Taste of Victory

by Sandra Dengler

  “Then ’tis me own imagination as well. But Captain Runyan turned the wheel over to his steersman and the captain be fiddling about in back, so it cannae be too much out of kilter.”

  She knew more about it than he. He let it go. “Where were you, Sam, if I may ask?”

  “Marty Frobel wanted to ride the river—there be nae like this in his country—so meself arranged privately for him with Captain Runyan, who was taking melons to Albury. The good captain suggested I come along for the company, and delighted I am that I did. ’Twas a delightful trip. Relaxing. Being unemployed, I could do that, ye see.” She watched his face a moment. “That be an ironic reference, in case ye dinnae notice.”

  “I noticed.” He pursed his lips. “Reginald suggested looking for threads—ways God arranges something completely unexpected. If you hadn’t disappeared up the river to Albury, I wouldn’t have gone to Barmah….” His voice trailed off.

  “Cole, why be ye here?”

  “On my way back to Echuca, to make amends. I may not be able to restore your job, but I’ll do my best.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “Change of heart. That’s it. Remember how you explained to me about your own change of heart? The difference between being a Christian and being a Christian? I’ve experienced that myself. And I can’t explain what happened or why. But I did.”

  Those incomparable opalescent eyes studied him. Why wasn’t she elated? Why wasn’t she gushing Oh, that’s so wonderful!? The eyes fell away. Disappointment ripped into Sloan. He expected a happier reaction than this.

  “You seemed to want me to at the time, Sam. Changed your mind?”

  “Nae, by nae means. But, ah…”

  He scooted in closer. “But what?”

  “Meself told ye in the long past, I cannae trust ye. I know y’r ways, Cole Sloan, and the devious way ye think. Y’r heart may be brand new, as Reginald explains it, or ye may for some reason be saying the one thing ye ken would sway me.”

  “You think I’m lying.”

  “Nae, ’tis more difficult than that. I’ve nae way of knowing whether ye be lying or nae. Sometimes ye do, sometimes ye dinnae. And sometimes…” Her voice caught. “Sometimes ye say naething atal, which can be the most telling lie. I’ve learned to me sorrow I cannae trust the words ye speak.”

  The gall of this woman! Here he was trying his best to pour his heart out to her and she was snubbing his efforts! She turned, then, presenting her profile as she studied the brown water and the rushing river. What a lovely face, serene and sad.

  Sad. Think how many times he had made her sad. Why should she believe him? He didn’t believe him either, at least not completely. In his desire to sway this woman worth loving, he could be fooling himself in some colossal way. What if this faith, so-called, were a sham of his own mind, generated not by the Holy Spirit but by his yearning for a woman who believed in such things?

  Cole Sloan was not one to despair, but he did now. He had damaged his trustworthiness irreparably. He might as well give it away; he was never going to win the trust of this solid, practical lady—and for good reason. She had no reason to trust him now. And the sense of loss nearly drove him to tears.

  He shuddered. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who actually deserves a perfect man. Nearer perfect than me, at any rate. And you’re right. I can’t be trusted. I want to change. I want to be a man known for my word. I never have been, but from now on…Maybe someday…” Someday. Tomorrow.

  She was studying him. Not staring. Studying. “I be nae perfect either.”

  “Who is? You know what I mean—oh.” He dug into his pocket. “The postmaster decided I’d probably see you before he did, so he asked me to give you this copy of a telegram you received.” He handed her the thin yellow envelope.

  She ripped it open, paused, grinned. “’Tis from Chris. Fine news! ‘Roller-skating goat a complete success.’”

  Chapter Twenty

  Flood and Crescendo

  Dateline Sydney:

  Miss Linnet Connolly, popularly known as the Adelaide Lark, arrived in town today to commence rehearsals for Ricardo Giambone’s lavish Easter production of Handel’s beloved Messiah. Miss Connolly, a musical prodigy discovered and nurtured at the University of Adelaide, has just completed a victorious concert tour through the Riverina. When an interviewer suggested that playing to small audiences in bush hamlets was not exactly an accolade, she replied through her spokesman, “Should these people, who are the backbone of Australia’s primary industry, expect and receive anything less than the best simply because there are fewer of them?”

