Praise for the novels of LINDA LAEL MILLER

“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”

—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate

“As hot as the noontime desert.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Rustler

“This story creates lasting memories of soul-searing redemption and the belief in goodness and hope.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Rustler

“Loaded with hot lead, steamy sex and surprising plot twists.”

—Publishers Weekly on A Wanted Man

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

“[Miller] paints a brilliant portrait of the good, the bad and the ugly, the lost and the lonely, and the power of love to bring light into the darkest of souls. This is western romance at its finest.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Man from Stone Creek

“Sweet, homespun, and touched with angelic Christmas magic, this holiday romance reprises characters from Miller’s popular McKettrick series and is a perfect stocking stuffer for her fans.”

—Library Journal on A McKettrick Christmas

“An engrossing, contemporary western romance.”

—Publishers Weekly on McKettrick’s Pride (starred review)

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

Linda Lael Miller
The Christmas Brides

CONTENTS

A McKETTRICK CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

A CREED COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

EPILOGUE

A McKETTRICK CHRISTMAS

For all those people, everywhere, who make a loving space for pets in their hearts and their homes.

CHAPTER ONE

December 22, 1896

LIZZIE MCKETTRICK LEANED SLIGHTLY forward in her seat, as if to do so would make the train go faster. Home. She was going home, at long last, to the Triple M Ranch, to her large, rowdy family. After more than two years away, first attending Miss Ridgely’s Institute of Deportment and Refinement for Young Women, then normal school, Lizzie was returning to the place and the people she loved—for good. She would arrive a day before she was expected, too, and surprise them all—her papa, her stepmother, Lorelei, her little brothers, John Henry, Gabriel, and Doss. She had presents for everyone, most sent ahead from San Francisco weeks ago, but a few especially precious ones secreted away in one of her three huge travel trunks.

Only her grandfather, Angus McKettrick, the patriarch of the sprawling clan, knew she’d be there that very evening. He’d be waiting, Lizzie thought happily, at the small train station in Indian Rock, probably at the reins of one of the big flat-bed sleighs used to carry feed to snowbound cattle on the range. She’d warned him, in her most recent letter, that she’d be bringing all her belongings with her, for this homecoming was permanent—not just a brief visit, like the last couple of Christmases.

Lizzie smiled a mischievous little smile. Even Angus, her closest confidant except for her parents, didn’t know all the facts.

She glanced sideways at Whitley Carson, slumped against the sooty window in the seat next to hers, huddled under a blanket, sound asleep. His breath fogged the glass, and every so often, he stirred fitfully, grumbled something.

Alas, for all his sundry charms, Whitley was not an enthusiastic traveler. His complaints, over the three days since they’d boarded the first train in San Francisco, had been numerous.

The train was filthy.

There was no dining car.

The cigar smoke roiling overhead made him cough.

He was never going to be warm again.

And what in God’s green earth had possessed the woman three rows behind them to undertake a journey of any significant distance with two rascally children and a fussy infant in tow?

Now the baby let out a pitiable squall.

Lizzie, used to babies because there were so many on the Triple M, was unruffled. Whitley’s obvious annoyance troubled her. Although she planned to teach, married or not, she hoped for a houseful of children of her own someday—healthy, noisy, rambunctious ones, raised to be confident adults and freethinkers.

It was hard, in the moment, to square the Whitley she was seeing now with the kind of father she had hoped he would be.

The man across the aisle from her laid down his newspaper, stood and stretched. He’d boarded the train several hours earlier, in Phoenix, carrying what looked like a doctor’s bag, its leather sides cracked and scratched. His waistcoat was clean but threadbare, and he wore neither a hat nor a sidearm—the absence of both unusual in the still-wild Arizona Territory.

Although Lizzie expected Whitley to propose marriage once they were home with her family, she’d been stealing glances at the stranger ever since he entered the railroad car. There was something about him, beyond his patrician good looks, that constantly drew her attention.

His hair was dark, and rather too long, his eyes brown and intense, bespeaking formidable intelligence. Although he probably wasn’t a great deal older than Lizzie, who would turn twenty on her next birthday, there was a maturity in his manner and countenance that intrigued her. It was as though he’d lived many other lives, in other times and places, and extracted wisdom from them all.

She heard him speak quietly to the harried mother, turned and felt a peculiar little clench in the secret regions of her heart when she saw him holding the child, bundled in a shabby patchwork quilt coming apart at the seams.

Whitley slumbered on, oblivious.

There were few other passengers in the car. A wan and painfully thin soldier in a blue army uniform, recuperating from some dire illness or injury, by the looks of him. A portly salesman who held what must have been his sample case on his lap, one hand clasping the handle, the other a smoldering cigar. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of the things, and he’d been puffing on them right along. An older couple, gray-haired and companionable, though they seldom spoke, accompanied by an exotic white bird in a splendid brass cage. Glorious blue feathers adorned its head, and when the cage wasn’t covered in its red velvet drape, the bird chattered.

All of them, except for Whitley, of course, were strangers. And seeing Whitley in this new and disconcerting light made him seem like a stranger, too.

A fresh wave of homesickness washed over Lizzie. She longed to be among people she knew. Lorelei, her stepmother, would be baking incessantly these days, hiding packages and keeping secrets. Her father, Holt, would be locked away in his wood shop between ranch chores, building sleds and toy buckboards and dollhouses, some of which would be gifts to Lizzie’s brothers and various cousins, though the majority were sure to find their way onto some of the poorer homesteads surrounding the Triple M.

There were always a lot of presents tucked into the branches of the family’s tree and piled beneath it, and an abundance of savory food, too, but a McKettrick Christmas centered on giving to folks who didn’t have so much. Lorelei, Lizzie herself, and all the aunts made rag dolls and cloth animals with stuffing inside, to be distributed at the community celebration at the church on Christmas Eve.

The stranger walked the aisle with the baby, bringing Lizzie’s mind back to the here and now. He glanced down into her upturned face as he passed. He didn’t actually smile—as little as she knew about him, she had figured out that he was both solemn and taciturn by nature—but something moved in his eyes.

Lizzie felt a flash of shame. She should have offered to spell the anxious mother three rows back. Already the child was settling down a little, cooing and drooling on the man’s once-white shirt. If he minded that, he gave no indication of it.

Beyond the train windows, heavy flakes of snow swirled in the gathering twilight, and while Lizzie willed the train to pick up speed, it seemed to be slowing down instead.

She was just about to speak to the man, reach out for the baby, when a horrific roar, like a thousand separate thunderheads suddenly clashing together, erupted from every direction and from no direction at all. The car jerked violently, stopped with a shudder fit to fling the entire train off the tracks, tilted wildly to one side, then came right again with a sickening jolt.

The bird squawked in terror, wings making a frantic slapping sound.

Lizzie, nearly thrown from her seat, felt the clasp of a firm hand on her shoulder, looked up to see the stranger, still upright, the baby safe in the curve of his right arm. He’d managed somehow to stay on his feet, retain his hold on the child and keep Lizzie from slamming into the seat in front of her.

“Wh-what…?” she murmured, bewildered by shock.

“An avalanche, probably,” the man replied calmly, as though a massive snowslide was no more than he would have expected of a train ride through the rugged high country of the northern Arizona Territory.

Whitley, shaken awake, was as frightened as the bird. “Are we derailed?” he demanded.

The stranger ignored him. “Is anyone hurt?” he asked, of the company in general, patting the baby’s back and bouncing it a little against his shoulder.

“My arm,” the woman in back whimpered. “My arm—”

“Nobody panic,” the man in the aisle said, shoving the baby into Lizzie’s arms and turning to take the medical kit from the rack above his seat. He spoke quietly to the elderly couple; Lizzie saw them nod their heads. They were all right, then.

“Nobody panic!” the bird cawed. “Nobody panic!”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Lizzie had to smile at that.

Whitley rubbed his neck, eyeing the medical bag, after tossing a brief, disgruntled glare at the bird. “I think I’m hurt,” he said. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you? I need laudanum.”

“Laudanum!” the bird demanded.

“Hush, Woodrow,” the old lady said. Her husband put the velvet drapery in place, covering the cage, and Woodrow quieted instantly.

The doctor’s answer to Whitley was a clipped nod and, “Yes, I’m a physician. My name is Morgan Shane. I’ll look you over once I’ve seen to Mrs. Halifax’s arm.”

The baby began to shriek in Lizzie’s embrace, straining for its mother.

“Make him shut up,” Whitley said. “I’m in pain.”

“Shut up!” Woodrow mimicked, his call muted by the drapery. “I’m in pain!”

Lizzie paid Whitley no mind, got to her feet. “Dr. Shane?”

He was crouched in the aisle now, next to the baby’s mother, gently examining her right arm. “Yes?” he said, a little snappishly, not looking away from what he was doing. The older children, a boy and a girl, huddled together in the inside seat, clinging to each other.

“The baby—the way he’s crying—do you think he could be injured?”

“My baby is a girl,” the woman said, between groans.

“She’s just had a bad scare,” Dr. Shane told Lizzie, speaking more charitably this time. “Like the rest of us.”

“I think we’s buried,” the soldier exclaimed.

“Buried!” Woodrow agreed, with a rustle of feathers.

Sure enough, solid snow, laced with tree branches, dislodged stones and other debris, pressed against all the windows on one side of the car. On the other, Lizzie knew from previous journeys aboard the same train, a steep grade plummeted deep into the red rocks of the valley below.

“Just a bad sprain,” Dr. Shane told Mrs. Halifax matter-of-factly. “I’ll make you a sling, and if the pain gets to be too bad, I can give you a little medicine, but I’d rather not. You’re nursing the baby, aren’t you?”

Mrs. Halifax nodded, biting her lower lip. Lizzie realized with a start that the woman was probably close to her own age, perhaps even a year or two younger. She was thin to the point of emaciation, and her clothes were worn, faded from much washing, and although the children wore coats, frayed at the cuffs and hems and long since outgrown, she had none.

Lizzie thought with chagrin of the contents of her trunks. Woolen dresses. Shawls. The warm black coat with the royal blue velvet collar Lorelei had sent in honor of her graduation from normal school, so she’d be both comfortable and stylish on the trip home. She’d elected to save the costly garment for Sunday best.

She went back up the aisle, still carrying the baby, to where Whitley sat. “We need that blanket,” she said.

Whitley scowled and hunched deeper into the soft folds. “I’m injured,” he said. “I could be in shock.”

Exasperated, Lizzie tapped one foot. “You are not injured,” she replied. “But Mrs. Halifax is. Whitley, give me that blanket.”

Whitley only tightened his two-handed grasp, so that his knuckles went white, and shook his head stubbornly, and in that moment of stark and painful clarity, Lizzie knew she’d never marry Whitley Carson. Not even if he begged on bended knee, which was not very likely, but a satisfying fantasy, nonetheless.

“Here’s mine, ma’am,” the soldier called out from the back, offering a faded quilt ferreted from his oversize haversack.

The peddler, his cigar apparently snubbed out during the crash, but still in his mouth, opened his sample case. “I’ve got some dish towels, here,” he told Dr. Shane. “Finest Egyptian cotton, hand-woven. One of them ought to do for a sling.”

The doctor nodded, thanked the peddler, took the quilt from the soldier.

“If I could just get to my trunks,” Lizzie fretted, settling the slightly quieter baby girl on a practiced hip. Between her younger brothers and her numerous cousins, she’d had a lot of practice looking after small children.

Dr. Shane, in the process of fashioning the fine Egyptian dish towel into a sling for Mrs. Halifax’s arm, favored her with a disgusted glance. “This is no time to be worrying about your wardrobe,” he said.

Stung, Lizzie flushed. She opened her mouth to explain why she wanted access to her baggage—for truly altruistic reasons—but pride stopped her.

“I’m in pain here!” Whitley complained, from the front of the car.

“I’m in pain here,” Woodrow muttered, but he was settling down.

“Perhaps you should see to your husband,” Dr. Shane said tersely, leveling a look at Lizzie as he straightened in the aisle.

More heat suffused Lizzie’s cheeks. It was cold now, and getting colder; she could see her breath. “Whitley Carson,” she said, “is most certainly not my husband.”

A semblance of a smile danced in Dr. Shane’s dark eyes, but never quite touched his mouth. “Well, then,” he drawled, “you have more sense than I would have given you credit for, Miss…?”

“McKettrick,” Lizzie said, begrudging him even her name, but unable to stop herself from giving it, just the same. “Lizzie McKettrick.”

About to turn to the soldier, who might or might not have been hurt, Dr. Shane paused, raised his eyebrows. He recognized the McKettrick name, she realized. He was bound for Indian Rock, the last stop on the route, or he would not have been on that particular train, and he might even have some business with her family.

A horrible thought struck her. Was someone sick? Her papa? Lorelei? Her grandfather? During her time away from home, letters had flown back and forth—Lizzie corresponded with most of her extended family, as well as Lorelei and her father—but maybe they’d been keeping something from her, waiting to break the bad news in person….

Dr. Shane frowned, reading her face, which must have drained of all color. He even took a step toward her, perhaps fearing she might drop the infant girl, now resting her small head on Lizzie’s shoulder. The child’s body trembled with small, residual hiccoughs from the weeping. “Are you all right, Miss McKettrick?”

Lizzie consciously stiffened her backbone, a trick her grandfather had taught her. Keep your back straight and your shoulders, too, Lizzie-girl, especially when you’re scared.

“I’m fine,” she said, stalwart.

Dr. Shane gave a ghost of a grin. “Good, because we’re in for a rough patch, and I’m going to need help.”

