Cowboy Brigade by Elle James

Author:Elle James [James, Elle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: suspense
Publisher: Harlequin Intrigue
Published: 2011-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Wade wiped sweat and soot from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. The heat bore down on him, the breeze a threat rather than a relief. He wanted to shout to the heavens to give them a break, but he didn’t, preferring to keep talking to a minimum behind the damp bandana tied over his nose and mouth.

His lungs burned, his eyes stung and his back ached as he dug yet another firebreak in front of the raging grass fire quickly eating its way toward them and the Long K Ranch buildings.

The sun hovered over the horizon, turning the smoke-filled sky a brilliant mauve—what he could see of it through the fog of black billowing clouds rising from the tinder-dry grass.

The county volunteer firefighters had arrived, along with more firefighters from Freedom. Local ranchers and businessmen showed up with bandanas around their faces, carrying shovels and hoes, ready to beat back the fires that could ultimately spread toward their homes and possibly Freedom if the grass fire wasn’t controlled soon.

Wade had helped carry Dusty back to the truck when he’d almost been overrun by flames. Dusty had breathed in so much smoke that the paramedic on duty had to give him oxygen.

Flames licked and slapped at the sky, gobbling up dry prairie grass like fuel in a speeding freight train, belching smoke skyward as it raced toward the line of men hurrying to create a firebreak wide enough to halt the fire’s eastward progression.

He’d been digging, scraping and turning the grass under for hours now and his shoulders, back and hamstrings ached along with his singed lungs.

He hadn’t seen Lindsay’s red bandana in more than thirty minutes and he was long past worried. Every instinct inside him begged him to drop his shovel and find her now. For all he knew she could be passed out due to smoke inhalation, lying directly in the path of the fire-spewing monster.

The number of volunteers had swelled to near fifty, all in a line, digging, shoveling, hoeing the ground bare in a twenty-feet-wide swath. If the fire continued in a northeasterly direction, it would run into a creek. Everyone hoped it would do just that. They’d trimmed the branches along the edges of the creek to prevent the fire from hopping over the creek and continuing its destructive path. Now they worked on shoring up the eastern front in case the wind changed directions and sent the flames toward the house. The firefighters hoped to starve the fire of fuel so that it would burn out and leave the rest of the ranch intact.

The firefighter beside Wade looked up, his face pale beneath the black streaks of ash. “Holy crap, the wind switched directions again. Hurry! It’s headed this way!”

Wade dug his shovel into the ground, flipped a chunk of dirt and grass upside down so that the grass was buried. He’d been doing this same operation for the past two hours—dig, flip, tamp, move on. His movements had become

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.