  Who would guess that hundreds and hundreds of people would turn out for an afternoon performance? Extraordinary!

  Even more extraordinary, look at them rise and applaud! These people were Sydneyites, the most sophisticated, cultured, discerning arts patrons in all Australia. See how enthusiastically they responded to the Giambone Messiah! And here stood Linnet in the heart of it, basking in the footlights, receiving accolade. Extraordinary? Far more than that. Fantastic!

  Linnet felt her cheeks flush as she raised an arm in gratitude. Her smile threatened to break her face in half, so wide and irrepressible was it. She looked to the wings. There stood Chris with a grin as broad as her own. He was clapping wildly, and with his eager clamor was saying, I believe in you! I love you!

  Chris. Dear Chris!

  The singers exited stage right as the crowd quieted.

  Mr. Giambone hugged her, burying her in his massive bulk. “Tomorrow, fair lass, you shall be the toast of Sydney, soon as the newspapers and the Bulletin write you up! And no woman deserves it more! How magnificent you were! This will be the finest Giambone production ever!” He bubbled a few more exclamations, but Linnet didn’t hear them. She could only see Chris’s face, that marvelous, glowing face. He loved her. He approved her performance. That was all that mattered.

  Chris pushed in beside her to pump Mr. Giambone’s hand. “We appreciate immensely your trust in us, sir, in Linnet here. Her career is well on the road thanks to you.”

  “Now that you mention…” Mr. Giambone received a towel from some faceless minion and began wiping at his makeup and perspiration. “We are taking Handel back to Europe, to Britain. The Adelaide Lark here must accompany us. You will, will you not? You and your swain here, of course.”

  Linnet’s world hesitated in its spinning. To Britain…Extraordinary was hardly describing it.

  Chris beamed like the sun. “We would be honored! An international tour.”

  Linnet’s heart was pounding. “Ye mean London?”

  “Dublin, then London. We’re setting it up now.”

  She glanced at Chris. For months he had counseled her to act boldly, to assume her place as a world-class soprano. Now she garnered her courage for the boldest request she had ever made. “Please, sir, be there a chance we might do a performance in Cork as well?”

  Chris, bless him, picked it up instantly. “Of course! Her family lives in Cork, and her grandmother is very frail. The trip to Dublin would tax the old lady sorely. Is it possible?”

  Mr. Giambone was laughing. “That, lass, is what makes you so charming. No pretense. No false airs, nor false modesty. And the first thing you think of is your family. Of course. We can schedule there as well. Your parents and grandmama, eh?”

  “Aye, sir. And most particularly, if she be still alive, a nun at me old school.”

  We’re coming, Sister Bertrand, that you might learn how much your patient love has wrought. For with your generosity and caring you gave me more than you will ever know.

  ****

  Sloan was not a boat enthusiast. He loved driving a snappy little sulky, or a shiny, pin-striped enameled trap, and he enjoyed the blatant elegance of an open brougham. He didn’t mind trains. Boats were something else—dull, pedestrian, sluggish.

  Listen to Echuca Charlene’s steam engine strain and struggle. She had taken her wool barge back under tow hours ago. Now
she was roaring along all out, canting a bit on the curves, and still she wasn’t going much faster than the pace of a man running.

  Sloan was not a rain enthusiast, either. He had abhorred the rains during those years at Sugarlea. And it was raining now, inside and out. Outside, the rain was drumming on Charlene’s deck and dripping off the roof three feet in front of his nose. Inside, Sam was in a pensive mood. She sat near Cole’s feet under the shelter of the roof, saying hardly a word. She professed the same sort of new faith in Jesus Christ that he had just discovered. He had hoped her reaction to his story would be jubilant. No such luck. If anything, his news deepened her introspection.

  Sloan sprawled in a nest of firewood that just happened to be shaped more or less like a chair seat. He shifted a bit to avoid a sharp edge that had been poking him for the last ten minutes. “Know what hurt most of all? Having to accept your charity. Not having a brass razoo—anything—of my own. Every penny I spent was yours. Being forced to accept a woman’s largess really twisted a knife in me. It’s not natural, a man living off a woman’s money.”

  She shrugged. “Meself prefers to think of it as a friend rendering temporary assistance to a friend. There was nae man-and-woman aspect to it, at least nae for me.”

