The clothespins caught in Laura’s mittens as she removed them from the laundry line. Holding them in her mouth, she pulled the stiff shirts down, letting them drop into the big wicker basket, sliding it along with her foot beneath the frozen clothes. Following behind her, Chen Li pinned up a load of long johns to the same line.
Even without that biting wind, it would be bitter cold out, but with it, her face felt raw. Since Chen Li never complained, she had to wonder if the winters were worse in China. They couldn’t be, she decided. Picking up the full basket, she hurried inside.
There was one good thing about doing laundry on a day like this, she told herself. No matter how chilly it had seemed inside before, when she came in, it felt downright hot for a little while. As she kicked the door shut behind her, she instinctively looked to the cradle. Jessie still slept.
Laying the frozen shirts on the table to soften, she pulled off her mittens and poured herself a cup of coffee, savoring the smell of the steam curling in the air above it. Two more loads to wash and hang, then she’d be ready to start the ironing this afternoon.
Carrying her cup with her, she went to the hearth to peek under a cloth at the rising bread dough. It wasn’t ready to punch down yet.
She still had to do the baking and start the ironing, and after Spence got back from camp with the cream, she’d be churning butter before she fixed supper. Fresh bread, butter, and potato soup were just the things for this cold weather.
Returning to the kitchen corner, she pulled out the potato bin, chose several, and was about to wash them, when Chen Li pounded on the door. As she opened it, the little Chinese man scurried past her to hold his ice-cold hands over the fire. His thin shoulders shook beneath that quilted cotton jacket he always wore.
“What you need is a good hot toddy,” she told him, crossing her arms and shivering to indicate how cold he was.
“You velly cold?”
“No, you are. A toddy’d warm you right up.”
“Li cold, too,” he said, nodding.
Unable to communicate any better, she decided to give him coffee instead. She didn’t know if he’d drink whiskey, anyway, she told herself as she filled his cup. She didn’t know much about him at all, and it wouldn’t do any good to ask where he came from or anything else. His English was so poor that she couldn’t carry on a conversation with him. But once she showed him how to do something, he did it well, and that was what mattered. “Coffee,” she said loudly, holding out the cup to him. “It’s good and hot.”
“Hot velly good,” Chen Lii agreed.
Spence came in with his arms full, elbowed the door shut, then stamped his feet, trying to warm them. Looking across the room to her, he said, “You just said cream, but since I was already down there, I went ahead and bought some other things, too. There’s sugar, a tin of arrowroot cookies, some hard candy, cooking chocolate, a bag of walnuts, and a bottle of cherry brandy in the gunnysack. Wagon came in just before I got there.”
“If I eat all that, I’ll be fat.”
“Not the way you work,” he answered, pulling off the heavy coat, mittens, and muffler, then bracing himself against the doorjamb to remove his boots. “Whooeeee, but it’s damned cold out—I’ll take Georgia any day over this.” Moving to join Chen Li by the fire, he told her over his shoulder, “Hawthorne said they were short on the rep track.”
“Oh?”
He wriggled his cold toes on the warm stones in front of the hearth, defrosting them as he added casually, “I told him I’d help out.”
“Spence, you didn’t—surely not!”
“Why not?”
Dismayed, she tried to keep her voice calm. “Well, if you think you’re cold now, you don’t even have a notion—you’ll be toting and hammering on cold steel fourteen hours a day, then trying to sleep in a drafty tent with that old north wind blowing right through it. It’s hard, dangerous work for a man not used to it—Jesse was killed doing it.”
“I’m not Jesse, and I won’t let them work me like that. Besides, I can use the extra money right now—I don’t know what’ll happen between here and California.”
“You know, I don’t need the room and board you’re paying. I mean, you do so much around here, helping out with the baby, carrying water, chopping wood—things like that—I don’t feel right taking it, anyway. I just didn’t want to insult your pride by refusing it, that’s all.”
“I need to do something. I just feel restless—it’s hell knowing I’ve got to be somewhere else when there’s no way I can’t get there. I feel like a caged animal in this one room.”
“Well, if it’s work you’re looking for, I could sure use help right here. There’s so much laundry coming in now that it’s almost too much for Chen Li and me to handle, and since word’s spread to McPherson, I’ve had to turn away customers.”
