The Element of Love
Coming March 1
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Excerpt
Another gully ahead and Laura felt like she was flying through midair. No ground beneath her for a hundred feet down. Then she swooped around a mountainside and splashed herself as the barrel careened from one side of the flume to another.
And that’s when the rain began falling. Sprinkling at first but they’d planned to stay as dry as possible and she’d forgotten.
Her movements cautious to keep from tipping, Laura got out the oil cloth packed in her satchel. She wrapped it around herself. She kept her arms out, but her satchel, the lantern, the money, all were protected. She couldn’t wrap it around her shoulders, even if they ended up soaked, because this ride would most likely end with her taking a swim. She’d need her arms free.
Then the curve went away from the mountain, then veered back and for a sickening second she saw she’d be slammed right into the face of a cliff. And then she saw the hole. The tunnel.
She blasted into the dark.
The roar of the water and the echo of this tight tunnel made her dizzy. All she knew was noise and motion, no vision. Blindness while the world exploded around her.
She couldn’t breathe. A scream built in her chest. She fought a violent urge to throw herself out of her barrel, to make contact with something that wasn’t moving, wasn’t roaring. It was irrational and she knew it.
But still, every second she endured was a battle.
Fighting it, she remembered the need for quiet. She had to be quiet. But surely they were far enough from anyone that a single scream, which pushed to tear free from her throat, wouldn’t be noticed. She swallowed it down. Clutched the sides of the barrel, fought the dizzying fear she’d tip over, or be crushed by the dark and speed and roar.
Then out.
Flying. Gasping for breath, she went into a sudden descent that was almost a straight drop. And the sky had opened up while she’d been in the tunnel. Rain poured down and hit like needles. She lifted the oil cloth up to cover her face so she could breathe and had to keep her head ducked low because her hands were busy clinging to the barrel.
The flume gradually leveled a bit to a less terrifying fall. The flume carried logs for nine miles. She knew that. She had to ride nine miles from the mountaintop to the river below. Nine miles and there was no way to figure time because there was no way to figure speed. She’d heard once it took the logs an hour to get from top to bottom. Another time she’d heard half that.
It all depended on the force of the water. Had they opened it full blast? She wasn’t sure. It was science, force times distance times descent patterns. She should be able to do the math in her head while she careened downward but she was missing key numbers.
Mathematical calculations were more Jilly’s thing. In fact, Laura wouldn’t be surprised if Jilly was keeping herself calm by counting in prime numbers or doing calculus problems. Laura did science—her favorite was chemistry. And she’d love like mad to use her smuggled chemicals to blow this flume into a million pieces.
She couldn’t blow it up. She couldn’t do the mathematical calculations. So, she played guessing games about what would happen when the men discovered the flume running. She ripped around a curve in the flume again, clinging to the barrel sides.
The men, think of the men.
They’d be coming to work in the morning, early, their day started at sunrise. Or the day after if the thunderstorm held on. No one logged mountaintop woodlands if there was lightning. Whenever they came back to work, their men would see the flume open.
Would they wonder if it hadn’t been turned off at the end of the last shift? She knew one thing, they wouldn’t report it to Edgar. His punishment was always as rapid as the blade of a guillotine. His wrath would fall on the neck of whoever reported it. And they’d be fired.
No, Edgar would never hear about it. And all of the hard-working lumberjacks were loyal to the Stiles family and held Edgar Beaumont in contempt. So between fear of Edgar’s wrath and disgust with the man, even if he tore the mountain apart looking for runaway daughters, which he just might do, he’d never hear about a flume found running overnight or any suspicions about the mad decision to use that flume to escape.
By the time he quit looking close to home, they would be miles away, and putting more space between them with every minute they were free.