  She stood up suddenly. For a moment she watched the trees moving by, and then she walked over to where, by craning her neck, she could glimpse the wool barge behind them. She was frowning.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We be moving too fast to be so near Echuca, unless the rules have changed since last I traveled this stretch.”

  “This is too fast?” Sloan lurched to his feet, as much to give his body a rest from the woodpile as to see what was going on.

  Somewhere in the nether reaches behind the firewood, the firebox door clanged shut. Steam hissed.

  From up in the wheelhouse the steersman yelled something Sloan could not discern.

  “A pox on all insurance brokers!” rang the cry from beyond the boiler. “May they follow each other in a long, unbroken queue to Abaddon! Head for the trees, Harry! Head for the trees!”

  “Vic or Wales?”

  “Vic!”

  Charlene leaned left. As little as Sloan knew about riverboats, he knew that normally they didn’t tilt.

  From upriver came a distant plaintive cry—the barge steersman was calling to them.

  Charlene convulsed in a single giant, jolting shudder. It threw Sloan against the paddle-wheel housing and flung Sam to her knees. Instantly glass shattered. Lions from hell roared as something from the rear of the vessel crashed into the woodpile. Sticks of firewood came scudding forward, filling the chair-shaped depression where Sloan had been sitting moments ago.

  “Gus! Captain! Gus!” Sam screamed. She was as close to hysteria as Sloan had ever seen her. She charged past him and scrambled across a low spot in the wall of the firewood, heading toward the rear. Didn’t she realize that was absolutely the most dangerous place she could be? Sloan reached out to grab her, but he wasn’t quick enough. What could he do? He clambered over the wood, too.

  The flimsy tongue-and-groove walls housing the boiler system were gone, blown away. Sloan thought that one of the walls, jammed against the woodpile, might be burning. Acrid black smoke billowed out so thickly he couldn’t see anything for certain, nor could he say for sure what was afire and what was not. His eyes filled with tears.

  Curled up in a corner by the firewood, Gus started to move. He shrieked and started flailing wildly as Sloan reached him. Sloan grabbed the first flying wrist he could get a hold of and began pulling. He had to get Gus out of here, out of the smoke, if nothing else. Already all three of them were coughing.

  The firebox lid banged and fell away. No wonder the old man shrieked; ripped from the firebox, the nearly red-hot lid had slammed against the woodpile, thrusting loose firewood into Sloan’s vacated chair, and then fallen to pin Gus’s leg to the deck. Sloan grabbed a piece of wood and pried Gus loose. Sam had seized Gus’s other arm. Together she and Cole hauled the old man up over the firewood and out to the rain-slick foredeck.

  Blood and soot had made a mess of Gus’s face. The bushy, silken beard was burned crisp, reduced to a black and stinking remnant of frizz. “My leg…” He reached out, groping toward his leg.

  The firebox lid had gone through his dungarees almost instantly, obliterating a big square patch. Half of Gus’s shin and calf were quite literally cooked. He’d lose his leg below the knee; Sloan knew it, as no doubt Gus did.

  The singed head shook. “Blew a tube. Musta blown a tube. Only thing would do that…blow the firebox like that…” Suddenly, as if a new man were inserted into the beaten old body, Gus came to life. His voice, though still shrill, took on a ring of authority. “We can save the old girl yet. There’s a chain coiled under the wood in the back, Sloan. Drag it out, loop it over the back bollard and let it drag behind. It’ll keep us nosed downstream.”

  As Sloan clawed his way back over the firewood to the rear of the boat, he heard Gus telling Sam, “That was the magic, lass. Dragging a chain behind us kept us in the channel back there. Helped us feel the bottom, hold to the deepest part. Same with the barge.”

  The chain. Here it was, a monstrous thing with links three inches long. Sloan flung aside the few sticks of wood stacked upon it. Bollard. What’s a bollard? The stern post there, likely. He found the end of the chain and started pulling.

  Charlene was definitely afire. Sloan could hear crackling beyond the expected noises of the firebox. Was this steady rain heavy enough to put it out? Probably not. The conky chain kept kinking and tangling.

