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stove, stuffing in kindling and old newspaper from the half-filled wood box, striking a match to start a blaze.
    “I was looking for food…blankets—”
    Morgan gave her a scathing look. Took the coffeepot off the stove and went out the rear door of the caboose. When he came back, Lizzie saw that he’d filled the pot with snow. He set it on the stove with an eloquent clunk. “You could have been killed!” he rasped, pale with fury.
    “How did you know to…to come looking for me?”
    “John Brennan woke me up. Said he’d seen you leave the car. At first, he thought he was dreaming, because nobody would do anything that stupid.”
    “ You left the car,” Lizzie reminded him. “What’s the difference?”
    “The difference, Lizzie McKettrick, is that you are a woman and I am a man. And don’t you dare get up on a soapbox. If I hadn’t come along when I did, you’d be at the bottom of that ravine by now. And it was the grace of—whoever—that we didn’t both go over!”
    He found a tin of coffee among the provisions, spooned some into the pot, right on top of the snow.
    Lizzie realized that he’d put himself in no little danger to pull her to safety. “Thank you,” she said, with a peculiar mixture of graciousness and chagrin.
    “I’m not ready to say ‘you’re welcome,’” he snapped. “Leaving that car, especially alone, was a damnably foolish thing to do.”
    “If you expect an apology, Dr. Shane, you will be sorely disappointed. Someone had to do something.”
    The fire crackled merrily in the stove, and a little heat began to radiate into the frosty caboose. Morgan reached up to adjust the damper, still seething.
    “Don’t talk,” he advised, sounding surly.
    Lizzie straightened her spine. “Of course I’m going to talk,” she told him pertly. “I have things to say. We need to bring everyone from the passenger car. It’s safer here—and warmer.”
    “ We aren’t going to do anything. You are going to stay put, and I will go back for the others.” He leveled a long look at her. “So help me God, Lizzie, if you set foot outside this caboose—”
    She smiled, getting progressively warmer, catching the first delicious scent of brewing coffee. She’d probably imagined that part, she decided.
    “Why, Dr. Shane,” she mocked sweetly, batting her eyelashes, “I wouldn’t think of disobeying a strong, capable man like you.”
    Suddenly he laughed. Some of the tension between them, until that moment tight as a rope with an obstreperous calf running full out at the other end, slackened.
    It gave Lizzie an odd feeling, not unlike dangling over the side of a cliff with only a root to hold on to and the jaws of a ravine yawning below.
    She blushed. Then her practical side reemerged. “I tried the door on the freight car,” she said. “But I couldn’t get in. If we’re lucky, there might be food inside.”
    “Oh, we’re lucky, all right,” Morgan responded, his amusement fading as reality overtook him again. The sun was coming up, and Lizzie knew as well as he did that even its thin, wintry warmth might thaw some of the snow looming over their heads, set it to sliding again. “We’re lucky we’re alive.” He studied her for a long moment. Then he snapped, “Wait here.”
    Frankly not brave enough to risk another plunge over the cliff-side, McKettrick or not, Lizzie waited. Waited when he left. Waited for the coffee to brew.
    He brought the baby first.
    Lizzie held little Nellie Anne and bit her lip, waiting.
    Next came Jack, riding wide-eyed on Morgan’s shoulders, his little hands clasped tightly under the doctor’s chin.
    After that, Mrs. Halifax. Her arm still in its sling, she fairly collapsed, once safely inside the caboose. Lizzie immediately got up to fill a coffee mug and hand it to the other woman. Mrs. Halifax trembled visibly as she drank, her two older children clutching at her skirts.
    Whitley appeared, having made his own way, scowling. Still clutching his