Today's Reading
His brothers' boots thundered across the floor. There was an eruption of talking and excited laughter from the schoolroom. Then they hit Brody so hard he'd've fallen if he hadn't staggered into Josh. Josh kept him from going down under the onslaught.
And then Brody held them. His brothers. Alive and well. "I found you! Thayne, Lochlan...thank God, thank God."
His brothers, now nearly full grown, were all right. And now Brody had another chance to do things right. Be a good big brother. Show these two he loved them and wanted to take care of them.
CHAPTER TWO
Annie came toward the back of the room.
Ellie flinched at the fire in her sister's eyes. Annie liked order and ran things very tightly in her class. Ellie envied her that skill, one she herself did not possess.
Right now, the whole class was a flurry of whispering, with students of all ages standing and craning their necks, trying to see what was going on. Not a single one of those ten boys was studying, and Annie would have her hands full getting their minds back on their work.
Every orphan child, or so Ellie believed, dreamed of finding his family.
Dreamed that someone out there, a ma or a pa, maybe even a brother, might now be searching for them. It was a wild dream without much hope behind it, yet it had just come true for the MacKenzie boys.
They had sure enough disrupted class. But Ellie could hardly fault the boys for their excitement.
Then Annie reached the door, looked out at the hugging trio, and her expression softened.
Ellie said quietly, "That's Brody MacKenzie. He's been hunting his little brothers."
Nodding, but with the look Annie sometimes got when her motherly sentiment was awakened, she smiled and then pulled the door shut.
Ellie wished her luck with getting the class to settle down.
Josh picked Brody's hat up off the floor, looked at it with disdain, then took charge of the MacKenzies. "Come on back to the house, and we'll figure out what to do with you."
Ellie bit back a smile. Her brother liked to take charge, maybe because he didn't get much chance to do so. When their oldest brother, Zane, was around, he ran things—so long as he could move fast enough that his wife, Michelle, didn't take over.
Annie Hart Lane was the oldest of the four Hart children. A widow and mother, she'd been on her own for several years before her husband was killed and she moved back home. No one could tell her what to do. Then came Josh, a mighty tall and tough former sailor who'd lived away from home for a long time and seen the world. It wasn't exactly easy being a little brother.
That left Ellie, the youngest of them. Out of pity for the poor guy, Ellie did her best to mind her big brother, but honestly it was only to make him happy. She didn't need anyone ordering her around.
The MacKenzies stopped hugging and started talking. Josh got them moving, but it was all stop-and-start with more talking and hugging interrupting their progress.
She caught snippets of the rapid talk. They were from New York, and she'd heard they were a fast-talking breed from back east.
"The journal told us California, but—"
"But then we jumped onto a train that was already rolling—"
"Real orphans could have found homes if you hadn't—"
"How's Pa?"
The three of them fell silent at Thayne's question.
Brody looked at both of them. "You knew he was sick when you left."
"Brown-bottle sick, not real sick." Lochlan continued toward the house, where Josh was steering them.
Lochlan's offhand quip about a brown bottle told Ellie a lot about their messed-up family situation.
"Pa died."
Thayne and Lochlan stumbled to a stop and turned to stare at Brody.
Thayne broke the silence first. "B-because we left him alone?"
Lochlan reached out and caught Brody's arm. "He was always yelling at us. Throwing us out of the house till we hardly lived there. We came home late at night to sleep. He didn't cook for us, nor for himself."
...