  With a whishing, sibilant crash, Charlene flipped her tail ninety degrees, yanking Sloan’s feet right out from under him. He sprawled across that unforgiving, iron-hard pile of chain. Pieces of big, heavy, slimy wet wood fell across him. Wheelhousing! Charlene must have hit the trees, for she had just taken out her port wheelhousing and possibly the paddle wheel itself.

  Cole tried to fight his way out of the debris. He finally freed his head, caught a swift look off the stern, and buried his head in his arms. The wool barge was coming on at full speed!

  Rushing, smashing noise drowned out Sloan’s thoughts. Charlene leaped beneath the blow. This boat was being torn apart, ripped into shreds out from under him. If he couldn’t free himself, he’d drown in the next few minutes, dragged under in the wreckage. And Sam! Oh, God, Sam!

  A few eternities of struggling got his head and shoulder free. The wool barge hung off their stern, listing badly. She had dumped her top tier of bales, her steering wheel and her steersman. The second tier was just now avalanching down off the massive wreck.

  The towline must have snapped. Charlene spiralled away from her ruined barge. Sloan could feel them hit a solid, unyielding tree trunk, bounce off, reel away. It wasn’t a tree; the iron bridge, like the shadow of death, drifted past above them. Charlene listed savagely; Cole lay head uphill, but he couldn’t tell if he was crosswise or lengthwise on the deck.

  This close to the wharf they might well be saved; half the town had surely been drawn by their roaring black cloud of smoke and were coming to help.

  The steersman screamed above, and in the distance Sam cried out. With a splintering crash the upper-story wheelhouse tangled with a tree and lost. The whole superstructure was coming down on Sloan. With nowhere to go, he pulled in his head and shoulders and pressed himself farther under the slimy timbers that pinned him.

  The world—nothing less than the whole world, it seemed—came smashing down upon him. There was no way he could come out on top this time. Any rescuers who came would come too late. He had that same feeling he felt when Bower and his nong mates beat the stuffing out of him in Adelaide. He faced certain defeat, and the certainty of it enraged him. This, though, was ultimate defeat. This time he was going to die.

  Sam. Sloan deserved whatever befell him, but Sam…Dear God, save Sam!

  Fire sirens howled somewhere afar.

  Sloan squi
rmed back deeper beneath the tumbled, slimy beams as the debris above him shifted ominously. He felt no resistance. Nothing barred his way. He scooted back farther. One boot went under water. He scooted forward quickly.

  God help me! God save Sam! The plea rang in his mind, poured out of his heart, and he couldn’t tell if he was speaking the words aloud or not.

  Wait! The water…Charlene was sinking; Sloan would find himself under water soon in any case, and he seemed to have a clear way behind. He scooted backward again.

  Both his boots went under. About a yard of the deck had submerged, it seemed. His toes could feel the low little gunwale. Beyond that he could find nothing solid. He kept scooting. His legs were under. He kicked wildly and felt no debris, nothing to trap him. He took a deep, deep breath and shoved himself backward. His head went under, his belly scraped over the gunwale. He kicked and flailed, trying to clear the wreck. It would help if he could open his eyes, but they remained tightly shut and would not cooperate.

  His head broke the surface. “Sam!” His lungs filled up; he gagged and coughed. “Sam!”

  Charlene was still spiralling. Her bow came swinging around toward him. Still coughing, Cole thrust one arm out to fend it off. It caught him and swept him along.

  Sam! Her lovely face, twisted and dirt-streaked, appeared right above him. Her eyes looked straight at him unseeing. Sam? Charlene hit something stationary; the boat jerked and shuddered and tilted to a steeper list. Sam came sliding. Sloan couldn’t catch her in time, couldn’t help her. She slid down on top of him and drove him under.

  He couldn’t let go of her. He kicked; he surfaced. She was alive; she moved, feebly. She was still wrapped in his arm. He must not let go.

  A soprano voice from heaven pierced his awareness. A rope splashed into the water beside him. He didn’t pause to wonder where it came from. He just grabbed it.

  The rope dragged him through the water; his head only went under a time or two. Half a dozen men’s voices were telling him what to do, but he couldn’t understand any of them. A life ring came dropping down beside him. He pulled it over Sam’s head and shoved her arms through it. He was getting cold, and his hands didn’t grip well anymore.