Enchanted Heart (18 page)

Finally, Caid pulled in a long breath before he dropped her hand and broke the spell and said without regretting that he had done so, “That is who I am, who my parents are, who my grandmother was, where I lived and how I came to this part of the country. I know that I can’t tell you about the man that Grammy loved; just that he was born rich and he came from England and died soon after my mother was born. I have forgotten who his father was, some lord or duke or earl. That kind of thing never made any difference to me.”

Caid looked toward her to see if it made any difference to Marty, but she showed no change in her expression other than the widening of her smile. Then, he continued as he patted the chestnut neck of his stallion, “A man can be born with money but he ain’t born with respect. That, he has to earn.”

“I do agree with you,” Marty finally interjected. “On both counts.”

Caid smiled at her then, glad that she agreed with him on a subject that he felt very strongly about. Then, he nodded his curly head and added, “But I can tell you that Grammy loved me and my brother unconditionally. My mother, I’m sure, loved me, but not as much as she loved Caleb. Other than that, my family is nothing to me, including my father. I don’t apologize and I’m not ashamed for not wanting to have anything to do with a bunch of do-nothings who only came around Grammy for a handout when times got tough. I am my own family. At least that was what I used to believe until I saw you.”

He paused, gazing into her eyes before he told her, “And now, if you will be my family, I would be very grateful.”

“Oh, Caid,” Marty said before she reached across the expanse of space between her horse and his and declared, “I would be honored to be your family. And I don’t want anything to do with your Grammy’s money. My fortune is within your heart.”

His smile was her reward and he leaned over to kiss her before he took the reins up and kicked his mount forward. He turned his attention to the path ahead, for the rocks and dismantled granite slabs were making their journey more treacherous and slowing their pace quite a bit.

After hours of picking through prickly pear and mesquite bushes, tripping up knee-high steps of granite wedges and climbing into deep crevasses, the horses began to sweat and puff in their weariness. Caid stopped and slipped from the saddle, indicating that they would have to rest before going onward to join the wagon train.

They ate a few bites of jerky, drank water from an underground stream and talked about their past, the present and their future while the horses rested.

Chapter Nineteen

While their conversation waned, a faint noise reached their ears. It sounded almost like a baby crying, yet the shrill scream was obviously produced by a wild animal in distress. Both Marty and Caid tilted their heads toward the noise to figure out from which direction the noise had originated. Its piercing pitch seemed to bounce between the granite walls, making it hard to discern the location of the sound. Then, suddenly, Caid threw down his strip of jerky and ran into the shadows of the canyon, through a draw that was only large enough for him to slip sideways between the rock formations. Not wanting to be left behind and equally curious to find out what had made the obviously agonizing scream, Marty followed.

When she caught up to him, Caid was kneeling on one knee, leaning over an object that she could not see but she could hear the terrible screams emanating from it. She walked to stand behind him and peered over his broad shoulders. At his feet was a small red fox with its back leg trapped in a large steel snare. Its tiny black foot was lodged, thankfully, between the teeth of the trap but he was still writhing in pain nonetheless. She winced at the terrified scream that the little animal emitted when Caid tried to release the biting teeth of the trap.

“It looks pretty bad,” he told her remorsefully without looking over his shoulder. “His leg may be broken.”

“Are you going to put it out of its misery?” Marty asked sadly.

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Caid said as he gently eased his knee upon the animal’s neck in order to keep it from squirming.

“You’re going to choke him!” Marty cried, worried for the little red-brown furry creature.

Caid chuckled under his breath before he explained his actions, “It’s to keep him from biting me when I release his leg. It’s gonna be painful for him.”

Marty cringed, scrunching her shoulders. Squinting so that she did not have to see the agonizing operation while she squealed, “Don’t hurt him!”

“He’s already hurt, my love. I’m just trying to help him,” Caid said sweetly while he leaned over the fox and put both hands onto the steel trap. To the fox, he whispered, “Easy now, little fella.”

