Miracle Jones

By

Nancy Bush

Originally published as

Danner's Lady

Published by Nancy Bush
Visit Nancy Bush’s official website at
www.nancybush.net
for the latest news, book details, and other information
Copyright © Nancy Bush, 1990
Cover by
Extended Imagery
e-book formatting by
Guido Henkel
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Except as permitted under the U.S.
Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Author’s Note

I’m really happy that my historical romance series, the Danner Quartet, is coming out again in e-book form.
The books have been languishing in that publishing netherworld where some novels find their way out again, but many drift into oblivion.
The Danner Quartet — LADY SUNDOWN, MIRACLE JONES (originally published as DANNER’S LADY), JESSE’S RENEGADE and SCANDAL’S DARLING — was a very popular series when it was first published and some of my readers have been clamoring to see it again.

When the first book in the series, LADY SUNDOWN, was originally published, I gave a copy to my grandmother who was in her nineties at the time.
She was not a fiction reader.
In fact she wasn’t a book reader, at all.
She was born in the late 1800’s and a farmer all her life, but she’d helped with some of the research and she really wanted to read the book.
I wanted her opinion, too, but I was struggling because LADY SUNDOWN has a number of fairly explicit love scenes.
When I gave her the book, I fumbled around trying to warn her about what she was about to read.
I remember sitting at her kitchen table, searching for the right words to suggest she prepare herself.
She leaned forward, looked me in the eye, and said, “Nancy, I know about sex.”

She sat right down and read the book cover-to-cover.
Then she read it a second time.
It was the start of her fiction reading which lasted the rest of her life.
When she told me how really good she thought LADY SUNDOWN was, I took it as the highest compliment a writer could receive.

Hope you enjoy it, along with all the Danner books, too!

Nancy Bush

Chapter One

The Cascade Foothills

September 1893

Miranda “Miracle” Jones slapped the reins on her slope-backed team.
Curse and rot them!
The miserable beasts could barely put one hoof in front of the other.
The hot September wind shrieked around her peddler’s cart.
Bottles and tin ware rattled inside the wagon as Gray and Tillie momentarily picked up the pace, only to fall back into a depressingly slow
clop, clop, clop.

Miracle sighed in disgust and was answered by a steady snore from behind the wagon seat.
Uncle Horace was dead to the world and had been since long before noon.
Miracle had tried to change the old reprobate’s ways time and again but to no avail.
Now she almost envied his drunken peace with the world.
She was tired, too.
They’d been on the road for hours, and her spine hurt.

“Giddyap, you,” she muttered to the plodders.
Night was falling, and Miracle wanted to be safe in Rock Springs before it grew dark.

The snapping of a twig somewhere to her right made her whip her head around.
She peered through the dusky evening shadows, searching the thick fir forest.
Branches waved, throwing dark flickering images across her path, but no one was there.

Drawing a sharp breath, Miracle frowned.
She’d been warned in the town of Malone about the highwaymen who hunted this stretch of road.
Several young women from neighboring towns had disappeared before reaching their destination; one body had been found floating facedown in the Clackamas River; another had never been seen again.

Even knowing the risks, Miracle had chosen to set off for Rock Springs.
She was used to taking care of herself.
Hadn’t she done so for most of her nineteen years?
Neither “Uncle” Horace Jones, who had befriended her after he’d caught her attempting to filch a bright shiny buckle from his peddler’s wagon, nor his sister, “Aunt” Emily Darcy, the lonely old woman who’d raised Miracle, had ever succeeded in fully taming her.
She’d run wild when she was a young child amid the remnants of a once-powerful Chinook tribe, and she’d never completely adjusted to the white man’s rigid social structure.

“Giddyap,” she urged again, slapping the reins.
She wasn’t really afraid, but there was no need to tempt fate.
The team responded with a woefully weak burst of speed, settling back again as soon as Miracle loosened the lines.
“You’re lucky I don’t sell you both for horse meat!”