As the shock subsided, the seriousness of the situation struck Lizzie like a second avalanche.

“I have to check on the engineer and the conductor,” Dr. Shane told her, stepping up close now, in order to pass her in the narrow aisle.

Lizzie nodded. “We’ll be rescued,” she said, as much for her own benefit as Dr. Shane’s. Whitley wasn’t listening; he’d taken a flask from his pocket and begun to imbibe in anxious gulps. The peddler and the soldier were talking in quiet tones, while Mrs. Halifax and her children huddled together in the quilt. The elderly couple spoke to each other in comforting whispers, Woodrow’s cage spanning from one of their laps to the other like a bridge. “When we don’t arrive in Indian Rock on schedule, folks will come looking for us.”

Her father. Her uncles. Every able-bodied man and boy in Indian Rock, probably. All of them would saddle horses, hitch up sleighs, follow the tracks until they found the stalled train.

“Have you looked out the window, Lizzie?” Dr. Shane asked, sotto voce, as he eased past her and the shivering child. “We’re miles from anywhere. We have at least eighteen feet of snow on one side, and a sheer cliff on the other. I’m betting heavily on first impressions, but you strike me as a sensible, levelheaded girl, so I won’t spare you the facts. We’re in a lot of trouble—another snowslide could send us over the side. It would take an army to shovel us out, and one sick soldier does not an army make. We can’t stay, and we can’t leave. There’s a full scale blizzard going on out there.”

Lizzie swallowed, lifted her chin. Kept her backbone McKettrick straight. “I am not a girl,” she said. “I’m nearly twenty, and I’ve earned a teaching certificate.”

“Twenty?” the doctor teased dryly. “That old. And a schoolmarm in the bargain.”

But Lizzie was again thinking of her family—her papa, her grandfather, her uncles. “They’ll come,” she said, with absolute confidence. “No matter what.”

“I hope you’re right,” Dr. Shane said with a sigh, tugging at the sleeves of his worn coat in a preparatory sort of way. “Whoever ‘they’ are, they’d better be fast, and capable of tunneling through a mountain of snow to get to us. It will be pitch-dark before anybody even realizes this train is overdue, and since delays aren’t uncommon, especially in this kind of weather, the search won’t begin until morning—if then.”

“Where’s that laudanum?” Whitley whined. His cheeks were bright against his pale face. If Lizzie hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was consumptive.

Dr. Shane patted his medical bag. “Right here,” he answered. “And it won’t mix with that whiskey you’re swilling. I’d pace myself, if I were you.”

Whitley looked for all the world like a pretty child, pouting. What, Lizzie wondered abstractly, had she ever seen in him? Where was the dashing charm he’d exhibited in San Francisco, where he’d scrawled his name across her dance card at every party? Written her poetic love letters. Brought her flowers.

“Aren’t you even going to examine him?” Lizzie asked, after some inward elbowing to get by her new opinion of Whitley’s character. Oddly, given present circumstances, she reflected on her earlier and somewhat blithe conviction that he would settle in Indian Rock after they were married, so that she could teach and be near her family. He’d seemed casually agreeable to the idea of setting up house far from his own kin, but now that she thought about it, he’d never actually committed to that or anything else. “He might truly be hurt, you know.”

“He’s fine,” Dr. Shane replied curtly. Then, medical kit in hand, he moved up the aisle, toward the locomotive.

“What kind of doctor is he, anyhow?” Whitley grumbled.

“One who expects to be very busy, I think,” Lizzie said, not looking at him but at the door Dr. Shane had just shouldered his way through. She knew the car ahead was empty, and the locomotive was just beyond. She felt a little chill, because there had been no sign of the conductor since before the avalanche. Wouldn’t he have hurried back to the only occupied passenger car to see if there were any injuries, if he wasn’t hurt himself? And what about the engineer?

Suddenly she knew she had to follow Dr. Shane. Had to know, for her own sanity, just how dire the situation truly was. She moved to hand the baby girl to Whitley, but he shrank back as if she’d offered him a hissing rattlesnake in a peck basket.

Miffed, Lizzie took the child back to Mrs. Halifax, placed her gently on the woman’s lap, tucked the quilt into place again. The peddler and the soldier were seated together now, playing a card game of some sort on the top of the sample case. The old gentleman left Woodrow in his wife’s care and stood. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked, of everyone in general.

Lizzie didn’t answer, but simply gave the old man a grateful smile and headed for the locomotive.

“Where are you going?” Whitley asked peevishly, as she passed.

She didn’t bother to reply.

A cold wind knifed through her as she stepped out of the passenger car, and she could barely see for the snow, coming down furiously now, arching over the top of the train in an ominous canopy. The next car lay on its side, the heavy iron coupling once linking it to its counterpart snapped cleanly in two.

Lizzie considered retreating, but in the end a desperate need to know the full scope of their predicament overrode common prudence. She climbed carefully to the ground, using the ice-coated ladder affixed to one end of the car, and stooped to peer inside the overturned car.

It was an eerie sight, with the seats jutting out sideways. She uttered a soft prayer of gratitude that no one had been riding in that part of the train and crawled inside. Clutching the edge of the open luggage rack to her left, she straightened and crossed the car by stepping from the side of one seat to the next.

Finally, she reached the other door and steeled herself to go through the whole ordeal of climbing to the ground and reentering all over again.

The locomotive was upright, however, and the snow was packed so tightly between the two cars that it made a solid path. Lizzie moved across, longing for her fancy new coat, and stepped inside the engine room.

Steam huffed forlornly from the disabled boiler.

The conductor lay on the floor, the engineer beside him.

Dr. Shane, crouching between them, looked up at Lizzie with such a confounded expression on his face that, had things not been at such a grave pass, she would have laughed.

“You said you might need my help,” she pointed out.

Dr. Shane snapped his medical bag closed, stood. He looked so glum that Lizzie knew without asking that the two men on the floor of the locomotive were either dead or mortally wounded.

Tears burned in her eyes as she imagined their families, preparing for Yuletide celebrations, unaware, as yet, that their eagerly awaited loved ones would never return.

“It was quick,” Dr. Shane said, standing in front of her now, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Did you know them?”

Lizzie shook her head, struggling to compose herself. Her grandfather’s deep voice echoed in her mind.

Keep your backbone straight—

“Were they—were they lying there, side by side like that?” It was a strange question, she knew that, even as she asked. Perhaps she was still in shock, after all. “When you found them, I mean?”

“I moved them,” the doctor answered, “once I knew they were both gone.”

Lizzie nodded. Just the act of standing up straight and squaring her shoulders made her feel a little better.

A slight, grim smile lifted the corner of Dr. Shane’s finely-shaped mouth. “These rescuers you’re expecting,” he said. “If they’re anything like you, we might have some hope of surviving after all.”

Lizzie’s heart ached. What she wouldn’t have given to be at home on the Triple M at that moment, with her family all around her. There would be a big, fragrant tree in the parlor at the main ranch house, shimmering with tinsel. Dear, familiar voices, talking, laughing, singing. “Of course we’ll survive,” she heard herself say. Then she looked at the dead men again, and a lump lodged in her throat, so she had to swallow and then ratchet her chin up another notch before she could go on. “Most of us, anyway. My papa, my uncles, even my grandfather—they’ll all come, as soon as they get word that the train didn’t arrive.”

“All of them McKettricks, I suppose.”

Lizzie nodded again, shivering now. The boiler wasn’t putting out any heat at all. Most likely, the smoke stack was full of snow. “They’ll get through. You wait and see. Nothing stops a McKettrick, especially when there’s trouble.”

“I believe you, Miss McKettrick,” he said.

“You must call me Lizzie,” she replied, without thinking. He had, though only once, and she needed the normality of her given name. Just the sound of it gave her strength.

“Lizzie, then,” Dr. Shane answered. “If you’ll call me Morgan.”

“Morgan,” she repeated, feeling bewildered again.

He went back to the bodies, gently removed the conductor’s coat, then laid it over Lizzie’s shoulders. She shuddered inside it, at once grateful and repulsed.

“Let’s get back to the others,” Morgan said quietly. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

Their progress was slow and arduous, but when they returned to the other car, someone had lighted lanterns, and the place had a reassuring glow. Most of the passengers seemed to have regained their composure. Even Woodrow had ceased his fussing; he peered alertly through the bars of his cage, his snow-white feathers smooth.

Whitley had emptied his flask and either passed out or gone to sleep, snoring loudly, clinging possessively to his blanket even in a state of unconsciousness.

“I’d better take a look at him,” Morgan said ruefully, stopping by Whitley’s seat and opening his kit, pulling a stethoscope from inside. “My preliminary diagnosis is pampering by an overprotective mother or a bevy of fussy aunts or spinster sisters, complicated by a fondness for strong spirits. I’ve been wrong before, though.” But not very often, he might have added, if his tone was anything to go by.

Lizzie could not decide whether she liked this man or not. He certainly wasn’t one to remain on the sidelines in a crisis, which was a point in his favor, but there was a suggestion of impatient arrogance about him, too. Clearly, he did not suffer fools lightly.

She approached the Halifax family and found them still burrowed down in the faded quilt. The peddler had lighted another cigar, and the soldier was on his feet, trying to see out into the night. Darkness, snow and the reflected light of the lanterns on the window glass made it pretty much impossible, but Lizzie understood his need to be doing something.

“Some Christmas this is going to be,” he said, turning when Lizzie came to thank him for giving up his quilt to Mrs. Halifax and her little ones. “Nothing to eat, and it’ll get colder and colder in here, you’ll see.”

“We’ll need to keep our spirits up,” Lizzie replied. “And expect the best.” Lorelei said things generally turned out the way folks expected them to, Lizzie recalled, so it was important to maintain an optimistic state of mind.

“Reckon we ought to do both them things,” the soldier said, his narrow, good-natured and plain face earnest as he regarded Lizzie. “But it wouldn’t hurt to prepare for some rough times, either.” He smiled, put out a hand. “John Brennan, private first class, United States Army,” he said.

“Lizzie McKettrick,” Lizzie replied, accepting the handshake. His palm and fingers felt dry and hot against her skin. Did he have a fever? “Do you live in Indian Rock, Mr. Brennan? I grew up on the Triple M, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.”

“My wife’s folks opened a mercantile there, six months ago. I was in an army hospital, back in Maryland, laid up with typhoid fever and the damage it done, for most of a year, so my Alice took our little boy and moved in with her mama and daddy to wait for my discharge.” Sadness flickered in his eyes. “Reckon my boy’s all het up about it bein’ almost Christmas and all, and lookin’ for me to walk through the front door any minute now.”

Lizzie sat down in the aisle seat, and John Brennan lowered himself back into the one beside the window. Lore lei had written her about the new mercantile, pleased that they carried a selection of fine watercolors and good paper, among other luxuries, along with the usual coffee, dungarees, nails and tobacco products. “What’s your boy’s name?” she asked, “And how old is he?”

“He’s called Tad, for his grandpappy,” Mr. Brennan said proudly. “He turned four last Thursday. I was hoping to be home in time for the cake and candles, but my discharge papers didn’t come through in time.”

Lizzie smiled, thinking of her younger brothers. They’d be excited about Christmas, and probably watching the road for their big sister, even though they’d surely been told she’d arrive tomorrow. She consulted the watch pinned to her bodice; it was almost three o’clock. The train wasn’t due in Indian Rock until six-fifteen.

She imagined her grandfather waiting impatiently in the small depot, right on time, hectoring the ticket clerk for news, ranting that in his day, everybody traveled by stagecoach, and by God, the coaches had been a hell of a lot more reliable than the railroad.

Shyly, John Brennan patted her hand. “I guess you’ve got home-folks waitin’, too,” he said.

Lizzie nodded. “Will you be working at the mercantile?” she asked, just to keep the conversation going. It was a lot less lonely that way. And a lot easier than thinking about the very real possibility of another avalanche, sending the whole train toppling over the cliff.

“Much as I’m able,” Mr. Brennan replied. “Can’t do any of the heavy work, loading and unloading freight wagons and such, but I’ve got me a head for figures. I can balance the books and keep track of the inventory.”

“I’ll be teaching at Indian Rock School when it reopens after New Year’s,” she said.

Mr. Brennan beamed. He was one of those homely people who turn handsome when they smile. “In a couple of years, you’ll have my Tad in first grade,” he said. “Me and Alice, we place great store by book learnin’ and such. Never got much of it myself, as you can probably tell by listenin’ to me talk, but I learnt some arithmetic in the army. Tad, now, he’ll go to school and make something of himself.”

Lizzie remembered how Mr. Brennan had given his quilt to Mrs. Halifax, even though he was obviously susceptible to the cold. He’d wasted during his confinement, so that his uniform hung on his frame, and plans to help out at the mercantile or no, he might be a semi-invalid for a long time.

“If Tad is anything like his father,” she said, “he’ll do just fine.”

Brennan flushed with modest pleasure. Sobered when he glanced toward the front of the train, where Whitley was awake again and complaining to Dr. Shane, who looked as though he’d like to throttle him. “Is that your brother?” he asked.

“Just someone I knew in San Francisco,” Lizzie said, suddenly sad. The Whitley she’d thought she’d known so well had been replaced by a petulant impostor. She grieved for the man she’d imagined him to be—the young engineer, with great plans to build dams and bridges, the cavalier suitor with the fetching smile.

Morgan left Whitley and came back down the aisle. “I’m going out and have a look around,” he said, addressing John Brennan instead of Lizzie. “If I don’t come back, don’t come searching for me.”

