About a mile from town, they were riding at a trot when Jason heard Ward holler, “Damn it! Pick a new place!” And the shout was followed by a burst of gunfire and pounding hooves.
Jason galloped up to the front of the line, where Ward had been traveling, and found him still sitting his horse, but with a new arrow jutting from his shoulder. “I swan, Jason, have I got some sorta target painted on me or somethin’?”
About five of the men had ridden out after the lone brave who’d fired the arrow, so Jason helped Ward down from his horse and into the back of one of the Mortons’ wagons—the one with only two Mortons in it.
“Ain’t you gonna get the arrow out?” Ward called after him.
“No, gonna leave it for Doc Morelli. Treating you is one of his favorite pastimes.”
“Aw, beans!”
Jason tied Ward’s horse’s reins to the back of the wagon while Ward continued to complain, and at last the men who’d ridden out galloped back in. Jason didn’t ask them whether they’d caught their prey. The fresh blood spraying from the hair grasped in one rider’s hand was all the answer he needed.
“All right, settle down,” was all Jason said. “We’re gonna ride fast for the two gate, got it?”
Ride fast, they did. They made such a rattle and racket that they found the gates open for them, and closed up right behind. Poor old Eliza was bounced halfway from her seat by the time they got the horses stopped.
From there on out, Ezekial said that that was the ride that did his Eliza in. She had a minor stroke sometime while they were on their last, frantic gallop into town, Doc Morelli later said, and thereafter got around on one crutch.
Jason had the men park the wagons out back of his house, near the corral, and gave shelter to the Mortons in his home. He had three bedrooms—one for him, one for Jenny, and the third they had built on in memory of his father. The Morton crew filled them up just fine.
Of course, Jenny would have to sleep on the couch. If she slept at all.
He sort of doubted she’d leave Megan’s side, though. Those two were thicker than thieves.
After thanking the men and seeing Ward off to the doctor (and looking in on Megan, who was asleep, along with Jenny in the chair beside her bed), he took himself over to the office.
Matt was still sleeping. Jason thought that Matt ought to thank his lucky stars that he was sleeping so much from the dope Dr. Morelli was providing for him. Otherwise, he’d most likely be dead and it’d be Jason locked behind those bars, sleeping on that cot.
Of course, he’d been sleeping on a twin to Matt’s cot for the last few nights anyway. Might as well make it official.
He stopped himself just before he pulled the trigger. He didn’t even remember pulling his sidearm, didn’t remember aiming it. He did remember the overwhelming glee he felt when his finger rode the trigger and the gun was aimed at Matthew’s skull, however—followed immediately by a sharp rush of guilt.
That was generally the way it was when it came to his relationship with Matt: It teetered precariously between culpable loathing and downright, abject hatred. Lately, the last one was winning out.
Quite a bit more than he would have liked.
He didn’t want to hate Matt. He didn’t want to hate anybody, except maybe some of those Apache out there right now. But he especially hadn’t wanted to hate his sister’s husband, let alone the brother of his intended bride.
Jenny was leaving him now, though. Which was almost like giving Jason permission to hate him.
Well, not really.
God wasn’t that good.
He slumped down in the chair behind the desk and looked up at the clock. Ten thirty-three. Word ought to be getting around by now about the Mortons, and what that meant. He slowly looked out and over the town.
Lamplight began to glow behind formerly darkened windows.
News was traveling, all right.
But he was beat. He found himself falling asleep where he sat, and made himself stand up and walk to the empty cell.
Two minutes after lying down on the cot and tossing his hat aside, he was asleep and dreaming of a life back East, a life filled with school and books and clean clothing and steady meals.
And no Apache.
Across the plaza inside the livery stable, Jenny sat, crouched next to Megan’s bed, half-asleep under the watchful eye of Doc Morelli.
Megan was resting easier now, and he hoped she’d continue to do so. The arrow had done terrible internal damage, but Jenny had gotten her here quickly, and he’d stitched her up the best he knew how. Now she was in God’s hands, and her own. If she didn’t jerk out the stitches, she’d make it.
Morelli understood from Jason that Jenny had made the decision to leave her husband. He hadn’t said anything, but he was happy for her. He could hardly bear to be in the same town with the man for ten minutes. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for Jenny to live with him.
Poor little thing.
Both Megan and Jenny, that is. They were very much alike. And Jason loved the both of them. He wondered why Jason hadn’t wed Megan long ago. They were made for each other—this was clear. Perhaps it was that she was a MacDonald.
Morelli could see where that might be a stopping point for someone like Jason.
But still, he didn’t see why it should keep them apart now. They could still have holidays without inviting Matthew to the table.
He smiled at himself a little.
His eyes went to his newest patient, Ward Wanamaker. Three separate times he’d had to patch that man up in less than four days! Or was it three? Five? Quite honestly, he had lost count. He hadn’t slept, outside of an occasional stolen ten minutes here or a half hour there, and the days and nights were all running together.
