Orphan 1 - Lily and the Major by Linda Lael Miller

Author:Linda Lael Miller
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 2011-05-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter

13

Liily couldn’t wait until the following Saturday to travel back to Fort Deveraux. It was too painful knowing Caleb was in Spokane, renewing his friendship with Bianca Parrish. So she bought a sturdy pinto gelding from the man at the livery stable, along with a saddle and bridle, and trousers and a shirt from the mercantile. Then she packed her valise.

After writing a short note of farewell to Rupert, which she left propped against the sugar bowl in the middle of the kitchen table, Lily mounted her horse and set her face toward Fort Deveraux. By nightfall she would be in her own little cottage across from the schoolhouse, making plans to move onto her homestead.

She wasn’t more than five miles outside of town when she began to wish she’d bought a hat and some proper boots as well as denim trousers and a shirt. The sun was so bright that it made her squint, and her scalp was sweating, making her hairline damp and sticky. Worse, the horse she’d purchased was determined to show her he deserved his name:

Dancer. He liked to prance and do little sideways jigs, but he had a problem with straight ahead.

Lily had serious doubts that he’d do as a plow horse.

When twilight came Lily was still miles from Tylerville, let alone Fort Deveraux. Resigned, she found a little rock-walled canyon, gathered a few twigs, and tried to start a fire.

Sally of Typhoon Sally, Queen of the Rodeo had once set a pile of wood ablaze by rubbing two sticks together. Lily tried that and found out fast that the process was overrated. Whenever she’d needed a fire, she’d used matches.

Dancer, meanwhile, seemed perfectly content. There was a stream nearby where he could drink, and the ground was covered with sweet green grass.

For Lily the pickings were slimmer. She hadn’t brought along any food, having expected to reach her destination well before nightfall, and now she’d go hungry. She didn’t have a gun or a knife, and even if she had, she would have been hard put to kill some unsuspecting little creature and eat it. She sat down on a fallen log next to her nonexistent fire and propped her chin in her hands to consider her fate.

“What would Typhoon Sally do?” she asked herself, and Dancer, and the waving green grass that stretched for miles, practically unbroken by trees, in every direction. No answer came to her from within or without. She looked up at the sky and hoped it wouldn’t be cold that night.

It was then that she felt the first tickle, about midway up her spinal column. That was followed by another tickle, and another, and suddenly they were all over her. Lily bounded off the fallen log and looked down to see that it was swarming with red ants.

With a startled scream she began tearing off her clothes. Her shirt went first, and then her trousers, and then her shoes and stockings. There were ants in her hair, between her toes, everywhere on her body.

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.