Ride the Thunder

by Janet Dailey

  All in the same moment, Brig glanced over his shoulder to see Fletcher ride into view, leading two saddled horses about five hundred feet below them. He caught the movement Jordanna made toward the man out of the corner of his eye. Instinct guided his reaction as Brig dropped his rifle and freed his hunting knife from the scabbard on his belt. Brutally, he pushed Jordanna backwards, slamming her against the trunk of the tree, and unsnapping his knife blade. His hand covered her mouth, smothering any outcry she might have made. He laid the cold metal blade along her throat.

  "Make one sound and it will be your last, " he snarled. Brig had absolutely no idea whether he would carry out the threat His action had been dictated strictly by an animal need to survive. Fletcher was too close, his rifle in his hand at the ready. If he discovered Brig's position, he could overtake them within minutes on horseback. And Fletcher would soon learn that his rifle was inoperable. After that, not even Jordanna could shield him for long

  Brig spared a look for the rider, who hadn't given any sign that he knew where they were, then glanced at Jordanna. Her wide eyes were shaded with alarm. Her hands were gripping his wrist, but she was making no straggle to remove his hand from her mouth. Brig became conscious of his length crushing her body against the trunk. Quickly he looked away, before the sight of her distracted him from the danger of her father again. An inner confusion gnawed at him. The slightest sound—even a foot kicking against the tree trunk—would be carried to Fletcher. Yet Jordanna wasn't making any attempt to gain her father's attention. Why? Fear wasn't keeping her silent He'd swear to that.

  Fletcher was nearing the place where he would cross their trail. Brig held his breath, not sure how much of it the snow had covered. The hunter's attention appeared to be focused on the mountain below him—where Brig would have been if he hadn't abruptly altered the retreat Fletcher walked his horse past the trail, but he looked bothered. It wouldn't be long before he would start to suspect that Brig had doubled back on him. The instant he did, Brig knew the man would ride to cut him off from camp.

  The snow clouds darkened the sky. There weren't too many hours left of the gray light of day. Even without the problem of eluding Fletcher, Brig would be lucky to make it back to camp on foot before nightfall. Add to that the complications of a potentially heavy snowfall and an injured leg, Brig didn't see a chance of reaching the camp. They would have to spend the night in the mountains without any shelter ... unless...

  As his gaze searched the surrounding landscape, Brig searched his mind. Somewhere out here was an old miner's cabin that had been abandoned long ago. He'd come across it -this summer when he'd been scouting the area for bighorns. The walls and roof were intact, but it had been so dirty inside that Brig had chosen to sleep outside on that trip. Now, that old log shack could give them protection—if he could remember where it was.

  Unless he was mistaken, it should be in the next ridge of mountains. They would have to circle this peak, go down the other side, and hope he could find that high canyon again. How far would that be? Three —four miles? Maybe more? Could he make it that far? There wasn't any choice. He had to.

  The first shiver of cold trembled over his skin. They had to start moving again. He snapped the knife shut against his leg and slipped it back in its leather sheath before he took his hand away from Jordanna's mouth. She didn't say a word as Brig stepped back to remove his pinning weight and grab her wrist again. Pulling her after him, he started through the trees to circle the mountain.

  "But my father went the other way with the horses, " Jordanna protested.

  "I know. Why do you think we are going this way?"

  He shot the answer at her, impatient that she continued to pretend.

  "I think you're crazy, " she murmured.

  "Crazy for trying, maybe, " he conceded grimly. "We've got a long way to go so I suggest that you shut up and save your breath. You'll need every bit of it. "

  "But why are we running from my father?" she argued.

  Brig didn't answer. Her perplexed expression looked so genuine. It almost made him believe that she was an innocent and unwitting accomplice in her father's scheme. But it was too unlikely—and too dangerous to believe.

  Chapter 21

  Her legs felt like frozen extensions of her body. Jordanna didn't know how she continued to make them function. The wind had picked up, swirling the calf-deep snow and obscuring the field of vision. Relentlessly, Brig dragged her behind him, picking her up when she fell—which was more often now—and forcing her to continue. There wasn't a part of her body that didn't scream for her to stop. But she was aware of the urgent need to find shelter from this winter storm before they collapsed. So she pushed on.