Anyway, he’d doped the deputy as much as he thought was safe, dug the arrowhead out as carefully as he could, stitched up the wound, and said good night. Ward was feeling no pain at the moment, but tomorrow he’d be feeling it and he’d be a bear.
Morelli wasn’t looking forward to the coming day.
Lone Wolf had sent out two braves to look for Hawk Fingers when he didn’t come back on time, and after he’d heard shots from far away in the direction that Hawk Fingers had ridden. And he was saddened to see them finally riding back at a slow jog with the pony of Hawk Fingers between them and with Hawk Fingers, blood covering his hairless, scalped head and trailing slowly down his pony’s side, strapped over it.
“Who has done this thing?” asked Cunning Dog, who had just walked up beside Lone Wolf. Cunning Dog had led the party of men who had brought him three riding horses, along with the cow and the ducks they had just eaten. “The whites? The Yuma?”
Lone Wolf assumed he’d included the Yuma because Hawk Fingers had been scalped.
White men did not scalp, in their experience.
Lone Wolf had already decided that their experience with the whites was about to change.
“Whites,” he said, scowling as if the taste of the word was like offal in his mouth.
“What will we do?” asked Cunning Dog.
He nodded toward the braves who had brought back the body. “They will see to Hawk Fingers. You, come to my fire. We will talk.”
Cunning Dog followed him curiously, but Lone Wolf had already made up his mind as to the course of their next actions.
The whites would be sorry they had taken the lives of so many good Apache warriors. They would be sorry for those they had lamed and wounded and mutilated.
Lone Wolf planned to make them sorry they were ever born, had ever traveled west.
They would die screaming.
Several beds away from where Dr. Morelli sat dozing, Ward Wanamaker dreamt.
He dreamt of when he was a small boy, back on his daddy’s farm in Maryland. They had cows and chickens and ducks and sheep and horses, too, and his favorite was a black pony named Flint.
In his dream, he held out his hand, offering a lump of sugar, and Flint came up to the fence, faster than ever before, and took it from him.
He reached out to touch Flint, his feet off the ground, his belly seesawing on the middle board of the fence his father had built, when Flint suddenly turned on him, latching his teeth onto the boy’s sleeve and yanking him forward.
He screamed, he thought, as the pony’s front feet came down again and again on his shoulder, then his back. And then he couldn’t scream anymore.
He heard his father cry, “Ward, I told you to stay away from those damn Apache!” and heard his father’s running footsteps coming closer, bringing salvation with them.
But it was too late. In his dream, he was already dead, his small shoulder and thin back crushed and bloodied by tiny, sharp black hooves.
He slept on, but not so peacefully as before.
Over at the sheriff’s house, the Mortons slept fitfully, if only because they were not in their own beds. Zachary and Ezekial both tossed and turned, worried about their livestock, worried about their home and their crops.
Their wives, Susannah and Eliza, slept deeper than they did, but still fretted in their dreams, concerned about their kitchens and their families, and what tomorrow might bring. Eliza fretted less than Susannah, benumbed by her stroke, although it had been small. Her right arm had gone completely numb, and she would walk into walls, walk to her right, for weeks afterward. And she would forever use a crutch.
Dr. Morelli had come to the house to see her, and promised that she would be all right in time. All things healed in time, according to him. And for the time being, he’d brought her a pair of crutches.
Zachary and Susannah’s girls, Electa and Europa, were restless in general.
Europa had dreams of her late husband’s death and Electa dreamed of the children in their school, dreamt of the Apache storming in and killing them all most gruesomely. And they both dreamed of their poor Aunt Eliza, crippled for no good reason.
Both girls—not girls now, but grown woman in their thirties, one an old maid and one a widow—cried fitfully in their sleep.
At around four-thirty in the morning, the Apache, led by Lone Wolf, began to make a slowly circuitous trip around the outskirts of the town, headed north toward the large farm Lone Wolf had spotted there sometime ago.
Although their numbers were greatly diminished since the start of the fight, Lone Wolf’s men traveled silently and steadily, and soon they had put the town behind them. They were more than one hundred in number, having left the wounded behind, as well as a small force to attack the south side of the settlement in the morning.
He wanted the north side of the town to think it was safe. He wanted them to send a force north, toward the flames and smoke of the buildings the Apache would burn.
He would wait until first light to attack. The smoke couldn’t be seen by the town at night.
And he wanted it to be seen.
He wondered if he and his men could hurt the farm people enough so that they might be heard from the town.
He doubted it, but they would try anyway.
He spoke to the man at his left, instructing him to drop out at the side of the trail. He was to wait nearby and to signal the next man when the whites were on the way. Another mile, and he dropped off another man with the same instructions, and so on and so on.
At last, he sighted the Morton farm, its large, well-constructed buildings picked out by the first feeble rays of the rising sun.
He sent his men out to secrete themselves behind crops, behind bushes, and behind rocks. He sent them to scatter their ponies behind the hill to the west.
All men were armed with the weapons of silence—the arrow, the spear, the ax, the knife. They would wait for his signal to attack.