Remarkably, the small creature calmed down and allowed him to work to free it and, with little effort, Caid pulled the sharp teeth apart and the little black leg slipped out.

Immediately, the fox scurried away as fast as his tiny feet would take him, limping on the one injured leg. He paused just at the edge of the woods to turn and look back at the two people who had saved him. For a long moment, he stared at them, his brown eyes communicating to them wordlessly. And then, he quickly disappeared into the brush.

“Well, it looks like he’s going to be fine,” Caid said with a smile while hugging Marty, who nodded silently, in awe at what had just transpired.

“I think he was telling you that he was grateful,” she said, equally filled with gratitude, though she didn’t know why. She had never had a soft spot for animals before she’d met Caid. He seemed to be changing her whole outlook, on quite possibly, everything. The words came bursting out of her, “You really do like animals.”

“Yep,” Caid said, easing her back toward the horses. “I’m kind of partial to critters.”

“And they seem to be partial to you!” Marty quipped as Caid steadied her horse so that she could step into the stirrup.

He didn’t reply, but instead he reflected on his interaction with animals and realized that he had always thought of that relationship as a normal part of his life. To him, it was nothing extraordinary to walk up to a band of wild ponies and speak to them as if they were his long lost friends and to have them react to him in the same way. That little fox was no different. Somehow, he knew that the little critter trusted him and appreciated the assistance that Caid had offered in freeing him from the trap. And somewhere, in his heart as well as in his mind, he knew that he had a very deep connection with animals, more so, he feared, than with people.

Marty Hirsch-Ingram, and soon to be McAllister, was the single exception to that rule. The connection that he felt with her was far beyond animal attraction. It bordered on obsession, at least for him. He was curious to discover just how obsessed she was with him, but he was patient enough to wait. He had a lifetime with her to find out.

They pushed the horses toward the billowing canvas tops that whipped in the wind a few miles ahead of them in the gully that was surrounded by two limestone and granite walls. Pure loving joy bounced from wall to wall of that canyon as they entered it, mixing their delightful conversation with the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the granite floor.

While they talked, Marty kept focusing on the train ahead, perplexed at the peculiarity of its progress, or lack thereof. For some reason, the wagons did not appear to be moving away from them as they traversed the dry riverbed toward the train. Instead, the wagons seemed to come closer and closer to them. They fell silent and urged the horses forward in order to find out the reason for the delay. And then, when they reached the last wagon, they could tell that the train had stopped and that there was a sense of urgency that seemed to waft in the air.

Caid knew that something was wrong. He jumped from the saddle and ran toward the lead wagon, but stopped when he saw that one of them had toppled on a boulder and had thrown some of its contents out onto the rocky ground. His heart stopped when he saw that it was Marty’s wagon.

He ran to the front of it with Marty right on his heels and he could hear her screaming her sister’s name.

“Greta!” Marty cried, her squealing voice echoing between the walls of granite that surrounded her as she hurried to kneel beside her twin. “Oh, Greta, what happened?”

Caid watched Marty run past him and fall onto her knees and then he saw her sister lying in the gully, the heavy wagon covering her lower torso. His heart fell in apprehension as he knelt beside Marty while she leaned over her sister. He felt almost devastated that he had just amazed Marty with his extraordinary effort to save a wild animal, and yet, he could not fix this.

He bowed on his knees beside Greta and took her trembling hand into his as he assessed her wounds. Her head was bleeding from a small zigzagged gash behind her ear that did not appear life-threatening. He peered beneath the wagon and saw that her leg was mangled and there was a gaping hole in her thigh where the broken bone had poked through. Bright red blood streamed from the wound, soaked through her skirt and spilled onto the pink, glistening granite while dowsing the kinked Indian Paintbrushes with a crimson hue. She held her chest with her free hand as if her ribs pained her and she moaned in obvious anguish, making Caid’s heart shudder at the thought of Marty losing her sister to this terrible accident.

“Greta!” Marty repeated as she vigorously waved her hand over her sister’s head to force air into Greta’s mouth so that her breathing would return to normal. Then she repeated, “What happened?”