He could almost hear the panic in her voice. Sighing, he shook his head. “Doing laundry’s no kind of life for you, Laura. Look at yourself—at those hands—at the circles under your eyes—you keep this up, and you’ll be old before your time. You’re part of the reason I’m doing this if you want the truth of it,” he said.
“Me? Oh, now wait a minute, Spencer Hardin! I had a husband telling me that, in case you’ve forgotten, and I’m not about to bear that burden again! Jesse killed himself working for something he wanted me to have whether I wanted it or not—and now I’m a widow with a baby to raise by myself! No, sir—if you want to do something, you do it for yourself, because I don’t aim to live with the blame if anything happens to you!”
Stung by the vehemence of her words, he caught her arm, forcing her to look up at him. “Will you listen before you go off half-cocked?” he demanded, his own voice rising. “I’ve got enough to get myself to San Francisco, but—”
“Then go!”
“Let me finish, for God’s sake, before you start hollering in my face!” As her eyes widened, he strove to control his temper. “Look, I don’t want to quarrel with you—I’m trying to help. I worry about you and Jessie, Laura. A couple of weeks’ pay will leave me with enough extra money to send both of you back to North Carolina with a few dollars in your purse to tide you over until you get settled. It’s where you belong, whether you want to admit it or not.”
For a moment, she stared incredulously at him, then found her voice. “You know, Dr. Hardin, once you get something in your mind, you just hang on to it. I guess you think all that education you’re not using entitles you to tell me you know what’s good for me. It just doesn’t seem to matter any to you that I’ve got a business out here, and there’s nothing for me back there.”
“You didn’t want to leave it,” he reminded her. “You told me that last May.”
“I wanted to stay on my home place. It’s different now—Jesse’s dead, and I don’t own the farm anymore. I’d be going back to nothing with nothing.”
“Carolina’s a better place to raise Jessie. What kind of life do you think you’ll give her out here? There’s bound to be better things for you to do back there than washing dirty underwear for a camp full of drunks and derelicts whose notion of a good time is spending a whole paycheck on cheap whiskey and cheaper whores,” he declared emphatically. “You don’t want to live like this—no woman would.”
“I’m not a whore, Dr. Hardin,” she said evenly. “I work with my hands and my heart—not my body.”
Vexed to distraction, he ran his hands through his hair, trying to think of some way to convince her. “I didn’t say you were, and you know it. All I was saying was there’s lots of things you could do besides this.”
“Oh, really? I’d like to have you name me one.”
“Well, you can sew … or teach kids maybe. Hell, that’s for you to decide, not me. But I do know a good Southern woman without a husband’s got no business putting herself at the mercy of a bunch of dirty ruffians.”
“Jesse wasn’t dirty, drunk, or derelict,” she retorted. “But even if he were any of those things, it wouldn’t make much difference now. He’s dead, and even if he wanted to, he couldn’t help me now. As for teaching school, I’ve got no education—everybody back there knows I had to stay home to take care of Mama, and after that, it was Danny. When they got done laughing, they’d tell me their kids have already got more schooling than I had!” Pushing an errant strand of hair away from her eyes, she declared defiantly, “So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Rich Doctor Fellow, because I’m not going back there!”
“Because you’re too damned bullheaded for your own good. What’ll you do if you get sick?—if the baby needs a doctor? At least back in Carolina, you won’t be packing up and dragging Jessie off someplace else every time damned camp moves. But have it your way—I’m going to salve my conscience by leaving you money in case you come to your senses, and then I’m getting out of here. I can’t stand watching you work yourself to death.”
“I’m not a charity case, and we’re not yours to worry about,” she declared flatly. Striding to the cupboard, she retrieved a big jar. “Look at this—I’ve got fifty dollars in here, and I earned every penny of it myself.”
“And you work harder to get it than a slave in a Mississippi cotton patch ever worked under a whip. Just how long do you think you can keep this up?”
“Well, maybe I don’t see it that way at all!” she snapped. “If I ever go back to North Carolina, I won’t be draggin’ my tail like some sorry dog. All my life, when I was trying to take care of Danny and growing up myself, I had people sayin’ how sorry they were for me; then I’d overhear those same folks snickerin’ behind my back because I was too poor to have a decent dress or anything else. Their notion of charity was givin’ me something they wouldn’t be caught dead in themselves!”