Lizzie stood up. “You can’t go out there alone,” she protested.

Morgan laid his hands on her shoulders and pressed her back into the hard, soot-blackened seat. “Mrs. Halifax might need you,” he said. “Or the children. Or the old folks—the husband has a bluish tinge around his lips, and I’m worried about his heart.” He paused, nodded toward Whitley. “God knows, that sniveling yahoo up there in the blanket won’t be any help.”

The peddler opened his sample case again, brought out a pint of whiskey, offered it to Morgan. “You may have need of this,” he said. “It’s mighty cold out there.”

Morgan took the bottle, put it in the inside pocket of his coat. “Thanks.”

“At least take one of the lanterns,” Lizzie said, anxious wings fluttering in her stomach, as though she’d swallowed a miniature version of Woodrow.

“I’ll do that,” Morgan answered.

“Here’s my hat,” Mr. Brennan said, holding out his army cap. “It ain’t much, but it’s better than going bareheaded.”

“I have a scarf,” Lizzie fretted. “It’s in my handbag—”

Morgan donned the cap. It looked incongruous indeed, with his worn-out suit, but it covered the tops of his ears. “I’ll be fine,” he insisted. He went back up the aisle, leaving his medical kit behind, and out through the door at the other end.

Lizzie watched for the glow of his lantern through the window, found it, lost track of it again. Her heart sank. Suppose he never came back? There were so many things that could happen out there in the frigid darkness, so full of the furious blizzard.

“I don’t think your interest in the good doctor is entirely proper,” a familiar voice said.

Lizzie looked up, mildly startled, and saw Whitley standing unsteadily in the aisle, glowering down at her. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes glazed.

“Be quiet,” she said.

“We have an understanding, you and I,” Whitley reminded her.

“I quite understand you, Whitley,” Lizzie retorted, “but I don’t think the reverse is true. Unless you mean to make yourself useful in some way, I’d rather you left me alone.”

Whitley was just forming his reply when the whole car shuddered again, listed slightly cliffward, and caught. The peddler shouted a curse. Mr. Brennan launched into the Lord’s Prayer. Mrs. Halifax gave a soblike gasp, and her children shrieked in chorus. Woodrow squawked and sidestepped along his perch, and the elderly couple clung to each other.

“We’re all right,” Lizzie said, surprising herself by how serenely she spoke. Inside, she was terrified. “Nobody move.”

“Seems to me,” observed the peddler, having recovered a modicum of composure, “that we’d all better sit on the other side of the car.”

“Good idea,” Lizzie agreed.

Whitley took a seat very slowly, his face a ghastly white. Lizzie, the peddler, and John Brennan crossed the aisle carefully to settle in. So did the old folks and Woodrow.

Outside, the wind howled, and Lizzie thought she could feel the heartbeat of the looming mountain itself, ponderous and utterly impersonal.

Where was Morgan Shane?

Lost in the impenetrable snow? Buried under it?

Fallen into one of the treacherous crevasses for which the high country was well known?

Lizzie wanted to cry, but she knew it was an indulgence she couldn’t afford. So she cleared her throat and began to sing, in a soft, tremulous voice, “‘God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…’”

Slowly, tentatively, the others joined in.

CHAPTER TWO

MORGAN HADN’T INTENDED TO wander far from the train—he’d meant to keep the lantern-light from the windows in view—but the storm was worse than he’d thought. Cursing himself for a fool, his own lantern having guttered and subsequently been tossed aside, he stood with the howling wind stinging his ears, bare hands shoved into the pockets of his inadequate coat. It was as though a veil had descended; he not only couldn’t see the glow of the lamps, he couldn’t see the train. All sense of direction deserted him—he might be a step from toppling over the rim of the cliff.

Be rational, he told himself. Think.

For the briefest moment the wind collapsed to a whisper, as though drawing another breath to blow again, and he heard a faint sound, a snatch of singing.

He pressed toward it, blinded by the pelting snow, blinked to clear his eyes and glimpsed the light shining through the train windows. Seconds later he collided hard against the side of the railroad car. Feeling his way along it, grateful even for the scorching cold of bare metal under his palms, he found the door.

Stiff-handed, he managed to open it and veritably fall inside. He dropped to his knees, steadied himself by grasping the arm rest of the nearest seat. His lungs burned, and the numbness began to recede from his hands and feet and face, leaving intense pain in its wake.

Frostbite? Suppose he lost his fingers? What good was a doctor and sometime surgeon without fingers?

He hauled himself to his feet and found himself face-to-face with a wide-eyed Lizzie McKettrick. He could have tumbled into the blue of those eyes; it seemed fathomless. She draped something around him—a blanket or a quilt or perhaps a cloak—and boldly burrowed into his coat pocket, brought out the pint the peddler had given him earlier.

Pulling the cork, she raised the bottle to his lips and commanded, “Drink this!”

He managed a couple of fiery swallows, waved away the bottle. His vision began to clear, and the thrumming in his ears abated a little. With a chuckle he ran a shaky forearm across his mouth. “If you have any kindness in your soul,” he said laboriously, “you will not say ‘I told you so.’”

“Very well,” Lizzie replied briskly, “but I did tell you so, didn’t I?”

He laughed. Not that anything was funny. He’d seen little on his foray into the blizzard, but he had confirmed a few of his worst suspicions. The car was off the tracks, and tipping with dangerous delicacy away from the mountainside. And nobody, McKettrick or not, was going to get through that weather.

If any of them survived, it would be a true miracle.

ONCE MORGAN STOPPED SHIVERING, Lizzie returned the quilt to Mrs. Halifax and went forward again to sit with him. Whitley glared at her as she passed his seat.

She’d gotten used to wearing the conductor’s coat by then; even though it smelled of coal smoke and sweat, it was warm. She considered offering it to Morgan, but she knew he would refuse, so she didn’t make the gesture.

“I heard you singing,” Morgan said, somewhat distractedly, when she sat down beside him. “That’s how I found my way back. I heard you singing.”

Moved, Lizzie touched his hand tentatively, then covered it with her own. His skin felt like ice, and his clothes were damp. Once he dozed off, not that he was in any condition to stop her even then, she’d make her way back to the baggage car. Raid her trunks and crates, and Whitley’s, too, for dry garments. And the freight car might contain food, matches, even blankets.

Lizzie’s stomach rumbled. None of them had eaten since their brief stop in Flagstaff, hours before, and she’d picked at her leathery meat loaf and overcooked green beans. Left most of it behind. Now she would have devoured the sorry fare happily and ordered a cup of strong, steaming coffee.

Coffee.

Suddenly, she yearned for the stuff, generously laced with cream and sugar—and a good splash of brandy.

Morgan’s fingers curled around hers, squeezed lightly. “Lizzie?”

“I was just thinking of hot coffee,” she confessed, keeping her voice down, “and food. Do you suppose there might be food in the freight car?”

He grinned at her. “I watched you in the restaurant at the depot today,” he said. “You barely touched your meat loaf special.”

“You were watching me?” She found the idea at once disturbing and titillating.

“Hard not to,” Morgan said. “You’re a very good-looking woman, Lizzie. I did wonder, I confess, about your taste in traveling companions.”

Lizzie felt color warm her cheeks, and for once, she welcomed it. Every other part of her was cold. “You seem to have formed a very immediate, and very poor, impression of Mr. Carson.”

“I’m a good judge of character,” he replied. “Mr. Carson doesn’t seem to have one, as far as I’ve been able to discern.”

“How could you possibly have reached such a conclusion merely by looking at him in a busy train depot?”

“He didn’t pull back your chair for you when you sat down,” Morgan went on, his tone just shy of smug. “And you paid the bill. It only took a glance to see those things—I saved the active looking for you.”

“Mr. Carson,” Lizzie said, mildly mortified, “is making this journey as my guest. That’s why I paid for his meal. He is, I assure you, quite solvent.”

“Planning to parade him past the McKettricks?” Morgan teased, after a capitulating grin. “I’ve only met one of them—Kade—a few weeks ago, in Tucson. He told me Indian Rock needed a doctor and offered me an office in the Arizona Hotel and plenty of patients if I’d come and set up a practice. Didn’t strike me as the sort to be impressed by the likes of Mr. Carson.”

All kinds of protests were brewing in Lizzie’s bosom, but the mention of her uncle’s name stopped her as surely as the avalanche had stopped the train. Though she wasn’t about to admit it, Morgan’s guess was probably correct. Kade, like all the other McKettrick men, judged people by their actions rather than their words. Whitley could talk fit to charm a mockingbird out of its tree, but he plainly wasn’t much for pushing up his sleeves and doing something about a situation. There was no denying that.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Lizzie conceded, bereft.

Morgan squeezed her hand again.

The wind lashed at the train from the side that wasn’t snowbound, rocked it ominously back and forth. Lizzie spoke again, needing to fill the silence.

“Did you practice medicine in Tucson?” she asked.

Morgan shook his head. “Chicago,” he said, and then went quiet again.

“Are you going to make me do all the talking?” Lizzie demanded after an interval, feeling fretful.

That smile tilted the corner of his mouth again. “I’m no orator, Lizzie.”

“Just tell me something about yourself. Anything. I’m pretty scared right now, and if you don’t hold up your end of the conversation, I’ll probably prattle until your ears fall off.”

He chuckled. It was a richly masculine sound. “All right,” he said. “My name, as you already know, is Morgan Shane. I’m twenty-eight years old. I was born and raised in Chicago—no brothers or sisters. My father was a doctor, and that’s why I became one. He studied in Berlin after graduating from Harvard, since, in his opinion, American medical schools were deplorable. So I went to Germany, too. I’ve never been married, though I came close once—her name was Rosalee. I practiced with my father until he died—probably would have stayed put, except for a falling-out with my mother. I decided to move west, and wound up in Tucson.”

It was more information than Lizzie had dared hope for, and she felt her eyes widen. “What happened to Rosalee?” she asked, a little breathless, for she had a weakness for romance. Whenever she got the chance, she read love stories and sighed over the heroes. The woman must have died tragically, thereby breaking Morgan’s heart and turning him into a wanderer, and perhaps the experience explained his terse way of speaking, too.

“She decided she’d rather be a doctor than a doctor’s wife and went off to Berlin to study for a degree of her own. Or was it Vienna? I forget.”

Lizzie’s mouth fell open.

Morgan grinned again. “I’m teasing you, Lizzie. She eloped with a man who worked in the accounts receivable department at Sears and Roebuck.”

She peered at him, skeptical.

He laughed. “Your turn,” he said. “What do you plan to do with your life, Lizzie McKettrick?”

“I mean to teach in Indian Rock,” Lizzie said, suddenly wishing she had a more interesting occupation to describe. A trapeze artist, perhaps, or a painter of stately portraits. A noble nurse, bravely battling all manner of dramatic diseases.

“Until you marry and start having babies.”

Lizzie was rattled all over again. What was it about Morgan Shane that both nettled her and piqued her interest? “My uncle Jeb’s wife is a teacher,” she said defensively. “They have four children, and Chloe still holds classes in the country school house he built for her with his own hands.” Jack and Ellen, living on the Triple M, would attend Chloe’s classes, because the distance to town was too great to travel every day.

Morgan’s eyes darkened a little as he assessed her, or seemed to. Maybe it was just a trick of the light. “How does Mr. Carson fit into all this?”

Lizzie sighed. Looked back over one shoulder to make sure Whitley wasn’t eavesdropping. Instead he’d gone back to sleep. “I thought I wanted to marry him,” she answered, in a whisper. “Why?”

“Well, because it seemed like a good idea, I guess. I’m almost twenty. I’d like to start a family of my own.”

“While continuing to teach?”

“Of course,” Lizzie said. “I know what you think— that I’ll have to choose one or the other. But I don’t have to choose.”

“Because you’re a McKettrick?”

Again, Lizzie’s cheeks warmed. “Yes,” she said, quite tartly. “Because I’m a McKettrick.” She huffed out a frustrated breath. “And because I’m strong and smart and I can do more than one thing well. No one would think of asking you when you’d give up being a doctor and start keeping house and mending stockings, if you decided to get married, would they?”

“That’s different, Lizzie.”

“No, it isn’t.”

He settled back against the seat, closed his eyes. “I think I’m going to like Indian Rock,” he said. And then he went to sleep, leaving Lizzie even more confounded than before.

“I HAVE TO USE THE CHAMBER POT,” a small voice whispered, startling Lizzie out of a restless doze. “And I can’t find one.”

Opening her eyes, Lizzie turned her head and saw the little Halifax girl standing in the aisle beside her. The last of the lanterns had gone out, and the car was frigid, but the blizzard had stopped, and a strangely beautiful bluish light seemed to rise from the glittering snow. Everyone else seemed to be asleep.

Recalling the spittoon she’d seen at the back of the car, Lizzie stood and took the child’s chilly hand. “This way,” she whispered.

The business completed, the little girl righted her calico skirts and said solemnly, “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Lizzie replied softly. She could have used a chamber pot herself, right about then, but she wasn’t about to use the spittoon. She escorted the child back to her seat, tucked part of Mr. Brennan’s quilt around her.

“We have to get home,” the little girl said, her eyes big in the gloom. “St. Nicholas won’t be able to find us out here in the wilderness, and Papa promised me I’d get a doll this year because I’ve been so good. When Mama had to tie a string to my tooth to pull it, I didn’t even cry.” She hooked a finger into one corner of her small mouth to show Lizzie the gap. “Schee?” she asked.

