“I had no chance to find anyone else, now, did I?” Maggie folded her arms stubbornly. “I’m your wife. I’ll look after your house!”

“You’re my wife, all right. And you’ll get your backside into that coach before I blister it, with all Brisbane looking on!”

She got into the coach, disdaining her husband’s offer of help, and met Eleanor’s gaze evenly. Eleanor smiled and inclined her head—Tansy would have called her expression “cheeky”—and if Cora and Elisabeth hadn’t been present, Maggie would have reached out and slapped the woman right across the face.

Reeve, no more a fool than Maggie, rode up top with the driver.

The weather, so mild the day before, was rapidly turning nasty. An eerie wind howled in the trees and great gray clouds fretted and rumbled in the sky. Remembering her first experience with an Australian rainstorm during the camp meeting at Parramatta, Maggie felt warm color rise in her cheeks.

After a time her throat began to feel a bit raw and her head ached, but she would have died before complaining.

The coach hadn’t traveled far when the angry clouds burst and a driving torrent began, striking the ground so hard that it sounded as if a great fire were burning all around them. A cool mist filled the coach.

“I hope we don’t get bogged down in the mud,” fretted Cora, fiddling with her gloves and then straightening her hat. She glanced down at Elisabeth, who had fallen asleep in her lap, her head resting against Cora’s sizable bosom. “We’d be sitting ducks if any bushrangers happened along.”

Eleanor smiled indulgently. “The driver carries a rifle,” she said.

“Piffle,” said Cora. “What good would that be against a dozen or more men?”

“I’m sure we’re quite safe,” Maggie put in.

Of course, it was exactly then that the coach lurched violently to one side and, with a sickening sliding motion, settled into a deep rut. Even Eleanor blushed at the words the driver bellowed at his team, trying to spur them onward.

The coach didn’t move, except to settle deeper into the mud.

Men in broad-brimmed hats and long canvas raincoats appeared on every side then, mounted on horseback and carrying guns. Maggie held out her arms to a confused, just-awakened Elisabeth, and the child scrambled from Cora’s lap to hers.

Cora’s chin was quivering, though she was obviously trying to maintain a brave front for Elisabeth’s sake. “Bushrangers,” she whispered.

“Nonsense,” said Eleanor with a cool smile. “It’s only Mr. Kirk and his party, stopping to offer assistance.”

Maggie wondered how Eleanor had come to know Duncan so well that she could pick him out of a dozen men in raingear in the middle of a rousing storm. Given the animosity between Duncan and Reeve, she’d almost rather the horsemen had been bushrangers.