  All her physical and mental efforts were concentrated on one thing—staying on her feet. Jordanna didn't know how far they had come. She only knew that it felt like a hundred miles farther than she believed she could go. Possessing no spare energy, Jordanna didn't waste any trying to puzzle out Brig's peculiar behavior toward her father. She was too tired to think about it anyway—or to care.

  Brig stopped to look around, swaying on his feet.

  Jordanna didn't see anything familiar. She was certain they had never been in this area before, not during any of their previous hunting forays.

  "We're lost, aren't we?" she accused in a hoarse whisper. "You don't know where we're going. "

  "You'd better hope I do, " he rasped, tugging at her wrist to drag her with him.

  At his first step, his left leg buckled under him. Jordanna heard his grunt of pain as he fell heavily to the ground. She sank to her knees beside him, wondering where she would find the strength to help him up. As Brig rolled onto his side, his face twisted with pain, she saw the crimson stain of blood on the white snow. Her eyes widened.

  "You are hurt. " For the first time, she saw the dark moisture of blood soaking his left pantleg. Fear shattered through her at the amount of blood Brig had lost. How had he managed to get this far?

  "Just shut up and help me get on my feet, " he said through his teeth.

  His large hand gripped her shoulder and used it to lever himself upright. He hobbled unsteadily for a moment, clutching at her for support. His face was white beneath its tan, the strength ebbing from him. Jordanna didn't misjudge the ruthlessly determined set of his jaw. Brig wasn't finished yet. Draping his arm around her neck and over her shoulder, she tried to support as much of his weight as she could. He looked down at her, the pain-glazed brown eyes hard, rejecting her help.

  "I can make it, " he snapped.

  But Jordanna simply tightened her hold on him. "You need me. Which way do we go?"

  He hesitated, then said, "Angle to the right. "

  Again they started off in the direction Brig had indicated. Twice more they stopped so that he could study their location. Each time he made slight adjustments in their course. More and more he relied upon her for support. Both were draining their well of reserve strength.

  "Back in those trees, " Brig's voice was hoarse with exhaustion and pain as he waved to a blurred wall of evergreens ahead of them. "... there's an old miner's shack. " The next was a thought he muttered aloud. "If it's still standing. "

  The wet, snow-covered branches of the trees hung low. When they pushed them out of their way, miniature avalanches of snow were dumped on them. The biting wind nipped at her face until it felt raw. Both of them were covered with white flakes, living snowmen staggering clumsily through the stand of pines. Jordanna could see the flakes that had whitened Brig's eyebrows and mustache. A few were clinging to his spiky, dark lashes.

  A square of brown rose ahead of them, striped with horizontal lines of white where the snow had gathered on the top ridges of the logs.

  "There it is, Brig. Do you see it?" Jordanna wanted to run, but she would be lucky if her legs carried her the last few yards.

  "Yes. " Brig didn't alter the rhythm of his plodding limp.

  The door resisted her attempts to open it; the wood was swollen
and warped. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes. Brig had been leaning against the logged side of the cabin. Seeing her difficulty, he motioned her aside and put his shoulder to the door. The wood moaned a protest, then swung violently inward. Brig's impetus carried him staggering inside, fighting for balance. Jordanna followed him inside the dark, windowless interior and heard him crash into something before she could reach him.

  A crude table with one broken leg had kept him from falling to the floor. The cabin smelled dank and dusty. Cobwebs grabbed at her face. Something scurried across the floor to hide in a darkened corner. A mouse or a wood rat, Jordanna thought with weary unconcern for the rodent occupants that shared their shelter.

  "The fireplace. " Brig reeled heavily against her.

  Jordanna felt her knees buckling under his weight She struggled to get him the couple of feet to the crude fireplace made of stone. He was losing consciousness. She saw him moving his head, trying to fight back the blackness.