“We hit a rock, a big rock,” Daniel Bader screeched, almost sobbing. His head was bleeding as well and he favored one leg but other than that, he seemed unhurt. He blinked back tears of frustration at his helplessness before he explained, “The wagon fell over and threw her onto the ground and then fell on top of her. I’m so sorry!”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Caid assured him gravely as he looked at the offending wagon. “This is a hard journey and it was bound to happen.”

To Greta, he said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get you out from under this thing and then get you back to Fredericksburg, to a doctor.”

“No,” with teeth chattering, Greta pleaded with him while she clutched his shirt sleeve. “I w-want to go on. I want to s-s-see the Promised Land! For Papa!”

“You can’t, Sweetheart. You’re hurt too bad,” Caid told her gently yet firmly. “You need a doctor.”

“I won’t go b-back,” she stuttered with a stern look on her face. “If I d-die getting there, at least it will be said that I was on my way there, just like P-Papa was when he came to Texas, on his way to the l-land that he was promised.”

“Greta, don’t be foolish,” Mrs. Bader, who leaned over the kneeling onlookers, interjected.

Although Marty agreed, she would not give the woman the satisfaction of knowing it. She clamped her lips tightly and squeezed her sister’s hand in hers.

Greta insisted, “I will not go back. L-Leave me here if you must, but I will not go back!”

Mrs. Bader folded her arms at her chest and let out a harrumph of disapproval and then stepped backwards to complain to her husband, who shook his head either in disgust at her or in concern for the woman lying on the hard rocks, Marty could not tell, for she ignored them altogether and concentrated on Greta.

“Seraphina,” Greta groaned, forgetting that she was shivering. “Where is she?”

Marty looked around in panic but Mrs. Bader stepped forward again to answer, “She’s back with Elsa and the other children. Your cousin didn’t want any of them to see this.”

“Good,” Greta breathed before she closed her eyes.

Chapter Twenty

Marty looked to Caid as if he had some marvelous solution for their problem. All of a sudden, her frail, fragile sister seemed full of determination and was courageously motivated by a dream that had been put on hold when their father had died trying to realize it, and she was firm in her resolve to see it through, even if it took her life as well.

Caid stared at the overturned wagon for a few moments before he sighed and said, “First, we’ve got to get it off of her. Then, I suppose we could empty it out and make a bed for her inside.”

He prayed that the extent of her injuries were confined to those that he and the others could see and that there were no internal wounds that would possibly kill her.

“Yes!” Marty exclaimed as she ran to the wagon and began rooting around it to relieve it of its contents so that it would be light enough to bring back onto its wheels. Then she returned to her sister and covered her with the quilt that Mama had made.

As she did so, she realized that it had been with her and Greta most of their lives in one form or another. When it was Mama’s dresses, the girls had hidden within the folds of her skirts either in play or in fear of some nightmare-induced phantom. On the ship, Mama had placed a pile of the dresses onto the girls for warmth, promising to make a quilt out of them as soon as they arrived in the new land while silently wondering why she’d brought so many to a country that she had heard was no place for fineries. And in their burrow that Mama and Papa had carved out of the Texas sand, she had begun sewing them into the patchwork quilt that Marty had used as a refuge more than once in her adult life. Now, it comforted her sister against the overwhelming pain.

Elsa took the children on a walk in the canyon while the adults worked to free Greta from the wagon’s deathly grip. When they were safely out of hearing range, she ushered them to a tiny crevice to investigate a strange-looking creature that resembled a frog but it had spikes growing out of its body and a long, pointy tail. Satisfied that they were occupied, she leaned on the canyon wall to watch the scene that was almost too unbearable to behold.

The other adults followed Marty to the wagon and, while she sat with Greta, they finished pulling everything out of it before they hitched a team of oxen to the side of it with ropes and heaved it onto its wheels again. Greta’s screams echoed around them when the wagon was lifted from her broken body. Once the wagon was stable, everyone ran to her side to assess her injuries further.