Uncle Horace snored on blissfully.
Useless old bounder,
she thought with a smile.
Miracle, who’d learned a great deal about being a half-breed in a white man’s world, was quite prepared to protect herself.
Her eyes darted to the Colt .45 lying on the seat beside her.
If she had to, she would use the revolver, but truthfully she wasn’t all that handy with a gun.
She was better with a knife and consequently had one strapped against her upper thigh beneath her crinoline skirt.

The rhythm of the wagon was comforting, a rhythm Miracle had grown used to during the years she’d sold elixirs and potions with Uncle Horace throughout Oregon’s rural countryside.
She’d been called everything from a quack to an angel of mercy to a shaman.
She knew more about herbs and medicine than half the so-called doctors in the state.
And she knew more about love and grief than all of them put together.

For years she’d thought both her parents had died when she was young.
No one, neither the white men nor the scattered tribe of Chinook Indians, had told her about her birth.
Aunt Emily, who had known the truth all along and later confided in Uncle Horace, had kept the lie well hidden.
Only when one of the town bullies had spat on Miracle and called her dead mother an “Injun whore” had Miracle forced Aunt Emily and Uncle Horace to confess.

“Your mother
was
a whore,” Uncle Horace had admitted gently.
“A goodhearted woman, but a whore nevertheless.”

Miracle’s blue eyes had widened in hurt and shock.
She refused to believe him, turning instead to Aunt Emily, silently pleading for it not to be so.

“She was no whore,” Aunt Emily had maintained sharply, shooting Horace a quelling look that would have turned a lesser man to stone.
“She loved your father, but he wouldn’t have an Indian bride.
He was a cold, callous man who thought a tin box of money was payment enough for her services.” She sniffed her indignation.
“His soul is blacker than hell.
Promised her marriage time and again, but he was already married.
He sired you, then left her for good.
She never was the same.”

The news has been a staggering revelation to Miracle.
“You – knew my mother?”

“She was a beautiful girl who stole our hearts,” Uncle Horace admitted softly.
“We only knew her a short while.
Didn’t see her, or your brother, much after she took up with your father.
But she was a special woman.”

“My
brother?”
Miracle could scarcely believe it.

“Blue was ten when you were born,” Aunt Emily said, tight-lipped.
“He’s your half-brother and only part Chinook.
Your mother knew a few men, Miracle, but had the poor sense to love your father.” Unlike Miracle, Aunt Emily felt the circumstances of the girl’s Indian birth should remain buried.
For Miracle’s sake, she thought it would be better if she acted as if she were white.
“And he was a proper little hellion.
So jealous, he tried to cut out your heart when you were born.
That’s what your mother said.
That’s why you have that scar.”

Miracle had often wondered about the small moon shaped scar above her left breast.
“Where is he now?”

Aunt Emily shrugged carelessly, but Uncle Horace said, “He left the Chinooks soon after he attacked you.”

“Tell me more,” Miracle had pleaded, and Uncle Horace then related all he knew about her heritage, which wasn’t all that much more.
She soon realized he was carefully omitting any further reference to her father, however, and it only served to pique her interest.

“Who is my father?” she demanded.
“What’s his name?”

The hesitation between Uncle Horace and Aunt Emily was telling.
“We don’t know, dear,” Aunt Emily finally admitted.
“He was a mystery to your mother, too.
He just came to her at his convenience, and she never had the strength to turn him down.” At that point she had glanced around guiltily and made the sign of the cross, as if the weakness of the flesh were some insidious disease which could be caught by gossiping.
“Your mother died giving birth to you,” she added in a lower voice.
“She left you the money.”

Now Miracle glanced toward the locked metal box, cleverly concealed amongst the hanging tin wares.
She’d never used the money, though she’d been tempted more than once.
She wanted to find her father first and learn the truth from his own lips.
She didn’t believe he was the bastard Uncle Horace and Aunt Emily made him out to be.
She couldn’t believe it.
After all, he
had
wanted to marry her mother.
And Miracle wanted a family of her own too badly to give up hope.