Lizzie’s heart swelled into her throat. She looked with proper awe upon the vacant spot between two other teeth, shook her head. Wanting to gather the child into her arms and hold her tightly, she restrained herself. Children were skittish creatures. “I think I would have cried, if I had one of my teeth pulled,” she said seriously. She’d actually seen that particular extraction process several times, back on the ranch—it was a brutal business but tried and true. And usually quick.

“My papa works on the Triple M now,” the little girl went on proudly. “He just got hired, and he’s foreman, too. That means we get our own house to live in. It has a fireplace and a real floor, and Mama says we can hang up Papa’s socks, if he has any clean ones, he’s been batching so long, and St. Nicholas will put an orange in the toe. One for me, and one for Jack, and one for Nellie Anne.”

Lizzie nodded, still choked up, but smiling gamely. “Your brother is Jack,” she said, marking the names in her memory by repeating them aloud, “and the baby is Nellie Anne. What, then, is your name?”

The small shoulders straightened. “Ellen Margaret Halifax.”

Lizzie put out a hand in belated introduction. “Since I’ll be your teacher, you should probably call me Miss McKettrick,” she said.

“Ellen,” Mrs. Halifax called, in a sleepy whisper, “you’ll freeze standing there in the aisle. Come get back under the quilt.”

Ellen obeyed readily, and soon gave herself up to dreams. From the slight smile resting on her mouth, Lizzie suspected the child’s imagination had carried her home to the foreman’s house on the Triple M, where she was hanging up a much-darned stocking in anticipation of a rare treat—an orange.

Having once awakened, Lizzie found she could not go back to sleep.

The baggage and freight cars beckoned.

Morgan, the one person who might have stopped her from venturing out of the passenger car, slumbered on.

Resolutely, Lizzie buttoned up the conductor’s coat, extracted a scarf from her hand luggage and tied it tightly under her chin, in order to protect her ears from a cold she knew would be merciless.

Once ready, she crept to the back of the car, struggled with the door, winced when it made a slight creaking sound. A quick glance back over one shoulder reassured her. None of the other passengers stirred.

The cold, as she had expected, bit into her flesh like millions of tiny teeth, but the snow had stopped coming down, and she could see clearly in the light of the moon. The car was still linked to the one behind it, and both remained upright.

Shivering on the tiny metal platform between the two cars, Lizzie risked a glance toward the cliff and was alarmed to see how close the one she’d just left had come to pitching over the edge.

Her heart pounded; for a moment she considered rushing back to awaken the others, herd them into the baggage car, which was, at least, still sitting on the tracks.

But would the second car be any safer?

It was too cold to stand there deliberating. She shoved open the next door. They would all be better able to deal with the crisis if she found food, blankets, anything to keep body and soul together until help arrived. And help would arrive. Her father and uncles were probably on their way even then. The question was, would they get there before there was another snowslide, before everyone perished from the unrelenting cold?

Lizzie found her own three steamer trunks, each of them nearly large enough for her to stand up inside, stacked one on top of the other. A pang struck her. Papa had teased her mercilessly about traveling with so much luggage. You’d never make it on a cattle drive, he’d said.

God, how she missed Holt McKettrick in that moment. His strength, his common sense, his innate ability to deal ably with whatever adversity dared present itself.

Think, Lizzie, she told herself. Fretting is useless.

Chewing on her lower lip, she pondered. Of course the coat and her other woolen garments were in the red trunk, and it was on the bottom. If she dislodged the other two—which would be a Herculean feat in its own right, involving much climbing and a lot of pushing— would the inevitable jolts send the passenger car, so precariously tilted, plummeting to the bottom of the ravine?

She decided to proceed to the freight car and think about the trunks on the way back. It was very possible, after all, that orders of blankets and coats and stockings and—please, God, food—might be found there, originally destined for the mercantile in Indian Rock, thus alleviating the need to rummage through her trunks.

Getting into the freight car proved impossible—the door was frozen shut, and no amount of kicking, pounding and latch wrenching availed. She finally lowered herself to the ground, by means of another small ladder, and the snow came up under her skirts to soak through her woolen bloomers and sting her thighs. She was perilously close to the edge, too—one slip and she would slide helplessly down the steep bank.

At least the hard work of moving at all warmed her a bit. Clinging to the side of the car with both hands, she made her precarious way along it. Her feet gave way once, and only her numb grip on the iron edging at the base of the car kept her from tumbling to her death.

After what seemed like hours, she reached the rear of the freight car. Somewhere in the thinning darkness, a wolf howled, the sound echoing inside Lizzie, ancient and forlorn.

Buck up, she ordered herself. Keep going.

Behind the freight car was the caboose, painted a cheery red. And, glory be, a chimney jutted from its roof. Where there was a chimney, there was a stove, and where there was a stove— Blessed warmth.

Forgoing the freight car for the time being, Lizzie decided to explore the caboose instead.

She had to wade through more snow, and nearly lost her footing again, but when she got to the door, it opened easily. She slipped inside, breathless, teeth chattering. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her scarf, so her ears throbbed with cold, fit to fall right off her head. There was a stove, a squat, pot-bellied one, hardly larger than the kettle Lorelei used for rendering lard at home. And on top of that stove, miraculously still in place after the jarring impact of the avalanche, stood a coffee pot. Peering inside a small cupboard near the stove, she saw a few precious provisions—a tin of coffee, a bag of sugar, a wedge of yellow cheese.

Lizzie gave a ranch-girl whoop, then slapped a hand over her mouth. Raised in the high country from the time she was twelve, she knew that when the snow was so deep, any sudden sound could bring most of the mountainside thundering down on top of them. She listened, too scared to breathe, for an ominous rumble overhead, but none came.

She assessed the long, benchlike seats lining the sides of the car. Room for everyone to lie down and sleep.

Yes, the caboose would do nicely.

She forced herself to go outside again—even the sight of that stove, cold as it was, had warmed her a little. The freight car proved as impenetrable from the rear door as from the first one Lizzie had tried, but she was much heartened, just the same. Morgan, Whitley and the peddler would be able to get inside.

She was making her way back along the side of the train, every step carefully considered, both hands grasping the side, when it happened.

Her feet slipped, her stomach gave a dull lurch, and she felt herself falling.

She slid a few feet, managed to catch hold of a tree root, the tree itself long gone. Fear sent the air whooshing from her lungs, as if she’d been struck in the solar plexus, and she knew her grip would not last long. She had almost no feeling in her hands, and her feet dangled in midair. She did not dare turn her head and look down.

“Help me!” she called out, in a voice that sounded laughably cheerful, given the circumstances.

Morgan’s head appeared above her, a genie sprung from a lamp. “Hold on,” he told her grimly, “and do not move.”

She watched, blinking salty moisture from her eyes, as he unbuckled his belt, pulled it free of his trousers and fashioned a loop at one end. He lay down on his belly and tossed the looped end of the belt within reach.

“Listen to me, Lizzie,” he said very quietly. “Take a few breaths before you reach for the belt. You can’t afford to miss.”

Lizzie didn’t even nod, so tenuous was her hold on the root. She took the advised breaths, even closed her eyes for a moment, imagined herself standing on firm ground. Safe with Morgan.

If she could just get to Morgan….

“Ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. Still clinging to the root, which was already giving way, with one hand, she grasped the leather loop with the other. Morgan’s strength seemed to surge along the length of it.

“I’ve got you, Lizzie,” Morgan said. “Take hold with the other hand.”

After another deep breath, she let go of the root.

Morgan pulled her up slowly, and very carefully. When she crested the bank, he hauled her into his arms and held her hard, both of them kneeling only inches from the lip of the cliff.

“Easy, now,” he murmured, his breath warming her right ear. “No sudden moves.”

Lizzie nodded slightly, her face buried in his shoulder, clinging to the fabric of his coat with both hands.

Morgan rose carefully to his feet, bringing Lizzie with him.

“The caboose,” she said, trembling all over. “There’s a stove in the caboose—and a c-coffeepot.”

He took her there. Seated her none too gently on one of the long seats. “What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded, moving to the stove, stuffing in kindling and old newspaper from the half-filled wood box, striking a match to start a blaze.

“I was looking for food…blankets—”

Morgan gave her a scathing look. Took the coffeepot off the stove and went out the rear door of the caboose. When he came back, Lizzie saw that he’d filled the pot with snow. He set it on the stove with an eloquent clunk. “You could have been killed!” he rasped, pale with fury.

“How did you know to…to come looking for me?”

“John Brennan woke me up. Said he’d seen you leave the car. At first, he thought he was dreaming, because nobody would do anything that stupid.”

“You left the car,” Lizzie reminded him. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference, Lizzie McKettrick, is that you are a woman and I am a man. And don’t you dare get up on a soapbox. If I hadn’t come along when I did, you’d be at the bottom of that ravine by now. And it was the grace of—whoever—that we didn’t both go over!”

He found a tin of coffee among the provisions, spooned some into the pot, right on top of the snow.

Lizzie realized that he’d put himself in no little danger to pull her to safety. “Thank you,” she said, with a peculiar mixture of graciousness and chagrin.

“I’m not ready to say ‘you’re welcome,’” he snapped. “Leaving that car, especially alone, was a damnably foolish thing to do.”

“If you expect an apology, Dr. Shane, you will be sorely disappointed. Someone had to do something.”

The fire crackled merrily in the stove, and a little heat began to radiate into the frosty caboose. Morgan reached up to adjust the damper, still seething.

“Don’t talk,” he advised, sounding surly.

Lizzie straightened her spine. “Of course I’m going to talk,” she told him pertly. “I have things to say. We need to bring everyone from the passenger car. It’s safer here—and warmer.”

“We aren’t going to do anything. You are going to stay put, and I will go back for the others.” He leveled a long look at her. “So help me God, Lizzie, if you set foot outside this caboose—”

She smiled, getting progressively warmer, catching the first delicious scent of brewing coffee. She’d probably imagined that part, she decided.

“Why, Dr. Shane,” she mocked sweetly, batting her eyelashes, “I wouldn’t think of disobeying a strong, capable man like you.”

Suddenly he laughed. Some of the tension between them, until that moment tight as a rope with an obstreperous calf running full out at the other end, slackened.

It gave Lizzie an odd feeling, not unlike dangling over the side of a cliff with only a root to hold on to and the jaws of a ravine yawning below.

She blushed. Then her practical side reemerged. “I tried the door on the freight car,” she said. “But I couldn’t get in. If we’re lucky, there might be food inside.”

“Oh, we’re lucky, all right,” Morgan responded, his amusement fading as reality overtook him again. The sun was coming up, and Lizzie knew as well as he did that even its thin, wintry warmth might thaw some of the snow looming over their heads, set it to sliding again. “We’re lucky we’re alive.” He studied her for a long moment. Then he snapped, “Wait here.”

Frankly not brave enough to risk another plunge over the cliff-side, McKettrick or not, Lizzie waited. Waited when he left. Waited for the coffee to brew.

He brought the baby first.

Lizzie held little Nellie Anne and bit her lip, waiting.

Next came Jack, riding wide-eyed on Morgan’s shoulders, his little hands clasped tightly under the doctor’s chin.

After that, Mrs. Halifax. Her arm still in its sling, she fairly collapsed, once safely inside the caboose. Lizzie immediately got up to fill a coffee mug and hand it to the other woman. Mrs. Halifax trembled visibly as she drank, her two older children clutching at her skirts.

Whitley appeared, having made his own way, scowling. Still clutching his blanket, he looked even more like an overgrown child than before. When Mrs. Halifax gave him a turn with the cup, he added a generous dollop from his flask and glared at Lizzie while he drank. She’d seen him empty the vessel earlier; perhaps he had a spare bottle in his valise.

She did her best to ignore him, but it was hard, since he seemed determined to make his stormy presence felt.

The peddler arrived next, escorting the old woman, his jowls red with the cold. He’d brought his sample case, too, and he immediately produced a cup of his own, from the case, and poured a cup of coffee at the stove. “Hell of a Christmas,” he boomed, to the company in general, understandably cheered by the warmth from the fire and probably dizzy with relief at having made the treacherous journey between cars unscathed. He gave the cup to the elderly lady, who took it with fluttery hands and quiet gratitude.

Finally, John Brennan came, on his feet but supported by Morgan. The old man accompanied them, carrying Woodrow’s covered cage.

The peddler, after flashing a glance Whitley’s way, conjured more cups from his sample case, shiny new mugs coated in blue enamel, and gave them to the newer arrivals.

“I’m starving,” Whitley said petulantly. “Is there any food?”

“Starving!” Woodrow commented from his cage.

The grin Morgan turned on Whitley was anything but cordial. “I thought maybe we could count on you, hero that you are, to hike out with a rifle and bag some wild game,” he said.

Whitley reddened, looked for a moment as though he might fling aside the coffee mug he was hogging and go for Morgan’s throat. Apparently, he thought better of it, though, for he remained seated, taking up more than his share of room on the benchlike seat opposite Lizzie. Muttered something crude into his coffee.

Lizzie stood, approached Morgan. “I was thinking if we could find a way to—well, unhook this car from the next—”

“Stop thinking,” Morgan interrupted. “It only gets you in trouble.”

Lizzie felt as though she’d been slapped. “But—”

Morgan softened, but only slightly. Regarded her over the rim of his steaming coffee. “Lizzie,” he said, more gently, “it’s a question of weight. As shaky as our situation is, if we uncoupled the cars, we’d be more vulnerable, separated from the rest of the train, not less.”

He was right, which only made his words harder for Lizzie to swallow. She averted her eyes, only to have her gaze land accidentally on Whitley. He was smirking at her.