  "We have... start a fire. " He lost part of the sentence as his full weight sagged on her shoulders. Jordanna let it force her down, absorbing his fall with her body. He began mumbling snatches of sentences. "... clothes... wet... have to... dry... fire. "

  Untangling herself from his weight, Jordanna stretched his limp form in front of the fireplace. She unwound the wool scarf from around her neck with difficulty, her fingers numb and clumsy. She tied it around his wound, not so tightly that it interfered with his circulation, but just enough to apply pressure and stem the flow of blood. Sitting back, she wanted to collapse beside him, but his barely coherent mumblings before he passed out forced her to move.

  A stack of kindling near the fireplace had long ago tumbled free of its neat pile. Jordanna gathered part of it and arranged it in the blackened hearth. There was enough wood there to start the fire, but not enough to keep it going all night. Mounding the shavings of wood and bark, and tee-peeing the split logs above it, she fumbled in her pocket for the waterproof pack of matches. She was shaking so badly from the cold that she had trouble striking the match. It flamed and sputtered, then caught fire. Jordanna had trouble holding the match steady as she touched the flame to the kindling. It licked at the pile the first few seconds with disinterest, before jumping onto a piece of bark. As it devoured more of it, Jordanna added new shavings to feed the tiny flame.

  When it grew large enough to consume the dry logs, she straightened. Her body was stiff with cold and exhaustion, but she couldn't stay by the warmth of the fire and dry her sweat-dampened clothes that had begun to freeze. There was more wood to be gathered for the fire and Brig's wound needed attention.

  By necessity, the fire came first. Jordanna neatly stacked the split logs that remained and looked around the one-room cabin. In addition to the broken table, there was a crude chair. She fought her way through the cobwebs that clogged the space and picked up the broken pieces of the table leg. The leather strips that tied the chair together had rotted. Jordanna used her knife to slice them apart and add its wood to her stack.

  Her teeth had started to chatter. But if she stopped now, she might not have the strength later on. She didn't hear her sobs of exhaustion as she concentrated on the shelves of rough lumber hammered to a side wall.

  Using a chairleg as a bat, Jordanna knocked out the braces that supported the shelves. A mouse squeaked in panic and raced across a bottom shelf. She pounded at the shelves and tugged until she had yanked them free of the wall. A dutch oven of cast iron clattered to the floor. Out of breath, she paused. Something crawled over her cheek. A spider belonging to one of the webs had stuck to her skin, she supposed, and brushed it off with only a hint of a tired grimace.

  When all the wood was stacked by the fireplace, Jordanna decided it was enough to last until morning. There was still the wooden frame of a cot with its network of rope springs, if she needed it. Brig stirred and she dragged herself upright. She had nothing to disinfect his wound with, but as much as he had bled, surely it would be alright if she could get some sort of halfway-sterile dressing on it. That meant hot water.

  Jordanna staggered to the dark corner where the iron pot had fallen. She carried it outside, careful not to shut the door tightly. In the gray light of late afternoon, she scrubbed out the dusty inside of the pot with grainy chunks of gravel gathered from under the snow. Her whole body was quaking with the cold as the falling snow swirled around her, driven by a wind whipping through the trees. She wiped out the pot with handfuls of snow and began tightly packing it with snow until it was mounded. Carrying it inside, she set it by the fire to melt and come to a boil.

  The warmth from the flames hurt her skin, pricking it with a thousand sharp needles. Not having the strength to stand again, she scooted on the floor to where Brig laid. His hard features were white and stiff. His poncho glistened with moisture and his hat had fallen off, the snow melting from the crown to form a brown pool of water on the dirty floor. The rest of his clothes had to be as equally damp with sweat as her own and chilling his skin instead of warming it. The fire would do neither of them any good with wet clothes on.

  Pulling off her wet gloves, Jordanna laid them in front of the fire to dry and warmed her colorless hands near the flames. When she had worked some of the stiffness from her fingers, she began undressing Brig. The rain poncho and the fleece-lined jacket came off first, followed by the heavy flannel shirt and the top of his insulated underwear. It was a struggle—his limp, massive form offering her no cooperation at all.

