herd burst over the shoulder of the hill and poured onto the loop of the road, a hundred feet from the landau.
And now, when she should have been accelerating, the foolish female brought it to a stop!
“What are you doing?” he screamed.
Fifty feet.
The top folded back and Claire stood, the lightning rifle on her shoulder.
Forty.
Bracing herself against the steering lever, she aimed the rifle straight toward the center of the herd and fired.
A bolt of lightning leaped into the clear air like a pheasant exploding out of cover. It sizzled through the atmosphere, burning oxygen as it went, a foot above the sharp antlers of the lead animals.
The enormous males snorted, bobbed, and in a move that was almost balletic, bounced to either side of the road. The herd parted like the Red Sea, one half washing up the slope between the landau and the mining vehicle, the other half pouring down the lower side. Then everyone stood—children, too—and waved their arms, making themselves a large, strangely colored organism that the caribou had never seen. Smoke puffed from the animals’ nostrils as they bounced out of reach of this strange apparition, and the pouring tide passed around them, then past them, and before Andrew could even think to draw his next breath, a thousand animals had regained their joyous momentum and were receding down the valley and into the distance.
The last cream-colored, boun-co regained cing caribou behind vanished into the trees and Andrew fell onto the bench as though it were he who had been shot.
“Who is that girl?” The steam tender recovered himself and got the vehicle moving again.
“She’s a dadburned fool,” the wheelman groused. “Putting eight people in danger, and for what?”
Errol gripped the bench, his eyes still wide. “Did you see that? Did you see her fire over their heads? What kind of rifle does that? And what kind of woman fires it?”
“A lady of resources,” Andrew said, feeling as winded as he sounded. “Just don’t ever ask her to dance.”
/body>
Chapter 17
Claire drove the landau carefully up the loading ramp into Lady Lucy’s cargo bay, and began to shut down the boiler as Tigg leaped out to stuff sandbags against the wheels so it would not roll about during flight.
Not a minute later, Andrew came striding up the ramp under a full head of steam. “Claire, you lunatic, what on earth were you thinking?” he shouted.
The landau ticked softly to itself and settled onto its axles with a sigh. She turned, raising an eyebrow at his disheveled appearance and red face. Lunatic? Really. He of all people should know better than to call a woman such a thing, when a woman’s invention had just saved their lives.
“Can you be more specific?” she inquired coolly.
“At every point!” he shouted. “What possessed you to go to the village unescorted?”
“I had Alice and Tigg and the girls with me. Any more and we should have had to requisition a second vehicle.”
“You put their lives in danger, to say nothing of your own.” Andrew took a long breath, as if he were reining in his temper before it ran away with him. He gripped the top of the landau, his fingers tightening in a most alarming way. “I have never been so afraid in my life—not even in the pinnacle cell, or during the crash in the Idaho Territory. Claire, for the sake of my heart, please think before you do such a thing again.”
“She was helping me.” Alice came to her side and helped her disconnect the boiler, then replace the bonnet. “I went to find my pa, and since Claire is the only one who can pilot a landau, she took me.”
“We promised you lessons,” Claire remembered. “I must keep my promise.”
“Well, you won’t have to worry about me going out there again,” Alice assured her. “In fact, I’m going to pull up ropes shortly and be in the sky by sunset.”
“That’s exactly what Isobel Churchill said, and she was disappointed, too,” Andrew told them both. His tone still held an edge, but at least he was no longer shouting.
In fact, his gaze as he watched Claire was so intense that it almost looked as if he wanted to pull her into his arms. A sign, a look, the merest softening, and she was certain he would do it.
t a width="2em">And then she remembered Alice’s face as she had confessed her feelings for him, and the moment passed.
“Cheer up, Mr. Malvern.” Maggie came to his side and took his