“Laura—”
“No, sir—they’re not getting another chance to look down on me like I’m not good enough to step over. The next time I see any of ’em, I’ll be holding my head high and showing ’em I’ve amounted to something. It sure won’t be to ask ’em if I can sew or keep house for ’em, which is about all somebody like me can do!”
As she said it, her lip quivered, and Spence realized she was on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry—I guess I just didn’t understand,” he said quietly.
“No, you didn’t!”
Pushing past him, she went outside and around the house to the privy. Slamming the door shut, she threw the bar inside, then sat down to cry. She hadn’t meant to let anybody see the lingering hurt, least of all somebody who’d had enough money to go to medical college, who’d never known what it was like to eat nothing but potatoes and beans month after month because there was nothing else.
Spence was right behind her. Pounding on the outhouse door, he shouted, “I said I was sorry! Come out before you freeze to death in there. It’s too damned cold out for a woman with no coat on!”
“Go away, and leave me alone! I’m just dandy, so don’t you worry yourself!”
“Look, I wanted to help you out, that’s all.”
“Well, don’t! I don’t need anybody’s charity, not even yours!”
“Now, damn it, I’ve already apologized twice. I don’t even know what started this, except I told you I was going to work a few days on the rep track. I figured you’d be glad to get rid of me for a while.”
“It was the money—and I won’t take a penny of it!”
“Laurie, for God’s sake—”
That was what Jesse used to call her. She leaned her head against the wood wall and closed her eyes. For the first time in her life, she had to admit she was afraid of being alone, of never having anybody to hold but her daughter. She wasn’t really any different from every other woman in the world—she ached for someone to love her, someone she could love also. But more than anything, she didn’t want him to go.
“Well, I guess you’re not talking now,” he said heavily. “I guess when you get cold enough, you’ll come out. Since I don’t have my boots on, my feet are freezing, and I’ve got to go inside.”
As she heard him walking away, she swallowed back more tears. She’d always known he’d have to leave, she told herself, but she just hadn’t expected it to happen before May. Maybe she hadn’t wanted him here in the first place, but she’d grown so accustomed to having him around that it seemed like he just belonged here. She even liked that rumpled look he had when he came to the table in the morning, because it made him seem like a vulnerable little boy instead of the bitter man he was. And when he sat before the fire, rocking Jessie, it was like the baby belonged there.
She just wished she’d met him before he married that stupid jezebel. With that black, black hair and those sky blue eyes, he must’ve been the handsomest bachelor in the state of Georgia, and surely he’d deserved better than what he’d gotten. Nothing on earth could’ve made her do to him what Lydia had.
She sat very still for a moment, realizing she’d been lying to herself, believing she thought of him as Jessie’s doctor, Jesse’s friend, but he was far more than that to her. He was the man she should’ve met before Jesse. Catching herself before she could let that thought take hold, she knew he would’ve looked right past her. Men born and bred to privilege had no honorable interest in awkward country girls wearing flour sack dresses. And they never would.
Shivering cold, she unlocked the privy door, and with her arms crossed tightly across her breasts, she ducked into the icy wind, then ran for the house. Around the corner, Spencer Hardin stepped in front of her.
“You said you were going inside!” she cried.
Pulling off his coat, he threw it around her. “You can throw a hissy fit if you want to, but by God, you’re going in with me,” he told her. “I don’t know why, but you’re having some kind of nervous collapse.”
“I’m not!” she shouted, trying to pull away.
“The hell you aren’t! You’re making yourself sick over nothing!” Out of all patience now, he swung her into his arms and headed for the front door. “You know it’s a damned good thing Chen Li can’t speak English, or he’d be going down the hill telling everybody you’re a crazy woman.”
“Put me down!”
Reaching around her, he managed to get the door open and stumble through it. He kicked it closed, crossed the little room, and dropped her on the bed. Standing over her, he needed a moment to catch his breath. When he looked down, she’d roiled into a tight ball, and she was shaking all over.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched her shoulder, feeling helpless. “Laurie … don’t … you’ve got to get hold of yourself.”
“I can’t!”
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Chen Li edging his way to the door. The odd little fellow obviously wanted out or there, and Spence wanted to be left alone with Laura. As the door closed, he began rubbing her back, her shoulders, her neck.
“Laurie—”
“Just go away! That’s what you want to do, anyway!”