She lifted her chin, turned away from both Whitley and Morgan, and set about helping Mrs. Halifax make a bed for the children, using John Brennan’s quilt. That done, she turned to the elderly couple.

Their names were Zebulon and Marietta Thaddings, Lizzie soon learned; they lived in Phoenix, but Mrs. Thaddings’s sister worked in Indian Rock, and they’d intended to surprise her with a holiday visit. Having no one to look after Woodrow in their absence, they’d brought him along.

“He’s a good bird,” Mrs. Thaddings said sweetly. “No trouble at all.”

Lizzie smiled at that. “Perhaps I know your sister,” she said.

Mrs. Thaddings beamed. “Perhaps you do,” she agreed. “Her name is Clarinda Adams, and she runs a dressmaking business.”

Lizzie felt a pitching sensation in the pit of her stomach. There was no dressmaker in Indian Rock, but there was a very exclusive “gentleman’s club,” and Miss Clarinda Adams ran it. Cowboys could not afford what was on offer in Miss Adams’s notorious establishment, but prosperous ranchers, railroad executives and others of that ilk flocked to the place from miles around to drink imported brandy, play high-stakes poker and dandle saucy women on their knees.

Oh, Miss Adams was going to be surprised, all right, when the Thaddingses appeared on her doorstep, with a talking bird in tow. But the Thaddingses would be even more so.

Lizzie felt a flash of mingled pity and amusement. She patted Mrs. Thaddings’s hand, still chilled from the perilous journey from one railroad car to another, and offered to refill her coffee cup.

Once they’d finished off the coffee and started a second pot to brewing, Morgan and the peddler set out to break into and raid the freight car.

As soon as they were gone, Whitley approached Lizzie, planted himself directly in front of her.

“If I die,” he told her, “it will be your fault. If you hadn’t insisted on bringing me into this wilderness to meet your family—”

Despite a dizzying sting—for there was truth in his words, as well as venom—Lizzie kept her backbone straight, her shoulders back and her chin high. “After staying alive,” she said, with what dignity she could summon, “my biggest problem will be explaining you to my family.”

With a snort of disgust, he turned on one heel and strode to the other side of the car.

And little Ellen tugged at the sleeve of the oversize conductor’s coat Lizzie had been wearing since the day before. “Do you think St. Nicholas will know where we are?” she asked, her eyes huge with worry. “Jack’s had a mean hankerin’ for that orange ever since Mama told us we could hang up stockings this year.”

“I’m absolutely certain St. Nicholas will know precisely where we are,” Lizzie told Ellen, laying a hand on her shoulder. “But we’ll be in Indian Rock by Christmas Eve, you’ll see.”

Would they? Ellen looked convinced. Lizzie, on the other hand, was beginning to have her doubts.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CABOOSE, although not much safer than the passenger car, was at least warm. When Morgan and the peddler returned from their foray, they brought four gray woolen blankets, as many tins of canned food, all large, and a box of crackers.

“There was a ham,” the peddler blustered, red from the cold and loud with relief to be back within the range of the stove, “but the doc here said it was probably somebody’s Christmas dinner, special-ordered, so we oughtn’t to help ourselves to it.”

Everyone nodded in agreement, including Ellen and Jack, her younger brother. Only Whitley looked unhappy about the decision.

There were no plates and no utensils. Morgan opened the tins with his pocket knife, and they all ate of the contents—peaches, tomatoes, pears and a pale-skinned chicken—forced to use their hands. When the meal was over, Morgan found an old bucket next to the stove and carried in more snow, to be melted on the stove, so they could wash up.

While it was a relief to Lizzie to assuage her hunger, she was still restless. It was December twenty-third. Her father and uncles must be well on their way to finding the stalled train. She yearned for their arrival, but she was afraid for them, too. The trip from Indian Rock would be a treacherous one, cold and slow and very hard going, most of the way. For the first time it occurred to her that a rescue attempt might not avert calamity but invite it instead. Her loved ones would be putting their lives at risk, venturing out under these conditions.

But venture they would. They were McKettricks, and thus constitutionally incapable of sitting on their hands when somebody—especially one of their own—needed help.

She closed her eyes for a moment, willed herself not to fall apart.

She thought of Christmas preparations going on at the Triple M. There were four different houses on the ranch, and the kitchens would be redolent with stove heat and the smells of good things baking in the ovens.

By now, having expected to meet her at the station in Indian Rock the night before, her grandfather would definitely have raised the alarm….

She started a little when Morgan sat down on the train seat beside her, offered her a cup of coffee. She’d drifted homeward, in her musings, and coming back to a stranded caboose and a lot of strangers was a painful wrench.

She saw that the others were all occupied: John Brennan sleeping with his chin on his chest, Ellen and Jack playing cards with the peddler, Whitley reading a book—he always carried one in the inside pocket of his coat—Mrs. Halifax modestly nursing baby Nellie Anne beneath the draped quilt. Mrs. Thaddings had freed Woodrow from his cage, and he sat obediently on her right shoulder, a well-behaved and very observant bird, occasionally nibbling a sunflower seed from his mistress’s palm.

“Brennan,” Morgan told Lizzie wearily, keeping his voice low, “is running a fever.”

Lizzie was immediately alarmed. “Is it serious?”

“A fever is always serious, Lizzie. He probably took a chill between here and the other car, if not before. From the rattle in his chest, I’d say he’s developing pneumonia.”

“Dear God,” Lizzie whispered, thinking of the little boy, Tad, waiting to welcome his father at their new home in Indian Rock.

“Giving up hope, Lizzie McKettrick?” Morgan asked, very quietly.

She sucked in a breath, shook her head. “No,” she said firmly.

Morgan smiled, squeezed her hand. “Good.”

Lizzie had seen pneumonia before. While she’d never contracted the dreaded malady herself, she’d known it to snatch away a victim within days or even hours. Concepcion, her stepgrandmother, and Lorelei had often attended the sick around Indian Rock and in the bunkhouses on the Triple M, and Lizzie had kept many a vigil so the older women could rest. “I’ll help,” she said now, though she wondered where she was going to get the strength. She was young, and she was healthy, but her nerves felt raw, exposed—strained to the snapping point.

“I know,” Morgan said, his voice a little gruff. “You would have made a fine nurse, Lizzie.”

“I don’t have the patience,” she replied seriously, wringing her hands. They’d thawed by then, along with all her other extremities, but they ached, deep in the bone. “To be a nurse, I mean.”

Morgan arched one dark eyebrow. “Teaching doesn’t require patience?” he asked, smiling.

Lizzie found a small laugh hiding somewhere inside her, and allowed it to escape. It came out as a ragged chuckle. “I see your point,” she admitted. She turned her head, saw Ellen and Jack enjoying their game with the peddler, and smiled. “I love children,” she said softly. “I love the way their faces light up when they’ve been struggling with some concept and it suddenly comes clear to them. I love the way they laugh from deep down in their middles, the way they smell when they’ve been playing in summer grass, or rolling in snow—”

“Do you have brothers and sisters, Lizzie?”

“Brothers,” she said. “All younger. John Henry—he’s deaf and Papa and Lorelei adopted him after his folks were killed in Texas, in an Indian raid. Lorelei, that’s my stepmother, sent away for some special books from back east, and taught him to talk with his hands. Then she taught the rest of us, too. Gabe and Doss learned it so fast.”

“I’ll bet you did, too,” Morgan said. By the look in his eyes, Lizzie knew his remark wasn’t intended as flattery. Unless she missed her guess, Dr. Morgan Shane had never flattered anyone in his life. “John Henry is a lucky little boy, to be a part of a family like yours.”

“We’ve always thought it was the other way around,” Lizzie said. “John Henry is so funny, and so smart. He can ride any horse on the ranch, draw them, too, so you think they’ll just step right off the paper and prance around the room, and when he grows up, he means to be a telegraph operator.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting him, along with the rest of the McKettricks,” Morgan told her. His gaze had strayed to Whitley, narrowed, then swung back to Lizzie’s face.

Something deep inside her leapt and pirouetted. Morgan wanted to meet her family. But of course it wasn’t because he had any personal interest in her. Her uncle Kade had encouraged him to come to Indian Rock to practice medicine, and the McKettricks were leaders in the community. Naturally, as a newcomer to town, Morgan would seek to make their acquaintance. Her heart soaring only moments before, she now felt oddly deflated.

Morgan stood. “I’d better go outside again,” he said. “See what I can round up in the way of fuel. What firewood we have isn’t going to last long, but there’s a fair supply of coal in the locomotive.”

Lizzie hated the thought of Morgan braving the dangerous cold again, but she knew he had to do it, and she was equally certain that he wouldn’t let her go in his stead. Still, she caught at his hand when he would have walked away, looked up into his face. “How can I help, Morgan?”

His free hand moved, lingered near her cheek, as though he might caress her. But the moment passed, and he did not touch her. “Maybe you could rig up some kind of bed for John, on one of these bench seats,” he said quietly. “He used up most of his strength just getting here. He’s going to need to lie down soon.”

Lizzie nodded, grateful to have something practical to do.

Morgan left.

Lizzie sat a moment or so longer, then stood, straightening her spine vertebra by vertebra as she did. Fat flakes of snow drifted past the windows of the train, and the sky was darkening, even though it was only midday.

Papa, she thought. Hurry. Please, hurry.

Lizzie made up John Brennan’s makeshift bed on one of the benches, as near to the stove as she could while still leaving room for her or Morgan to attend to him. He gave her a grateful look when she awakened him from an uncomfortable sleep and helped him across the car to his new resting place. Using two of the four blankets from the freight car as pillows, she tucked him in between the remaining pair. Laid a hand to his forehead.

His skin was hot as a skillet forgotten over a campfire.

“I could do with some water,” he told Lizzie. “My canteen is in my haversack, but it’s been empty for a while.”

Lizzie nodded. “Dr. Shane brought in some snow a while ago. I’ll see if it’s melted yet.”

“Thank you,” Mr. Brennan said. And then he gave a wracking cough that almost bent him double.

“Is he contagious?” Whitley wanted to know. He stood at her elbow, his book dangling in one hand.

“I only wish he were,” Lizzie answered coolly. “Then you might catch some of his good manners and his generosity.”

“Don’t you think we should stop bickering?” Whitley retorted, surprising her. “After all, we’re all in danger here, the way that sawbones tells it.”

“Are you just realizing that, Whitley?” Lizzie asked. “And Dr. Shane is not a ‘sawbones.’ He’s a physician, trained in Berlin.”

“Well, huzzah for him,” Whitley said bitterly. Apparently, his suggestion that they make peace had extended only as far as Lizzie herself. He was going to go right on being nasty. “I swear he’s turned your head, Lizzie. You’re smitten with him. And you don’t know a damn thing about the man, except what he’s told you.”

“I know,” Lizzie said moderately, “that when this train was struck by an avalanche, he didn’t think of himself first.”

Whitley’s color flared. “Are you implying that I’m a coward?”

The peddler, Ellen and Jack looked up from their game.

John Brennan went right on coughing.

Woodrow, back in his cage, spouted, “Coward!”

“No,” Lizzie replied thoughtfully. “I’ve watched you play polo, and you can be quite brave. Maybe ‘reckless’ would be a better term. But you are selfish, Whitley, and that is a trait I cannot abide.”

He gripped her shoulders. Shook her slightly. “Now you can’t ‘abide’ me?” he growled. “Why? Because you’re a high-and-mighty McKettrick?”

A click sounded from somewhere in the car, distinctive and ominous.

Lizzie glanced past Whitley and saw that the peddler had pointed a small handgun in their direction.

“Unhand the lady, if you please,” the man said mildly.

Ellen and Jack stared, their eyes enormous.

“Don’t shoot,” Lizzie said calmly.

Whitley’s hands fell to his sides, but the look on his face was cocky. “So you’re still fond of me?” he asked Lizzie.

“No,” Lizzie replied, watching his obnoxious grin fade as the word sank in. “I’m not the least bit fond of you, Whitley. But a shot could start another avalanche.” Whitley reddened.

The peddler lowered the pistol, allowing it to rest on top of his sample case, under his hand.

“I’m catching the first train out of this godforsaken country!” Whitley said, shaking a finger under Lizzie’s nose. “I should have known you’d turn out to be—to be wild.”

Lizzie drew in her breath. “‘Wild’? If you’re trying to insult me, Whitley, you’re going to have to do better than that.” She jabbed at his chest with the tip of one index finger. “And kindly do not shake your finger at me!”

The peddler chuckled.

“Wild!” Woodrow called shrilly. “Wild!”

The door at the rear of the caboose opened, and Morgan came in, stomping snow off his boots. He carried several broken tree branches in his arms, laid them down near the stove to dry, so they could be burned later. His gaze came directly to Lizzie and Whitley.

“I’m leaving!” Whitley said, forcing the words between his teeth.

“That might be difficult,” Lizzie pointed out dryly, “since we’re stranded.”

“I won’t stay here and be insulted!”

“You’d rather go out there and die of exposure?”

“You think I’m a coward? I’m selfish? Well, I’ll show you, Lizzie McKettrick. I’ll follow the tracks until I come to a town and get help—since your highfalutin family hasn’t shown up!”

“You can’t do that,” Morgan said, the voice of irritated moderation. “You wouldn’t make it a mile, whether you followed the tracks or not. Anyhow, in case you haven’t been listening, the tracks are buried under snow higher than the top of your head.”