When she found her father she would use the money, not before.
And now she was close.
She could feel it!
Her search had led her to Rock Springs, Oregon.

Tillie suddenly pricked up her ears, snorting.
Miracle glanced around.
Only the wind stirred the dense firs and pines, making their needles whisper and rustle.

Tingling fear turned her arms to gooseflesh.
She strained to listen.
Nothing.
Then she heard a soft thump.
The back of the wagon lurched, and her hair stood on end.
Sucking in a startled breath, Miracle swung around.
She could see nothing, hear nothing but Uncle Horace and the gusting wind.
Spooked, she snapped the reins with extra fervor, and for once the horses broke into a gallop.

The wagon sped forward, rattling and clanging.
Wind streamed Miracle’s black hair away from her face.
Her eyes burned and teared.
How far was it to Rock Springs?
Ten miles?
Twenty?

Two dark, smelly shadows suddenly reached down from the roof of the wagon, clutching at her.
Miracle gasped.
They were huge grasping hands!
They grabbed her hair and covered her face before she could move.

Miracle bit into flesh.
A man howled furiously.
Her fingers scrambled for the revolver, knocking it from the seat to the floor.
The horses tore wildly forward.
The grimy hands shoved Miracle roughly against the seat back, squeezing her neck, choking her, and a dark body tumbled off the roof onto the wagon seat beside her.

“Doan’ move and I won’t kill you,” a male voice said with cruel malevolence.
She heard the click of a pistol and felt the cold barrel pressed to her temple.
Heart thudding in panic, she sat like a stone.

The man twisted around to grab the reins Miracle had dropped.
His gun never left her head.
Her own revolver was too far out of reach, and her knife was useless against the speed of a bullet.

“Slow down, you swaybacked mules!” he yelled at the horses, yanking viciously on the reins.

Snorting and tossing their heads, Tillie and Gray gradually slowed, their breath rasping through their nostrils, steaming in the soft September night.
Uncle Horace, disturbed, lifted his head and said thickly, “Miracle?
Whad’ya doing?”

Quick as lightning, the gun was removed from Miracle’s temple and slammed hard against Horace’s forehead.
With a sickening thud, Uncle Horace fell silent.

“Damn you!” Miracle cried furiously, wrenching out of her captor’s grasp.
He backhanded her, stunning her, and the gun barrel was thrust ruthlessly against her temple once more.

“Shut your mouth, girlie, if’n you want to stay alive a while longer.”

“Uncle Horace!” she choked out, struggling.

The gunman clamped an arm across her chest, pinning her against the bare wooden seat, this time leveling the gun between her eyes.
“He’s all right.
Smells like the bottom of a whiskey keg, but he’ll live.
At least as long as you behave.”

With a last jerk of the reins, the team stopped.
The wagon ground to a halt.
Miracle eyed the dirty, bearded man tautly.
“What do you want?” she demanded.

He grinned through stained teeth.
“Whatever you’ve got to give.”

She almost spat in his face.
Prudence forced her to remain calm.
If she could only get her fingers on the Colt.

She didn’t have a chance.

Grabbing her by the hair, the man jerked her up from the wagon seat.
Tears of pain blurred her eyes as she was flung to the ground beside the wagon.
Her knees and palms scraped against hard, sharp pebbles.
She heard her skirt rend, the sound loud even with the blowing wind.

Scrambling to her feet, she ran three paces before he caught her easily around the waist.
The knife, she thought, but she had no time to grab it before clattering hoofbeats caught her attention.
Two men on horseback appeared.
Miracle’s captor kept the gun against her head.

“Doan’ move,” he warned.

“Whatcha got there?” one of the newcomers asked, sliding from his horse.
He strode toward Miracle.

“A woman.
Doan’ know what she looks like yet.”