“I can’t help if I don’t know what ails you,” he said gently. “Come on—you’re making yourself sick,”
“Why can’t I be afraid like everybody else? Why do I have to be strong?” she wailed.
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know! I just k-keep working … and … and nobody cares! I can’t make myself try any harder!”
Lifting her, he turned her into his shoulder and wrapped his arms around her. “You won’t let anybody help you,” he murmured, stroking her soft hair.
She burrowed her face into his shirt and held onto him with both hands, sobbing hard. As warm and solid as he was, she didn’t want to ever let go, but she knew she had to. Finally, she sat up, ashamed of herself for the inexplicable outburst. Gulping air, she managed to tell, him, “I just can’t get everything done—there’s just no end to it—and if you go on the rep track, it’s something more to worry about.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Jesse wasn’t.”
He thought he finally knew what was wrong. “It’s Jesse—that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“No.” Trying to dry her eyes on a corner of the apron, she couldn’t look up at him. “Jesse isn’t even here anymore—he’s just gone.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not anymore. There was a time when I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t—I was afraid I’d lose the baby, too, and there’d be nothing left. And, anyway, it wouldn’t be for what you’d think—the Jesse Taylor who came home from the war was a stranger to me.”
“I see.”
“And after we got out here, it just got worse, because I hardly ever saw him.” Looking up through wet lashes, she admitted, “It was like he’d been seduced by the money he was making, and all he wanted was more of it. If I said anything about him being gone all the time, he’d tell me I was holding him back, that I didn’t want him to make anything of himself—but that wasn’t true.”
The catch in her voice touched him more than her words. “If he thought you were holding him back, he was wrong.”
“No.”
“Hey—whose money brought him out here, anyway?”
“It wasn’t enough—there was never enough for what he wanted—he wanted things like rich folks had, and he died trying to get them, Spence. I couldn’t make him see it wasn’t what we had—that it was what we were that mattered.”
“He was wrong.”
“And now you’ve started talking about money, about Jessie needing a better life than I can give her, and I can’t stand it anymore. I’m doing all I can to make it happen, but nobody thinks it’s good enough.”
“I’m sorry, Laurie, truly sorry.”
Looking away, he stared bleakly across the room that held everything she owned. There wasn’t anything there he’d give more than twenty dollars for. And he’d as much as told her all of her hard work didn’t amount to anything either. He might as well have said she was worthless herself, he realized now.
“You just shouldn’t have to work so hard—it’s not right.”
“What am I supposed to do?—just give up? Some days I just want to dig myself a hole so I can crawl in it and die, but I tell myself I can’t—I’m all Jessie’s got, and she deserves so much better.”
“Laura, that’s foolish talk. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I don’t want her to grow up like me,” Wiping her wet cheeks with the back of her hand, she sniffed, trying to stop her runny nose. “I want her to know she’s somebody.”
As she dropped her hand, he caught it Rubbing the rough, chapped skin with his fingers, he found hers small and almost frail. “God, Laura—”
Once again, those flecked brown eyes appeared almost gold as she looked up. Staring into them, he felt a dam of suppressed hunger break, releasing such a flood of desire that it overwhelmed rational thought. Every nerve in him was acutely aware of her woman’s body, of the pleasure within it. Catching her shoulders, he bent his head to hers, brushing her lips with his. He could feel her cold flesh quiver as her lips parted to receive his kiss, telling him she wanted this as much as he did.
For one brief second, she told herself it was wrong; then her balled fists dug into his shoulders, holding on, while his tongue probed the depths of her mouth, shocking her. A feeble protest died in the fire of her own desire. Her arms twined around his neck as she returned his kiss with a passion that drove everything else from his mind.
His mouth left hers, and his lips traced lightly over the shell of her ear, while his warm breath sent shivers of anticipation coursing down her spine. It was as though the quick, feathery kisses he trailed along her jaw and down her neck brought her alive with the promise of ecstasy, and as he pressed his lips against the sensitive hollow of her throat, she felt the low moan rise within her throat. Her neck arched, offering more hot skin to his touch.
“Let me love you,” he murmured against her flesh. “You need this as much as I—you want this as much as I.”
Hiding behind her closed eyes, she whispered, “Yes, I want it, too.”
