideon asked, his voice cracking halfway through.

  Leopold turned to him slowly. “Virginia. Near Chancellorsville.”

  All color left Gideon’s face. If Lucy didn’t know any better, she would have thought that Gideon had been a general on the other side of the conflict from Leopold’s son and that he had pulled the trigger. Something about the invisible weight that pressed down on him had that kind of… of guilt written all over it.

  She opened her mouth to ask another question, closed it and pressed her lips together, leaned her weight onto one hip, and searched for a way to keep the conversation going.

  “A classmate of mine had a brother who was killed in Virginia,” she said at last. “At a place that they just called The Wilderness. We had graduated three years before that, though, and I wasn’t close to her at the time, but I remember hearing all about it. I danced with her brother once. It’s sad to think that so many young men who we all danced with gave their lives for the cause. But I suppose war is like that.”

  Dear me, she sounded like a complete ninny. It was no wonder her mother shook her head at her when she started chattering mindlessly.

  “It is a shame,” Leopold spoke quietly, letting her off the hook for her lack of propriety. “I would give anything to have my son back. They told me that he died heroically, defending his regiment’s position.” He paused. “Or so they told me. I set out to talk to those who fought with him after Sandra died, but the story they told was different than the one in the letter from Michael’s commanding officer.”

  “Really?” Lucy blinked, setting aside the dishes she’d finished washing and sitting to face Leopold.

  Gideon grew paler still.

  “The commanding officer said he was shot in the heart as he defended his friends from a surprise attack, but those same friends say he was nowhere near them that day. They told me that he and a group of others were sent on a special assignment a ways off from the heart of the battle. They didn’t know much about what position Michael and the others were defending, only that they died while doing it. No one saw that action, though.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gideon burst suddenly, with such passion that Lucy gasped. “I’m so terribly sorry.” There was pain in his eyes once again, as if he had been on the battlefield. But no, he’d told her that he had been exempted from military service because of his research.

  She gasped again and blinked in confusion when, rather than going on with his story or finding some way to console Gideon, Leopold got up and walked off. Just like that, without another word.

  Lucy stared at the spot where he’d been sitting, stared at Gideon. He looked as though he might burst into tears.

  “Gideon,” she breathed out, her frustration and concern for him near the point of panic. “Will you please tell me what is the matter?”

  Gideon took a long, shuddering breath. He rubbed his hand over his face and let his work on Graham’s leg drop from his hands to the ground.

  At long last, he sucked in a breath, lowered his hand, and said, “Lucy, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Gideon’s throat closed. Just when he had reached the point of finally sharing the most important thing he had to share. He stared up at Lucy, memorizing her face, the curiosity and the impatience. She was beautiful, more than he could ever hope to find in his life. Her auburn hair framed her face, and her green eyes shone in the western sunshine. He would have given anything to see her smile at him one last time, to take that memory with him, whatever happened next, but it was too late.

  “I’m waiting,” she said, resting a hand on her hip. She looked as though she’d start tapping her foot in the packed dirt beside her wagon if he didn’t get on with it.

  That made Gideon smile and let out a breath, but only for a moment. He rubbed his hand over his face and gestured for her to move to the overturned crate closer to him. If he was going to do this, he wanted her near.

  She got up and moved, reaching out to take his hand once she was seated. “I know there’s something you’ve been holding back,” she started before he could. “I’ve known for ages now. I can see it in your eyes. You can’t expect to be able to hide something from someone who you’ve been so intimate with in other ways,” she added in a near whisper, leaning closer to him.

  “I know.” He sighed. This was it.

  “It’s about our new friend, Mr. Diver, isn’t it?” she pushed on before he could gather his courage. “You know him from back East.”

  If he didn’t take the reins and start confessing, she would talk over him until he lost his nerve.

  “Yes, although I didn’t realize how I knew him until he told his story,” he began. He shook his head and gestured with his free hand. “That is, I don’t know him specifically. We’ve never met before.”

  “Then how does he know you? What’s going—”

  He silenced her by raising a hand. She pursed her lips and huffed, but kept her eyes fixed firmly on him, waiting.

  Gideon swallowed. “I’m not going to be able to say this if you interrupt me, so please, just let me say it.”

  “All right.” She folded her hands in her lap and watched him intently.

  “You know that I was a graduate student at Princeton University, and that I turned to chemistry and research as my education progressed.”

  She opened her mouth, but shut it and settled for a nod.

  “And you know that I’ve been interested in the properties of chlorine as a way to purify water and remove putrification, things that my cousin in England has researched.”

  Again she nodded.

  Gideon took a deep breath. “Well, there was more to the research than just using chlorine to purify water.”

  He rubbed his free hand over his face, using the eagerness in Lucy’s eyes to ground him and give him the will to go on.

  “Chlorine, as it turns out, can be a highly effective in fighting disease when used by surgeons and in hospitals. Much research was conducted in Europe in the 1820s to discover ways that it could be used to reduce the stench associated with decay. Even before that, in the last century, it was discovered that chlorine was effective as a bleaching agent.” He knew he was speaking too technically, but it was easier to hide behind scientific language than to get to the point.

  “How interesting,” Lucy said, though her eyes urged him to go on.

  “The thing is,” he forced himself to continue, “there were sometimes side effects to these discoveries and observations. Insects dropping dead in the area where chlorine gas was being experimented with. Irritation to the throat and nose of scientists working with chlorine and other substances. It’s because when chlorine gas co
mes into contact with the moisture in our eyes and respiratory passageways, it turns into hydrochloric acid, a highly toxic substance.”

  He lowered his head, remembering the sting when he had breathed in fumes that were too potent.

  “A man by the name of John Doughty, a teacher from New York, came up with a theory that chlorine gas could be used to deliberately cause negative effects, and that it could be used as a weapon, to immobilize soldiers. He contacted the army, and the army came to visit us in our laboratory.” He swallowed, slowly lifting his chin to look in Lucy’s eyes. “We explained our research and warned them about the consequences of too potent a mixture of gas, but at the same time, we were curious about chlorine and other chemicals’ potential.”

  He paused, dropping his eyes to stare at Lucy’s hands in her lap. He reached for one and rubbed his thumb across her knuckles.

  “The biggest fault that scientists like me have is that we can lose sight of the human element in the excitement of new discoveries. We dove into our research with enthusiasm, coming up with combinations of chemicals that we knew could create an overpowering effect. It was easy, too easy. We discovered that a combination of chlorine and bromine created a gas that was so devastatingly effective….” He choked on his words.

  When he peeked up at Lucy again, she was studying him with a frown. “What happened?”

  “The experiment was a resounding success,” he answered grimly. His stomach turned at the memory, his soul ached. “We created several cartridges of chemicals that, when detonated, would spread a thick cloud of chlorine gas over a small area of a battlefield. The army insisted on testing it, so we all went down to Virginia, where the fighting was the hottest. All of this was in absolute secret, mind you. Barely a soul had any knowledge of the experiment. Not even the top generals in the army knew. I’ve never seen anything treated with such confidentiality in my life.”

  “So what did you do?” Lucy’s voice shook just a little. Bless her, but she was smart enough to see what was coming.

  “We launched the cartridges at an oncoming attack, one that the army had manipulated to take place in a more remote section of the forest.” His chest squeezed at the memory. “Our team was placed within observation range, but out of real danger. We watched the cartridges explode, watched the cloud of gas spread….” He swallowed hard, worried he might be sick. “Then we watched a hundred men on both side of the battle die in agony.”