“Maybe you’re afraid, Dr. Shane, but I’m not!” Whitley looked around, first to the peddler, then to poor John Brennan. “I think we should all go. It would be better than sitting around in this caboose, waiting to fall over the side of a mountain!”

Ellen raised a small hand, as though asking a question in class. “Are we going to fall over the mountain?” she asked. Jack nestled close against his sister’s side, pale, and thrust a thumb into his mouth.

“You’re frightening the children!” Lizzie said angrily.

Morgan raised both hands in a bid for peace. “We’re not going to fall off the mountain,” he told the little girl and Jack, his tone gentle. But when he turned to Whitley, his eyes blazed with temper. “If you want to be a damn fool, Mr. Carson, that’s your business. But don’t expect the rest of us to go along with you.”

Little Jack began to cry, tears slipping silently down his face, his thumb still jammed deep into his mouth.

“Stop that,” Ellen told him, trying without success to dislodge the thumb. “You’re not a baby.”

Whitley grabbed up his blanket, stormed across the car and flung it at Ellen and Jack. Then he banged out of the caboose, leaving the door ajar behind him.

Lizzie took a step in that direction.

Morgan closed the door. “He won’t get far,” he told her quietly.

“Come here to me, Jack,” Mrs. Halifax said. She’d finished feeding and burping the baby, laid her gently on the seat beside her; Nellie Anne was asleep, reminding Lizzie of a cherub slumbering on a fluffy cloud.

Jack scrambled to his mother, crawled onto her lap.

Lizzie felt a pinch in her heart. She’d held her youngest brother, Doss, in just that way, when he was smaller and frightened by a thunderstorm or a bad dream.

“I have some goods in the freight car,” the peddler said, tucking away the pistol, securing his case under the seat and rising. He buttoned his coat and went out.

Lizzie helped Ellen gather the scattered cards from their game. Mrs. Halifax rocked Jack in her lap, murmuring softly to him.

Morgan checked the fire, added wood.

“He’ll be back,” he told Lizzie, when their gazes collided.

He was referring to Whitley, of course, off on his fool’s errand.

Lizzie nodded glumly and swallowed.

When the peddler returned, he was lugging a large wooden crate marked Private in large, stenciled letters. He set it down near the stove, with an air of mystery, and Ellen was immediately attracted. Even Jack slid down off his mother’s lap to approach, no longer sucking his thumb.

“What’s in there?” the little boy asked.

The peddler smiled. Patted the crate with one plump hand. Took a handkerchief from inside his coat and dabbed at his forehead. Remarkably, in that weather, he’d managed to work up a sweat. “Well, my boy,” he said importantly, straightening, “I’m glad you asked that question. Can you read?”

Jack blinked. “No, sir,” he said.

“I can,” Ellen piped up, pointing to a label on the crate. “It says, ‘Property of Mr. Nicholas Christian.’”

“That,” the peddler said, “would be me. Nicholas Christian, at your service.” He doffed his somewhat seedy bowler hat, pressed it to his chest and bowed. He turned to Jack. “You ask what’s in this box? Well, I’ll tell you. Christmas. That’s what’s in here.”

“How can a whole day fit inside a box?” Ellen demanded, sounding at once skeptical and very hopeful.

“Why, child,” said Nicholas Christian, “Christmas isn’t merely a day. It comes in all sorts of forms.”

Morgan, having poured a cup of coffee, watched the proceedings with interest. Mrs. Halifax looked troubled, but curious, too.

“Are you going to open it?” Jack wanted to know. He was practically breathless with excitement. Even John Brennan had stirred upon his sickbed to sit up and peer toward the crate.

“Of course I am,” Mr. Christian said. “It would be unthinkably rude not to, after arousing your interest in such a way, wouldn’t you say?”

Ellen and Jack nodded uncertainly.

“I’ll need that poker,” the peddler went on, addressing Morgan now, since he was closest to the stove. “The lid of this box is nailed down, you know.”

Morgan brought the poker.

Woodrow leaned forward on his perch.

The peddler wedged one end of it under the top of the crate and prized it up with a squeak of nails giving way. A layer of fresh wood shavings covered the contents, hiding them from view.

Lizzie, preoccupied with Whitley’s announcement that he was going to follow the tracks to the nearest town, looked on distractedly.

Mr. Christian knelt next to the crate, rubbed his hands together, like a magician preparing to conjure a live rabbit or a white-winged dove from a hat, and reached inside.

He brought out a shining wooden box with gleaming brass hinges. Set it reverently on the floor. When he raised the lid, a tune began to play. “O little town of Bethlehem…”

Lizzie’s throat tightened. The works of the music box were visible, through a layer of glass, and Jack and Ellen stared in fascination.

“Land,” Ellen said. “I ain’t—” she blushed, looked up at Lizzie “—I haven’t never seen nothin’ like this.”

Lizzie offered no comment on the child’s grammar.

“It belonged to my late wife, God rest her soul,” Mr. Christian said and, for a moment, there were ghosts in his eyes. Leaving the music box to play, he plunged his hands into the crate again. Brought out a delicate china plate, chipped from long and reverent use, trimmed in gold and probably hand-painted. “There are eight of these,” he said. “Spoons and forks and butter knives, too. We shall dine in splendor.”

“What’s ‘dine’?” Jack asked.

Ellen elbowed him. “It means eating,” she said.

“We ain’t got nothin’ to eat,” Jack pointed out. By then, the crackers and cheese Lizzie had found in the cupboard were long gone, as were the canned foods pirated from the freight car.

“Oh, but we do,” replied Mr. Christian. “We most certainly do.”

The children’s eyes all but popped.

“We have goose-liver pâté.” He produced several small cans to prove it.

Woodrow squawked and spread his wings.

Jack wrinkled his nose. “Goose liver?”

Ellen nudged him again, harder this time. “Whatever patty is,” she told him, “it’s vittles for sure.”

“Pah-tay,” the peddler corrected, though not unkindly. “It is fine fare indeed.” More cans came out of the box. A small ham. Crackers. Tea in a wooden container. And wonderful, rainbow-colored sugar in a pretty jar.

Lizzie’s eyes stung a little, just watching as the feast was unveiled. Clearly, like the things stashed in her travel trunk, these treasures had been intended for some one in Indian Rock, awaiting Mr. Christian’s arrival. A daughter? A son? Grandchildren?

“Of course, having recently enjoyed a fine repast,” Mr. Christian said, addressing Ellen and Jack directly, but raising his voice just enough to carry to all corners of the caboose, “we’d do well to save all this for a while, wouldn’t we?”

“I don’t like liver,” Jack announced, this time managing to dodge the inevitable elbow from Ellen. “But I wouldn’t mind havin’ some of that pretty sugar.”

Morgan chuckled, but Lizzie saw him glance anxiously in the direction of the windows.

“Later,” Mr. Christian promised. “Let us savor the anticipation for a while.”

Both children’s brows furrowed in puzzlement. The peddler might have been speaking in a foreign language, using words like repast and savor and anticipation. Raised hardscrabble, though, they clearly understood the concept of later. Delay was a way of life with them, young as they were.

Lizzie moved closer to Morgan, spoke quietly, while the music box continued to play. “Whitley,” she said, “is an exasperating fool. But we can’t let him wander out there. He’ll die.”

Morgan sighed. “I was just thinking I’d better go and bring him back before he gets lost.”

“I’m going, too. It’s my fault he’s here at all.”

“You’re needed here,” Morgan replied reasonably, with a slight nod of his head toward John Brennan. “I can’t be in two places at once, Lizzie.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do if Mr. Brennan had a medical crisis,” Lizzie said. “But I do know how to follow railroad tracks.”

Morgan rested his hands on Lizzie’s shoulders, just lightly, but a confounding sensation rushed through her, almost an ache, stirring things up inside her. “You’re too brave for your own good,” he said. “Stay here. Get as much water down Brennan as you can. Make sure he stays warm, even if the fever makes him want to throw off his blankets.”

“But what if he—?”

“What if he dies, Lizzie? I won’t lie to you. He might. But then, so might all the rest of us, if we don’t keep our heads.”

“You’re exhausted,” Lizzie protested.

“If there’s one thing a doctor learns, it’s that exhaustion is a luxury. I can’t afford to collapse, Lizzie, and believe me, I won’t.”

Wanting to cling to him, wanting to make him stay, even if she had to make a histrionic scene to do it, Lizzie forced herself to step back. To let go, not just physically, but emotionally, too. “All right,” she said. “But if you’re not back within an hour or two, I will come looking for you.”

Morgan sighed again, but a tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth, and something at once soft and molten moved in his eyes. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. And then, after making only minimal preparations against the cold, he left the caboose.

Lizzie went immediately to the windows, watched him pass alongside the train. Keep him safe, she prayed silently. Please, keep him safe. And Whitley, too.

John Brennan began to cough. Lizzie fetched one of the cups, dashed outside to fill it with snow, set it on the stove. The chill bit deep into her flesh, gnawed at her bones.

Ellen and Jack whirled like figure skaters to the continuing serenade of the music box, Mr. Christian having demonstrated that it could play many different tunes, by virtue of small brass disks inserted into a tiny slot. Woodrow seemed to dance, inside his cage. Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings took in the scene, smiling fondly.

“I’m burnin’ up,” Mr. Brennan told Lizzie, when she came to adjust his blankets. “I need to get outside. Roll myself in that snow—”

Lizzie shook her head. She had no medical training, nothing to offer but the soothing presence of a woman. “That’s your fever talking, Mr. Brennan,” she said. “Dr. Shane said to keep you warm.”

“It’s like I’m on fire,” he said.

How, Lizzie wondered, did people stand being nurses and doctors? It was a sore trial to the spirit to look helplessly upon human suffering, able to do so little to relieve it. “There, now,” she told him, near to weeping. “Rest. I’ll fetch a cool cloth for your forehead.”

“That would be a pure mercy,” he rasped.

Lizzie took her favorite silk scarf from her valise, steeled herself to go outside yet again.

Mr. Thaddings stopped her. Took the scarf from her hands and made the journey himself, shivering when he returned.

The snow-dampened scarf proved a comfort to Mr. Brennan, though the heat of his flesh quickly defeated the purpose. Lizzie, on her knees beside the seat where he lay, turned her head and saw that Zebulon Thaddings had brought in a bucketful of snow. Gratefully, she repeated the process.

“It would be a favor if you’d call me by my given name,” Mr. Brennan told her. His coughing had turned violent, and he seemed almost delirious, alternately shaking with chills and trying to throw off his covers. “I wouldn’t feel so far from home thataways.”

Lizzie blinked back another spate of hot tears. “You’ll get home, John,” she said, fairly choking out the words. “I promise you will.”

A small hand came to rest on her shoulder. She looked around, saw Ellen standing beside her. “I could do that,” the child said gently, referring to the repeated wetting, wringing and applying of the cloth to John’s forehead. “So you could rest a spell. Have some of that tea Mr. Christmas made.”

Lizzie’s first instinct was to refuse—tending the sick was no task for a small child. On the other hand, the offer was a gift and oughtn’t to be spurned. “Mr. Christmas?” she asked, bemused, distracted by worry. “Don’t you mean Mr. Christian?”

Ellen smiled, took the cloth. Edged Lizzie aside. “Here, now, Mr. Brennan,” the little girl said, sounding like a miniature adult. “You just listen, and I’ll talk. Me and my ma and my brother Jack and my little sister, Nellie Anne, we’re on our way to the Triple M Ranch—”

Lizzie got to her feet, turned to find Mr. Christian holding out a mug full of spice-fragrant tea, hot and strong and probably laced with the very expensive colored sugar.

Mr. Christmas. Maybe Ellen had gotten the peddler’s name right after all.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE COLD WAS BRUTAL, the snow blinding. Morgan slogged through it, following the rails as best he could. It was in large part a guessing game, and he had to be careful to stay away from the bank on the left. That presented a challenge, since he couldn’t be entirely certain where it was.

Carson, the damn fool, had left footprints, but they were filling in fast, and the man was clearly no relation to the famous scout with the same last name. Tracking him was more likely to lead Morgan to the bottom of the ravine than the nearest town.

Cursing under his breath—the wind buffeted it away every time he raised his head—Morgan kept going, ever mindful of the passing of time. If he took too long finding Carson and bringing him back, he knew Lizzie would make good on her threat to mount a one-woman search. John Brennan was too sick to stop her, let alone make the trek in her stead, and the peddler, well, he was a curious fellow, now guarding that sample case of his as if it contained the Holy Grail, now serving up goose-liver pâté and other delicacies on fancy china plates. He might keep Lizzie in the caboose, where she belonged, or send her out into the blizzard with his blessings. Morgan, by necessity an astute observer of the human animal, wasn’t sure the man was completely sane.

Lizzie. In spite of his own situation, he smiled. What a hardheaded little firebrand she was—pretty. Smart as hell. Calm in a crisis that would have had many females—and males, too, to be fair—wringing their hand kerchiefs and bewailing a cruel fate. He hadn’t been joking when he’d said she’d make a good nurse.

Now, in the strange privacy of a high-country blizzard, he could admit something else, too—if only to himself. Lizzie McKettrick would make an even better doctor’s wife than she would a nurse.

He felt something grind inside him, both painful and pleasant.

It was sheer idiocy to think of her in such intimate terms. They barely knew each other, after all, and she was set on teaching school, married or single. On top of that, she’d been fond enough of Whitley Carson to bring him home to her family during a sacred season. Her irritation with Carson would most likely fade, once they were all safe again. She’d forget the man’s shortcomings soon enough, when the two of them were sipping punch beside a big Christmas tree in some grand McKettrick parlor.

