Mittman, Stephanie by Bridge to Yesterday Read Free Book Online Page B

further under the blankets. Suddenly she was very, very cold.
    ***
    "I
guess you're a mite uncomfortable," the man behind her said, and Mary
Grace craned her neck around to glare at him. The saddle's pommel was drilling
a hole in her hip, and each step the horse took caused her agony. She still
couldn't figure out quite how it had happened. One moment she was down by the
river, putting the basket of wash down and reaching in to pick up the baby,
ready to make a run for it before Horace's uncles realized she was gone. And
the next she was tied up like a sack of potatoes and thrown over the neck of a
horse the size of a B-52.
    "Look,"
the man said, and it was clearly an explanation, not an apology. "I wasn't
plannin' on takin' you with me."
    She
grunted. It was the best she could manage under the circumstances.
    "The
idea was for me to grab the kid, but when you opened your pretty little mouth
and started screamin', I saw I really didn't have no choice."
    He
shook his head and then shrugged, shooing a fly away from Mary Grace's face at
the same time. At the mention of the baby, she was all attention. So it was her
little Patrick the man was after, and not her. Well, it was a good thing she'd
screamed, then. And she wasn't sorry about the biting and clawing, either. She
would never give up that sweet child without a fight. If she was willing to
steal him away from his blood relatives, she wasn't about to turn him over to
some Roy Rogers wannabe.
    "Leastwise,
I got the baby," he said, and Mary Grace wriggled herself around to stare
at him through narrowed eyes. A dirty blond beard covered most of his face, but
through it she could see a row of shiny white teeth. He was smiling, the idiot,
as though he didn't have a care in the world.
    "So
you belong to one of those Tate boys, do you? Or just watching the baby? Not
that it matters to me, mind ya. I'm just curious." He talked in a voice
just above a whisper, a soft voice that would calm a child or an animal but
which was driving Mary Grace crazy. How could he be having a normal
conversation at a time like this? The man had to be insane.
    He
went on amiably, as if it were the most normal of situations. "Mason, I
think he's the most nearly human, though that might be stretching it a bit. And
he didn't seem all that cozy with you at the river yesterday. Harlin, now, he's
just crazy. Been crazy since... well, since always, near as I can recall. But I
don't know that he's crazy enough to let you go down by the river alone with
Wilson. Which brings us to Wilson, who's just plain mean. Meaner than a
grizzly."
    It
was hard for Mary Grace to get a really good look at the man riding behind her.
It was hard for her to get a good look at anything but the horse's underbelly,
a fancy rifle with a hunting dog carved in silver near the trigger, and the
parched road as it passed beneath them, filling her nostrils with dust. No
place in the world was as dry as Arizona, and when she finally got Benjamin and
returned home she was going to spend a week in a cool tub with one tall drink
after another. After what she was being put through, she'd have earned it, she
thought.
    Twisting
around, she tried to get more than just a glimpse of her abductor. He was
bigger than the horse, if that were possible. Maybe it was just the angle that
made him appear so large and fearsome. Or maybe it was the stark contrast of
the smallness of the child pressed against his chest in the makeshift sling.
The man was staring at his hand again, opening it and then clenching it into a
fist as though he were testing it. For heaven's sake, she thought. It was just
a small bite. It wasn't as though she were rabid. She hoped it hurt him as much
as this ride was hurting her.
    "I
guess you could hold your own with old Wilson, after all." He laughed,
putting his hand in his mouth and sucking on it. Good, she thought. I hope it hurts like hell.
    At
least with his hand in his mouth he was quiet for a while. Only the horse's
feet made