Easing her down into the feather bed, he looked into her face, thinking she had to be the loveliest woman in the world. His gaze moved lower, taking in the promise of her slender body from the full breasts beneath the faded bodice, the narrow waist, the curve of her hip under her dress, and he wanted to see all of it. He wanted to feel her flesh under his. Fumbling at her bodice buttons with one hand, he worked those on his shirt with the other, tearing at them. Jerking his shirttail out of his pants, he managed to get his shirt and coat off together, then fling them to the floor. Easing his body down beside hers, he began stroking her hair, her cheek, the smooth skin above her bodice. She sucked in her breath as his fingers slipped under the cloth to touch the fullness of her breasts.
“Don’t—I’ll leak,” she protested weakly.
“I don’t care, Laurie—all I care about is you. I want to be good for you.”
His hand cupped her breast, and his thumb rubbed over her nipple, eliciting an intense, exquisite agony. As milk flowed into his palm, she felt the aching wetness between her thighs. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please …”
“Please what?” he murmured against her breast. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.”
“I don’t know—I just don’t want you to stop.”
Feeling as if he’d burst, he kissed her lips again. “Are you sure?”
“It’s been so long, Spence—love me now. I want it all,”
Nuzzling her throat, he reached down to unbutton his pants. He could feel himself grow as the buttons gave way. Lifting his hips, he worked his pants down to his ankles, then kicked them off. “Touch me, Laurie,” he said hoarsely.
“I … I can’t … I’ve never done that before.”
She had her eyes squeezed tightly shut, and her teeth held her lip. He could see the rise and fall of her breasts through her open bodice. Working feverishly, he pushed the dress and thin chemise down from her shoulders, tugging them past her waist, over her hips. Loosening the waist of her drawers, he got them and everything else to her ankles. His fingers caught the laces of her shoes, untying them, pulling them off.
Instead of parting her legs, he nuzzled the crevice between her breasts, while his hands stroked the curve of her hip, moving over the nearly flat plain of her belly until his fingers found the soft fold below, then glided inside.
He felt her body tauten under his hand, her heels dig into the feather mattress. As he stroked the wet flesh, she began to move, opening and closing her legs as the pleasure intensified. More than ready to give her what she wanted, he eased his body over hers, and as her legs splayed to receive him, he guided himself inside.
“Oh, yes!” she gasped, clinging to him as he rocked within her. “Don’t stop now!” Her legs came up, and her body joined his rhythm, bucking beneath him, demanding satisfaction. Grasping her hips, he rode hard, straining to reach that ultimate peak. Pounding blood roared in his ears, and her breath was coming in great gasps, drowning out the primordial cries of the woman beneath him. He felt the explosion, the intense pleasure of release. Wrapping, his arms around her, he lay within her, floating back to earth.
For a time, she hugged him, catching her breath. She felt utterly, completely sated. Finally, he rolled off her, drew her into the crook of his arm, and stared at the cabin ceiling. He was so quiet she could hear his heartbeat under her ear. She lay there, thinking dreamily that she never wanted to move from the warmth of his body.
He hadn’t meant to do this, it had just happened, he told himself. No, he was lying. He’d wanted her more than anything, but that still didn’t make it right—nothing could. He’d wanted her, and he’d taken advantage of her loneliness, and when she came to her senses, she’d probably hate him for it. Or herself, and he couldn’t stand that. The blame was his, not hers—he’d thought of little else these past few weeks, so much he d tried to run away, but he hadn’t made it. No, he was leaving with the railroad rep crew tomorrow, one day too late.
He looked down at the silky soft brown hair spilling across his bare shoulder, wondering what she was thinking, if he’d given her as much pleasure as she’d given him. If she had any idea how good her woman’s body had felt, how much better than the others. The thought threatened to rekindle his desire, making him feel no better than an animal. If things had been different, if he’d met her before Jesse, before Lydia …
She was probably too mortified to face him, and he didn’t want that. His hand crept to stroke her hair as his mind sought words. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
The regret in his voice struck her like a slap, telling her she’d been a fool. It’d been lust, not love in his mind. She’d given her body wantonly, wanting to believe he could somehow love her. He probably thought her little better than a whore now. Somehow, she managed to whisper, “It’s all right—the blame is as much mine as yours.”
Nothing was worth the shame he heard in that whisper. “I guess you’re as sorry as I am, aren’t you?”