The realization sobered Morgan. He felt something for Lizzie, though it was far too soon to know just what, but opening his time-hardened heart to her would be foolhardy. Rash. Until this trip, Morgan Shane had never done anything rash in his life. A week ago, even a few days ago, he wouldn’t have considered taking the kind of stupid chance he was in the midst of right now, bumbling into the maw of a storm that might well swallow him whole.

Yes, he was a doctor, and a dedicated one. He was a pragmatist’s pragmatist, in a field where the most competent were bone skeptical. He believed that, upon reaching the age of reason, everyone was responsible for their own actions, and the resultant consequences. Therefore, if Whitley Carson was stupid enough to set off looking for help in the middle of a snowstorm, he had that right. From Morgan’s perspective, his own duty, as a man and as a physician, lay with John Brennan, Mrs. Halifax and her children, the peddler, the Thaddingses, and Lizzie.

Hell, he even felt responsible for the bird.

So why was he out there in the snowstorm, when he knew better, knew the hopelessness of the task he’d undertaken?

The answer made him flinch inside.

Because of Lizzie. He was doing this for Lizzie. Whatever her present mood, she loved Carson. Bringing the man home to the bosom of her fabled clan was proof of that.

Flesh stinging, Morgan kept walking. His feet were numb, and so were his hands. His ears burned as though someone had laid hot pokers to them, and every breath felt like an inhalation of flame. He fumbled for the flask Nicholas Christian had given him earlier, managed to get the lid off, and took a swig, blessing the bracing warmth that surged through him with the first swallow.

He found Carson sprawled in the snow, just around a bend.

Was he dead?

Morgan’s heartbeat quickened, and so did his half-frozen brain. He crouched beside the prone body, searched for and found a pulse.

Carson opened his eyes. “My leg,” he scratched out. “I think I’ve broken my leg…slipped on the tracks… almost went over the side—”

Morgan confirmed the diagnosis with a few practiced motions of his hands, even though his wind-stung eyes had already offered the proof. He opened the flask again, with less difficulty this time, and held it to Carson’s lips. “I’ll get you back to the train,” he said, leaning in close to be heard over the howl of the wind, “but it’s going to hurt.”

Carson swallowed, nodded. “I know,” he rasped. He groaned when Morgan hoisted him to his one good foot, cried out when he tried to take a step.

Morgan sighed inwardly, crouched a little, and slung Carson over his right shoulder like a sack of grain. He remembered little of the walk back to the train—it was a matter of staying upright and putting one foot in front of the other. At some point, Carson must have passed out from the pain—he was limp, a dead weight, and several times Morgan had to fight to keep from going down.

When the train came in sight, Morgan offered a silent prayer of thanks, though it had been a long time since he’d been on speaking terms with God. The peddler, Mr. Christian, met him at the base of the steps leading up to the caboose. Stronger than Morgan would have guessed, the older man helped him get the patient inside.

Lizzie had concocted something on the stove—a soup or broth of some sort, from the savory aroma, but when she saw her unconscious beau, alarm flared in her eyes and she turned from the coffee can serving as an improvised kettle. “Is he…he’s not—”

Morgan shook his head to put her mind at ease, but didn’t answer verbally until he and the peddler had laid their burden down on the bench seat opposite the place where John Brennan rested.

“His leg is broken,” Morgan said grimly, rubbing his hands together in a mostly vain attempt to restore some circulation. He had a small supply of morphine in his bag, along with tincture of laudanum—he’d sent his other supplies ahead to Indian Rock after agreeing to set up a practice there. He could ease Carson’s pain, but he dared not give him too much medicine, mainly because the damned fool had been tossing back copious amounts of whiskey since the avalanche. “I have to set the fracture,” he added. “For that, I’ll need some straight branches and strips of cloth to bind them to the leg.”

Lizzie drew nearer, peering between Morgan and the peddler to stare, white-faced, at Carson. “Is he in pain?” she asked, her voice small.

No one answered.

“I’ll see what I can find for splints,” the peddler said.

Morgan replied with a grateful nod. He’d nearly frozen, hunting down and retrieving Carson. If he went out again too soon, he’d be of no use to anybody. “Stay near the train if you can,” he told Christian. “And take care not to slip over the side.”

The peddler promised to look out for himself and left. Mrs. Halifax and the children were sleeping, all of them wrapped up together in the quilt. Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings were snoozing, too, the sides of their heads touching, though Woodrow was wide-awake and very interested in the proceedings.

“When your friend regains consciousness, he’ll be in considerable pain,” Morgan said, in belated answer to Lizzie’s question. Her concern was only natural— anyone with a shred of compassion in their soul would be sympathetic to Carson’s plight. Still, the intensity of her reaction, unspoken as it was, reconfirmed his previous insight—Lizzie might think she no longer loved Whitley Carson, but she was probably fooling herself.

She did something unexpected then—took Morgan’s hands into her own, removed the gloves he’d borrowed from Christian earlier, chafed his bare, cold skin between warm palms. The act was simple, patently ordinary and yet sensual in a way that Morgan was quite unprepared to deal with. Heat surged through him, awakening nerves, rousing sensations in widely varying parts of his anatomy.

“I’ve made soup,” Lizzie told him, indicating the coffee can on the stove, its contents bubbling cheerfully away. Morgan recalled the tinned ham from the peddler’s crate and the dried beans from the freight car. “You’d better have some,” she added. “It will warm you up.”

She’d warmed him up plenty, but there was no proper way to explain that. Numb before, Morgan ached all over now, like someone thawing out after a bad case of frostbite. “Best get Mr. Carson ready for the splints,” he said. “The more I can do before he wakes up, the better.”

She nodded her understanding, but dipped a clean mug into the brew anyway, and brought the soup to Morgan. He took a sip, set the mug aside, shrugged out of his coat. Using scissors from his bag, he cut Carson’s snow-soaked pant leg from hem to knee and ripped the fabric open to the man’s midthigh. Lizzie neither flinched nor looked away.

Morgan had the brief and disturbing thought that Lizzie might not be unfamiliar with the sight of Carson’s bare flesh. He shoved the idea aside—Lizzie McKettrick’s private life was patently none of his business. He certainly had no claim on her.

“I’ve got a petticoat,” she said.

The announcement startled Morgan. Meanwhile, Carson had begun to stir, writhing a little, tossing his head from side to side as, with consciousness, the pain returned. Morgan paused to glance at Lizzie.

She went pink. “To bind the splints,” she explained.

Morgan nodded, trying not to smile at her embarrassment.

Lizzie stepped back, out of his sight. There followed a poignantly feminine rustle of fabric, and then she returned to present him with a garment of delicate ivory silk, frothing with lace. For one self-indulgent moment, Morgan held the petticoat in a tight fist, savoring the feel of it, the faint scent of lavender caught in its folds, then proceeded to rip the costly fabric into wide strips. In the interim, Lizzie fetched his bag without being asked.

Carson opened his eyes, gazed imploringly up at her. “I meant…” he whispered awkwardly, the words scratching like sandpaper on splintery wood. “I meant to find help, Lizzie…. I’m so sorry…the way I acted before…”

“Shh,” she said. She sat down on the bench, carefully placed Carson’s head on her lap, stroked his hair. Morgan felt another flash of envy, a deep gouge of emotion, raw and bitter.

Christian returned with the requested tree branches, trimmed them handily with an ivory-handled pocket knife. The scent of pine sap lent the caboose an ironically festive air.

“This is going to hurt,” Morgan warned Carson bluntly, gripping the man’s ankle in both hands.

Carson bit his lower lip and nodded, preparing himself.

“Can’t you give him something for the pain?” Lizzie interceded, looking up into Morgan’s face with anxious eyes.

“Afterward,” Morgan said. He didn’t begrudge Carson a dose of morphine, but it was potent stuff, and the patient was in shock. If he happened to be sensitive to the drug, as many people were, the results could be disastrous. Better to administer a swallow of laudanum later. “It’ll be over quickly.”

“Do it,” Carson said, and went up a little in Morgan’s estimation. Perhaps he had some character after all.

Morgan closed his eyes; he had a sixth sense about bones and internal organs, something he’d never mentioned to a living soul, including his father, because there was no scientific explanation for it. He saw the break in his mind, as clearly as if he’d laid Carson’s hide and muscle open with a scalpel. When he felt ready, he gave the leg a swift, practiced wrench. Carson yelled.

But the fractured femur was back in alignment.

Quickly, deftly, and with all the gentleness he could manage—again, this was more for Lizzie’s sake than Carson’s—Morgan set the splints in place and bound them firmly with the long strips of petticoat.

Taking a bottle of laudanum from his kit, Morgan pulled the cork and held it to Carson’s mouth. “One sip,” he said.

Sweating and pale, Carson raised himself up a little from Lizzie’s lap and gulped down a mouthful of the bitter compound. The drug began taking effect almost immediately—Carson sighed, settled back, closed his eyes. Lizzie murmured sweet, senseless words to him, still smoothing his hair.

Morgan had set many broken limbs in his time, but this experience left him oddly enervated. He couldn’t look at Lizzie as he put the vial of laudanum back in his kit, took out his stethoscope. There was something intensely private about the way she ministered to Carson, as tenderly as a mother with a child.

Or a wife with a husband.

Morgan turned away quickly, the stethoscope dangling from his neck, and crossed the railroad car to check Mr. Thaddings’s heart, which thudded away at a blessedly normal rate, then moved on to examine John Brennan again.

“How are you feeling?” he asked the soldier gruffly. The question was a formality; the feverish glint in Brennan’s eyes and the intermittent shivers that seemed to rattle his protruding skeleton provided answer enough.

Brennan’s voice was a hoarse croak. “I heard that feller yell—”

“Broken leg,” Morgan said. “Don’t fret over it.”

A racking cough tore itself from the man’s chest. When he’d recovered, following a series of wheezing gasps, Brennan reached out to clasp at Morgan’s hand, pulled. Morgan leaned down.

Brennan rasped out a ragged whisper. “I got to stay alive long enough to see my boy again,” he pleaded. “It’s almost Christmas. I can’t have Tad recalling, all his life, that his pa passed….” The words fell away as another spate of coughing ensued.

Morgan crouched alongside the bench seat, since there were no chairs in the caboose. He was not accustomed to smiling under the best of circumstances, so the gesture came a lot harder that day. Brennan had one foot dangling over an open grave, and unless some angel grabbed him by the coattails and held on tight, he was sure to topple in.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “Don’t think about dying, John. Think about living. Think about fishing with your son—about better times—” Much to his surprise, Morgan choked up. Had to stop talking and work hard at starting again. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d lost control of his emotions—maybe he never had. If you’re going to be any damned use at all, he heard his father say, you’ve got to keep your head, no matter what’s going on around you.

“My wife,” John said, laboring to utter every word, “makes a fine rum cake, every Christmas—starts it way down in the fall—”

“You suppose she baked one this year?” Morgan asked quietly, when he could speak.

John smiled. Managed a nod. As hard as talking was for him, he seemed comforted by the exchange. Probably he was clutching one end of the conversation for dear life, much as Lizzie had held on to Morgan’s looped belt earlier, when she’d slipped in the snow. “She doubled the receipt,” he ground out. “Just ’cause I was going to be home for Christmas.”

Morgan noted the old-fashioned word receipt—his family’s cook, Minerva, had used that term, too, in lieu of the more modern recipe—and then registered Brennan’s use of the past tense. “You’ll be there, John,” he said.

Exhausted, John settled back, seemed to relax a little. His gaze drifted, caught on someone, and Morgan realized Lizzie was standing just behind him. She held a mug of steaming ham and bean soup and one of the peddler’s fancy spoons.

Morgan straightened, glanced back at Carson, who seemed to be sleeping now, though fitfully. Sweat beaded the man’s forehead and upper lip, and Morgan knew the pain was biting deep, despite the laudanum.

“I thought Mr. Brennan might require some sustenance,” she said, her eyes big and troubled. She’d paled, and her luscious hair drooped as if it would throw off its pins at any moment and tumble down around her shoulders, falling to her waist.

Morgan nodded, stepped back out of the way.

Lizzie moved past him, her arm brushing his as she went by, and knelt alongside Brennan. “It would be better with onions,” she said gamely, holding a spoonful of the brew to the patient’s lips. “And salt, too.” When he opened his mouth, she fed him.

“Them beans is sure bony,” Brennan said. “I guess they ain’t had time to cook through.”

Lizzie gave a rueful little chuckle of agreement.

And Morgan watched, struck by some stray and nameless emotion.

It was a simple sight, a woman spooning soup into an invalid’s mouth, but it stirred Morgan just the same. He wondered if Lizzie would fall apart when this was all over, or if she’d carry on. He was betting on the latter.

Of course, they’d have to be rescued first, and the worse the weather got, the more unlikely that seemed.

The thin soup soothed Brennan’s cough. He accepted as much as he could and finally sank into a shallow rest.

Creeping shadows of twilight filled the car; another day was ending.

The peddler had engaged the children in a new game of cards. Carson, like Brennan, slept. Mrs. Halifax and the baby lay on the bench seat, bundled in the quilt, the woman staring trancelike into an uncertain future, the infant gnawing on one grubby little fist.

Madonna and Child, Morgan thought glumly.

He made his way to the far end of the car, sat down on the bench and tipped his head back against the window. Tons of snow pressed cold against it, seeped through flesh and bone to chill his marrow; he might have been sitting in the lap of the mountain itself. He closed his eyes; did not open them when he felt Lizzie take a seat beside him.

“Rest,” he told her. “You must be worn-out.”