  She rubbed his chest and arms to increase his circulation, covering every inch of his torso until she knew it intimately. Next came the lower half. After untying the wool scarf that bound his wound, Jordanna considered using her knife to cut away the material of his Levis and longjohns. But they still had to walk out of this place. In this cold, he would need all the warmth of his layers of clothes, and not a gaping slash in his pantlegs.

  Unbuckling his belt, she unfastened his pants and zipped them down. As carefully as she could, she eased the material down his hips, working it over the wet, bloody area of his thigh wound. Brig groaned once in sharp pain and Jordanna bit her lip anxiously before continuing. She had to stop to remove his boots. She didn't set them close to the fire, knowing that too much heat would ruin the leather. With his pants and socks removed, she gently stripped off his insulated longjohns.

  Jordanna was glad he was unconscious because she knew she was hurting him terribly. A caking crust of blood had pasted the material to his skin. The wound had stopped bleeding. Amidst the messy sight, she could see the purpling entrance and exit holes of the bullet She was relieved that it wasn't lodged inside him still.

  The snow-water in the pot had just started to boil when she had finished undressing him. Starting with his right foot, she began massaging his cold skin, working up the long length of his muscled leg to the smooth skin of his hip and including the hair-roughened skin of his lower stomach. Jordanna transferred her attention to his left foot, rubbing his hard flesh to the top of his knee, not daring to go any further because of his wound.

  For a fleeting moment, Jordanna found it an unsettling sensation to have so much freedom to touch his naked form. She had found scars of previous wounds, other than the one that marked his shoulder. Brig never would have permitted her to discover so much about him if he had been conscious. He would have had her flat on her back and beneath him long before now. And she wouldn't have been objecting

  But this wasn't the time for such stimulating thoughts. Turning away from the intoxicating sight of his naked, male body, Jordanna cut off a portion of the tail of his shirt with her knife. The many layers of her own clothes were becoming cumbersome. She undressed to her insulated underwear, hesitated, then stripped off the bottoms. She cut off one leg below the knee and dropped it in the angrily boiling water. Her body was one big shiver that wouldn't stop.

  Dipping the piece of his shirt tail in the water, she nearly scalded her fingers trying to wring out the excess moisture. She bent over Br
ig's leg and began gently wiping away the blood drying on his thigh, until the area around the wound was clean. It looked ugly and sore. Jordanna turned back to the iron kettle and the thick piece of her underwear churning in the bubbling water. It hadn't boiled long enough to be sterile yet

  She added more wood to the fire and glanced at their pile of damp clothes. They needed to be dried out The floor was gritty beneath her bare feet as she walked over to drag the table from the center of the room. It noisily scraped across the floor in resistance. Lying on its side, it rested crookedly and formed a natural lean-to over Brig's body. She draped some of the clothes over the legs, creating sides that held in the fire's warmth. With her knife, she cut away the rope mattress of the cot and used the short lengths to make a clothesline, tying one end to a hook cemented into the side of the fireplace and securing the other end to the table leg. On it, she hung out the rest of their clothes to dry, removing her top and adding it to the line.

  With a short stick, Jordanna fished out the material from the boiling water and let the excess drip and sizzle on the stone hearth. Steam rose from the wet cloth in a gray vapor. She waited until the heat subsided before touching it Maybe it was wrong to put a wet dressing on his wound, but she didn't want to leave it exposed in this dirty place and risk infection. His muscles flinched instinctively from the hot, wet compress she applied to the wound. Needing something to secure it in place, Jordanna cut off two narrow strips from the bottom of her blouse and tied them around his leg to hold the bandage.

  That was it. There was nothing left to do, she thought tiredly, and exhaustion started fuzzing her vision. No, she shook herself and stood up. She had to keep the fire going. Without anything to cover them, she couldn't let it go out They desperately needed its warmth.

  Leaning against the warm stones of the fireplace for support, Jordanna tried to maintain her vigil. Several times she dozed off, so exhausted that she could sleep upright Each time, a chill would touch the portion of her naked body that didn't face the fire and she would have to turn to warm it, toasting herself. Half-a-dozen times, she added more wood to the fire. In her exhausted state, she moved like a robot, carrying out her task without conscious motivation.