What was she supposed to say to that? Not wanting to lower his opinion or her any further, she swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yes.”
“It’s not your fault, you know. At least I knew where I was headed.”
“I was married—I had a notion.” Pulling away from him, she sat up with her back to him, acutely conscious of her nakedness now. “You didn’t exactly have to ravish me.”
“Laura—”
“Please don’t.” Her hands gripped the edge of the bed. “Since I’m still nursing Jessie, I won’t be having another baby, so you don’t have to worry about that.”
“God, Laura—it wasn’t like that at all.”
Leaning down, she retrieved her clothes from the floor, grateful he couldn’t see her face. “Mama told me that, you know. I wasn’t old enough to be thinking about such things, but she knew she wouldn’t be there to tell me later.”
He took a deep breath, then expelled it slowly, knowing he was about to pay the piper for the dance. “If you want to, we’ll get married. While you get yourself cleaned up, I’ll go down and make arrangements with the preacher in camp.”
Humiliated, she could barely whisper, “I want better than that.”
Mistaking her meaning, he said, “There’s not time for anything else. I told Hawthorne I’d be ready to leave tomorrow, and I don’t know for sure when I’ll be back—probably in a couple of weeks—so it’s got to be today. When I head for San Francisco in May, you can either go with me, or I can come back through to get you after I find Josh.” When she didn’t respond, he told her, “Look, it may not be what either of us wanted, but I don’t mind. It’s probably the best thing, anyway—Jessie will get a father, and Josh a mother, so it’s not a bad bargain. At least you’ll have somebody to take care of you this way.”
Fighting tears, she pulled her dress over her head, thrust her arms into the sleeves, and yanked the bodice down to cover her breasts. Standing up, she dropped the skirt down over her hips. “Those aren’t exactly the things a woman wants to hear, Spence. I married for Danny the last time, and if there’s a next time, it’ll be for myself. And it’ll be to somebody who loves me, not somebody who thinks he’s doing something honorable.” Turning away so he couldn’t see her face, she added, “I’ve got to want to be your wife, Spence, and right now, I don’t.”
“I thought you and I had a pretty good time, but I guess I was mistaken.”
She swung around at that and looked him in the eye. “I had a real good time, all right,” she said evenly, “but that’s not enough for me to promise my life away. If it’s a good time you’re after, go to the hog ranch—the whores down there can probably give you a better one than I can.”
“I didn’t say that’s what I was looking for. I said I thought you—”
“I’m looking for somebody who wants to spend his whole life with me, who won’t mind growing old with me. I want to be everything to somebody, Spence. Any man that asks me had better be ready to convince me he’s got his heart set on me and nobody else. Otherwise, I’m going to be a widow for the rest of my life. That’s all I’ve got to say about it.”
“Well, that was quite a speech.”
“It came from my heart,” she said simply. Her eyes took in his tousled black hair, his strong, masculine shoulders, and she condemned herself for being a fool. A man like that could never love her. Looking down to button the front of her dress, she told him, “Since you’re leaving in the morning, you can stay tonight, but when you get back, I think you’d better figure on staying somewhere else. Jessie and I’ll miss you, but what we did just now wasn’t right. And since I don’t think I’ll be likely to forget it happened, having you around would be just plain awkward.”
The look on her face would haunt him a long time. “I see,” he said heavily. “I don’t think I’ve been sorrier for anything in my life.”
“Yes—well, I’ve got to get busy, or I won’t get the laundry finished up and ironed by tomorrow. I’ll try to have your shirts ready before I go to bed, but if I can’t I’ll get up early.”
“Is there anything I can do to help out?”
“I guess if you get your packing done, you could chop wood. I’ll probably be needing a lot more before warm weather gets here.”
As she walked away from him, he felt drained, utterly empty. “I’ll chop what I can, then leave you money in case you have to buy some. It’s the least I can do.”
She whirled to face him furiously. “Don’t make me feel any worse than I already do, Dr. Hardin!” she snapped. “I may be a sinner, but I’m not a whore! I don’t want to hear any more talk about money—now or ever!”
He finished dressing in silence, telling himself he’d tried, that there wasn’t much more he could do to help her. When he sat down to pull on his pants, he saw she was punching down the bread dough with a vengeance. And he felt as though he’d just lost his best friend.
