Read Whispers on the Wind for Free Online Page A

had one of those dreams again. I didn’t want you to leave without food in your belly.”
    His tone was heavy. “The gold.” It wasn’t a question.
    She nodded. He thought that, through her thick glasses, he could read wariness along with resignation. “I’ll get your pack.”
    “Yeah.” The gold. It was up there...somewhere. He thought he had known. In the dream, it had been so clear, like a vision. But now, it was fading the way dreams do when you try too hard to remember them. There’d been a cave. That he knew. And in it, he’d seen the gleam of gold. It had called him. It had called him strongly, almost as if a voice had spoken in his mind.
    He shivered, staring out the wide window wall that faced his fields, with the dark bulk of the Rockies soaring straight up beyond, blocking the stars. What was it out there that called him? And where was it?
    “Now, who could that be?” Jane asked, drawing Angus’s attention to a flickering light well beyond the window wall of the kitchen. Someone stumbled along the side of the east pasture. The light paused, dipped, and he knew the person had parted the strands of wire that kept the stock from the hayfield. The light wove uncertainly onward, cutting a slow but steady path across the freshly plowed and planted field.
    Once, it bobbed out of existence, as if it had been shut off, but as Jane damped the lights in the kitchen, offering a better view of the outdoor scene, he saw that whoever staggered across the ground had fallen. That person now recovered the lightcell and reeled on, traveling in an ever-more erratic pattern as if unsure of the right direction to take.
    One moment, the light bobbed toward the Johannsen ranch-house, close by, but unseen in the dark. The next, it angled back toward McQuarrie’s place, as if whoever was lost out there might have been drawn by the lights and was now confused because they’d been shut off.
    “I’d better check this out,” Angus said, “since I’m already up and dressed.” He tugged on his jacket and fumbled with the fastener. “Looks like someone’s in trouble,” he added as the person fell again, getting up more slowly this time.
    “Heading toward Johannsen’s ranch, by the look of it.” Jane commented. “Maybe Pete’s had too much to drink.”
    “Hmmph.” Angus wouldn’t have been surprised. Pete Johannsen was not a happy man, what with his on-again, off-again relationship with the Worth girl. But who could he have been boozing with until this time of the night? Most everyone hereabouts got up with the chickens and went to bed not long after them, too.
    Just before the fence that separated his east hayfield from the highway, he intercepted the carrier of the lightcell and came to a stunned halt. “Nancy? Nancy Worth?”
    He stared at her. She wore only a short nightshirt, moth-gray in the harsh glare of his of light as he swept it over her, no shoes, not even slippers, despite the crispness of the frost on the grassy verge here. Her eyes held a dazed expression, quickly hidden by her squint as he beamed his lightcell right into her face.
    “What the hell are you doing out here?”
    She blinked and he turned his light off her face. “Angus. Oh. Why are you here?”
    “Why are you in the middle of my field in the middle of the night?”
    “I...I don’t know. I had to go...somewhere. To be...with someone.”
    “Be with who? Peter? Did he call you? Is he sick? Why didn’t you drive? What are you doing on foot and with no clothes on?”
    She shook her head, looking confused. “Not...him, not Peter. Someone else. I...think. I don’t know who. It’s like I did know, but now I can’t remember. This is crazy, isn’t it, Angus? God, I’m cold.” She wrapped her arms around herself, looked down at her feet. “I don’t have any shoes on!”
    “I know.” Angus was concerned about the woman, not only her physical state, but her mental condition as well. “Come on, let’s get you inside and warmed up.