“I can’t,” she said. He heard the slightest tremor in her voice. “I thought—I thought they’d be here by now.”

Morgan opened his eyes, met Lizzie’s gaze.

“Do you suppose something’s happened to them? My papa and the others?”

He wanted to comfort her, even though he shared her concern for the delayed rescue party. If they’d set out at all, they probably hadn’t made much progress. He took her hand, squeezed it, at a loss for something to say.

She smiled sadly, staring into some bright distance he couldn’t see. “Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” she said, very quietly. “My brothers, Gabriel and Doss, always want to sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve, because our grandfather says the animals talk at midnight. Every year they carry blankets out there and make beds in the straw, determined to hear the milk cows and the horses chatting with each other. Every year they fall asleep hours before the clock strikes twelve, and Papa carries them back into the house, one by one, and Lorelei tucks them in. And every year, I think this will be the time they manage to stay awake, the year they stop believing.”

Morgan longed to put an arm around Lizzie’s shoulders and draw her close, but he didn’t. Such gestures were Whitley Carson’s prerogative, not his. “What about you?” he asked. “Did you sleep in the barn on Christmas Eve when you were little? Hoping to hear the animals talk?”

She started slightly, coming out of her reverie, turning to meet his eyes. Shook her head. “I was twelve when I came to live on the Triple M,” she said.

She offered nothing more, and Morgan didn’t pry, even though he wanted to know everything about her, things she didn’t even know about herself.

“You’ve been a help, Lizzie,” he told her. “With John Brennan and with Carson, too.”

“I keep thinking about the conductor and the engineer—their families….”

“Don’t,” Morgan advised.

She studied him. “I heard what you told John Brennan—that he ought to think about fishing with his son, instead of…instead of dying—”

Morgan nodded, realized he was still holding Lizzie’s hand, improper as that was. Drew some satisfaction from the fact that she hadn’t pulled away.

“Do you believe it really makes a difference?” she went on, when she’d gathered her composure. “Thinking about good things, I mean?”

“Regardless of how things turn out,” he replied, “thinking about good things feels better than worrying, wouldn’t you say? So in that respect, yes, I’d say it makes a difference.”

She pondered that, then looked so directly, and so deeply, into his eyes that he felt as though she’d found a peephole into the wall he’d constructed around his truest self. “What are you thinking about, then?” she wanted to know. “You must be worried, like all the rest of us.”

He couldn’t tell Lizzie the truth—that despite his best efforts, every few minutes he imagined how it would be, treating patients in Indian Rock, with her at his side. “I can’t afford to worry,” he said. “It isn’t productive.”

She wasn’t going to let him off the hook; he could see that. Her blue eyes darkened with determination. “What was Christmas like for you, when you were a boy?”

Morgan found the question strangely unsettling. His father had been a doctor, his mother an heiress and a force of nature, especially socially. During the holiday season, they’d gone to, or given, parties every night. “Minerva—she was our cook—always roasted a hen.”

Lizzie blinked. Waited. And finally, when certain that nothing more was forthcoming, prodded, “That’s all? Your cook roasted a chicken? No tree? No presents? No carols?”

“My mother wouldn’t have considered dragging an evergreen into the house,” Morgan admitted. “In her opinion, the practice was crass and vulgar—and besides, she didn’t want pitch and birds’ nests all over the rugs. Every Christmas morning, when I came to the breakfast table, I found a gift waiting on the seat of my chair. It was always a book, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. As for carols—there was a church at the end of our street, and sometimes I opened a window so I could hear the singing.”

“That sounds lonely,” Lizzie observed.

His childhood Christmases had indeed been lonely, Morgan reflected. Which made December 25 just like the other 364 days of the year. For a moment he was a boy again, he and Minerva feasting solemnly in the kitchen of the mansion, just the two of them. His dedicated father was out making a house call, his mother sleeping off the effects of a merry evening passed among the strangers she preferred to him.

“If you hadn’t mentioned a cook,” Lizzie went on, when he didn’t speak, “I would have thought you’d grown up in a hovel.”

He smiled at that. His mother had regarded him as an inconvenience, albeit an easily overlooked one. She’d often rued the day she’d married a poor country doctor instead of a financier, like her late and sainted sire, and made no secret of her regret. Morgan’s father had endured by staying away from home as much as possible, often taking his young son along on his rounds when he, Morgan, wasn’t locked away in the third-floor nursery with some tutor. Those excursions had been happy ones for Morgan, and he’d seen enough suffering, visiting Elias Shane’s patients, most of them in tenements and charity hospitals, to know there were worse fates than growing up with a spoiled, disinterested and very wealthy mother.

He’d had his father, to an extent.

He’d had Minerva. She’d been born a slave, Minerva had. To her, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was as sacred as Scripture. She’d actually met the man she’d called “Father Abraham,” after the fall of Richmond. She’d clutched at the sleeve of his coat, and he’d smiled at her. Such sorrow in them gray, gray eyes, she’d told Morgan, who never tired of the much-told tale. Such sadness as you’d never credit one man could hold.

Morgan withdrew from the memory. He’d have given a lot to hear that story just one more time.

Lizzie bit her lip. Took fresh notice of his threadbare clothes, then caught herself and flushed a fetching pink. “You’re not poor,” she concluded, then colored up even more.

He laughed, and damn, it felt good. “Oh, but I am, Lizzie McKettrick,” he said. “Poor as a church mouse. Mother didn’t mind so much when I went to Germany to study. She figured it would pass, and I’d come to my senses. When I came home and took up medicine in earnest, she disinherited me.”

Lizzie’s marvelous eyes widened again. “She did? But surely your father—”

“She showed him the door, too. She was furious with him for encouraging me to become a doctor instead of overseeing the family fortune. Minerva opened a boarding house, and Dad and I moved in as her first tenants. We found a storefront, hung out a shingle and practiced together until Dad died of a heart attack.”

Sorrow moved in Lizzie’s face at the mention of his father’s death. She swallowed. “What became of your mother?” she asked, sounding meek now, in the face of such drama.

“She sold the mansion and moved to Europe, to escape the shame.”

“What shame?”

God bless her, Morgan thought, she was actually confused. “In Mother’s circles,” he said, “the practice of medicine—especially when most of the patients can’t pay—is not a noble pursuit. She could have forgiven herself for marrying a doctor—youthful passions, lapses of judgment, all that—but when I decided to become a physician instead of taking over my grandfather’s several banks, it was too much for her to bear.”

“I’m sorry, Morgan,” Lizzie said.

“It isn’t as if we were close,” Morgan said, touched by the sadness in Lizzie McKettrick’s eyes as he had never been by Eliza Stanton Shane’s indifference. “Mother and I, I mean.”

“But, still—”

“I had my father. And Minerva.”

Lizzie nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “My mother died when I was young. And even though I’m close to Lorelei—that’s my stepmother—I still miss her a lot.”

He couldn’t help asking the question. It was out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Is money important to you, Lizzie?” He’d told her he was poor, and suddenly he needed to know if that mattered.

She glanced in Carson’s direction, then looked straight into Morgan’s eyes. “No,” she said, with such alacrity that he believed her instantly. There was no guile in Lizzie McKettrick—only courage and sweetness, intelligence and, unless he missed his guess, a fiery temper.

He wanted to ask if Whitley Carson would be able to support her in the manner to which she was clearly accustomed, considering the fineness of her clothes and her recently acquired education, but he’d recovered his manners by then. “Miss McKettrick?”

Both Lizzie and Morgan turned to see Ellen standing nearby, looking shy.

“Yes, Ellen?” Lizzie responded, smiling.

“I can’t find a spittoon,” Ellen said.

Lizzie chuckled at that. “We’ll go outside,” she replied.

“A spittoon?” Morgan echoed, puzzled.

“Never mind,” Lizzie told him.

“I believe I’ll go, too,” Mrs. Halifax put in, rising awkwardly from her bed on the bench because of her injured arm, wrapping her shawl more closely around her shoulders.

Lizzie bundled Ellen up in the peddler’s coat, readily volunteered, and the trio of females braved the snow and the freezing wind. The baby girl stayed behind, kicking her feet, waving small fists in the air, and cooing with sudden happiness. She’d spotted the cockatiel with the ridiculous name. What was it?

Oh, yes. Woodrow.

“I reckon we ought to be sparing with the kerosene,” the peddler told Morgan, nodding toward the single lantern bravely pushing back the darkness. “Far as I could see when we checked the freight car, there isn’t a whole lot left.”

Morgan nodded, finding the prospect of the coming night a grim one. When the limited supply of firewood was gone, they could use coal from the bin in the locomotive, but even that wouldn’t last more than a day or two.

The little boy, Jack, like Brennan and Carson, had fallen asleep.

The peddler spoke in a low voice, after making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “You think they’ll find us in time?”

Morgan shoved a hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

“You know anything about Miss Lizzie’s people?”

Morgan frowned. “Not much. I met her uncle, Kade, down in Tucson.”

“I’ve heard of Angus McKettrick,” Christian confided, his gaze drifting briefly to Whitley Carson’s prone and senseless form before swinging back to Morgan. “That’s Miss Lizzie’s grandpa. Tough as an army mule on spare rations, that old man. The McKettricks have money. They have land and cattle, too. But there’s one thing that’s more important to them than all that, from what I’ve been told, and that’s kinfolks. They’ll come, just like Miss Lizzie says they will. They’ll come because she’s here—you can be sure of that. I’m just hoping we’ll all be alive and kicking when they show up.”

Morgan had no answer for that. There were no guarantees, and plenty of dangers—starvation, for one. Exposure, for another. And the strong likelihood of a second, much more devastating, avalanche.

“You figure one of us ought to try hiking out of here?”

Morgan looked at Carson. “He didn’t fare so well,” he said.

“He’s a greenhorn and we both know it,” the peddler replied.

“How far do you think we are from Indian Rock?”

“We’re closer to Stone Creek than Indian Rock,” Christian said. “Tracks turn toward it about five miles back. It’s another ten miles into Stone Creek from there. Probably twenty or more to Indian Rock from where we sit.”

Morgan nodded. “If they’re not here by morning,” he said, “I’ll try to get to Stone Creek.”

“You’re needed here, Doc,” the peddler said. “I’m not as young as I used to be, but I’ve still got some grit and a good pair of legs. Know this country pretty well, too—and you don’t.”

Lizzie, Mrs. Halifax and Ellen returned, shivering. Lizzie struggled to shut the caboose door against a rising wind.

Morgan and the peddler let the subject drop.

They extinguished the lamp soon after that, ate ham and “bony” bean soup in the dark.

Everyone found a place to sleep.

And when Morgan opened his eyes the next morning, at first light, he knew the snow had stopped. He sat up, looked around, found Lizzie first. She was still sleeping, sitting upright on the bench seat, bundled in a blanket. John Brennan hadn’t wakened, and neither had Mrs. Halifax and her children. Whitley Carson, a book in his hands, stared across the car at him with an unreadable expression in his eyes.

“The peddler’s gone,” he told Morgan. “He left before dawn.”

CHAPTER FIVE

LIZZIE DREAMED SHE WAS HOME, waking up in her own room, hearing the dear, familiar sounds of a ranch house morning: stove lids clattering downstairs in the kitchen; the murmur of familiar voices, planning the day. She smelled strong coffee brewing, and wood smoke, and the beeswax Lorelei used to polish the furniture.

Christmas Eve was special in the McKettrick household, but the chores still had to be done. The cattle and horses needed hay and water, the cows required milking, the wood waited to be chopped and carried in, and there were always eggs to be gathered from the henhouse. Behind the tightly closed doors of Papa’s study, she knew, a giant evergreen tree stood in secret, shimmering with tinsel strands and happy secrets. The luscious scent of pine rose through the very floorboards to perfume the second floor.

Throughout the day, the uncles and aunts and cousins would come, by sleigh or, if the roads happened to be clear, by team and wagon and on horseback. There would be exchanges of food, small gifts, laughter and stories. In the evening, after attending church services in town, they would all gather at the main house, where Lizzie’s grandfather Angus would read aloud, his voice deep and resonant, from the Gospel of Luke.

And there were in the same fields, shepherds, guarding their flocks by night…

Tears moistened Lizzie’s lashes, because she knew she was dreaming. Knew she wasn’t on the Triple M, where she belonged, but trapped in a stranded train on a high, treacherous ridge.

The smell of coffee was real, though. That heartened her. Gave her the strength to open her eyes.

Her hair must have looked a sight, that was her immediate thought, and she needed to go outside. Her gaze found Morgan first, like a compass needle swinging north. He stood near the stove, looking rumpled from sleep, pouring coffee into a mug.

He crossed to her, handed her the cup.

The small courtesy seemed profound to Lizzie, rather than mundane.

“Today,” she said, “is Christmas Eve.”

“So it is,” Morgan agreed, smiling wanly.

Whitley, resting with his broken leg propped on the bench seat, caught her eye. “Good morning, Lizzie-bet,” he said.

She gave a little nod of acknowledgment, embarrassed by the nickname, and sipped at her coffee. Evidently, Whitley’s apology the day before had been a sincere one. He was on his best behavior. She discovered that she did not have an opinion on that, one way or the other.

“Where is Mr. Christian?” she asked Morgan, having scanned the company and noticed he was missing. The caboose was chilly, despite the efforts of the little stove. “Has he gone looking for firewood?”

A glance passed between Morgan and Whitley. Whitley raised both eyebrows, but didn’t speak.

“He’s on his way to Stone Creek,” Morgan said, sounding resigned.

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