Light from the three-quarter moon overhead shone on the murky waters of the Platte, revealing the flat plates of ice churning by, breaking the otherworldly stillness of the deserted road as Spence gathered dead sticks into the burlap sack. The air was so cold his breath formed ice crystals on the bandana over his nose, telling him Nebraska wasn’t any place anybody from Georgia ought to be. Down home, it’d be starting to feel like spring about now.
The other members of his railroad crew, most of whom had wintered on the plains before, claimed that as long as it didn’t snow, they didn’t mind being out in weather like this. A body got used to it, they said, but so far he hadn’t. And if he ever got out of Nebraska, he damned sure wasn’t coming back to give the place another try.
Every night since he’d left Laura’s cabin, he’d rolled himself up in four heavy blankets and shivered himself to sleep so he could wake up before dawn, gulp a cup of scalding coffee to wash down his share of hardtack, then head out to tear up pieces of broken track for twelve or thirteen hours. She’d been right about that, like just about everything else.
It wasn’t the hard work that bothered him. At night he was almost grateful to fall into bed too tired to even think. No, it was the damned, unrelenting wind—and Laura Taylor. That wailing, otherworldly wind swept the bitter cold down from the mountains and bore it across the plains, driving everything but wolves and railroad men into dens and lairs. It made him long for the warmth of that tiny cabin. It made him miss her.
But tonight he was going to be warm, he promised himself. He’d already cut a small vent hole in the roof of his tent to draw the smoke, and as soon as he had enough wood and tinder to make one, his water bucket was going to hold a fire instead of ice. He was going to show these Yankees some good old Rebel engineering he’d seen in. the Tennessee campaign. Once he got a bucket full of red-hot coals, the metal’d give off at least enough heat to keep him from freezing, maybe enough that four wool blankets could keep him warm. And if he could keep the fire going until morning, he’d throw an extra buffalo chip on it, put some holes in an old rusty pan he’d found, and cover the bucket with it to make himself a cook-stove. Instead of hardtack for breakfast, he was going to have soda biscuits and fried potatoes with his coffee.
As he twisted dead twigs from a limb, he couldn’t help wondering how she was. By now, she’d have Jessie asleep, and she’d have that rocker pulled up close to the hearth. She’d probably be reading one of her books again, wearing her eyes out in that yellow light, or if she was trying to save on kerosene, she’d be knitting in the dark. He just hoped she wasn’t running low on wood or anything else. He didn’t want her trying to split logs or walking down to camp by herself.
He had to wonder if she missed him, or if she was doing just fine without him. She’d say she was, anyway, and she’d try her damnedest to believe it. She was the stubbornest woman of his memory, determined to take care of herself, refusing to go back home poor. He guessed he understood that—if he hadn’t had to wait for Pinkerton to answer, he sure as hell wouldn’t have spent those last months in Georgia, pretending not to notice conversations turned to furtive whispers whenever he entered a room. Pity wasn’t anything either of them could stand.
He hadn’t thought much about Lydia lately, or Ross either, for that matter. It was Joshua who occupied his thoughts. And Laura. Lydia didn’t matter anymore. The speculative gossip that had probably found him wanting as a husband was a distant memory that no longer stung. It was the here and now that plagued him.
He just didn’t know what to do about Laura, and he knew she wouldn’t help him any. She wouldn’t go home, she couldn’t stay where she was, and she’d refused to go to California, too, which was going to make it damned difficult for him to leave when the time came. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate, she was haunting his waking thoughts, seducing him in his dreams.
He’d go to bed telling himself he’d already been deceived by one pretty face, that women were all more or less faithless creatures, and he would vow he’d never make a fool of himself over a woman again. Then, before he could get across that hazy netherworld leading to sleep, rational thought would slip away, and he’d relive every word, every movement, every touch that had passed between them in that bed, and he’d ache for her—not just lust, ache.
Her response to him had been a revelation, showing him yet another way Lydia had cheated him. He’d mistaken lying words for passion, accepted it as fact that a decent woman wasn’t supposed to pant and writhe under him like a whore pretending to enjoy it, that she’d be shocked and repelled by what a man really wanted. Lydia had done her best to plant and nurture that notion. Looking back, he could see now that there hadn’t been much about marriage she’d liked except the Mrs. in front of her name. It made him wonder why she’d turned to Ross—or Ross to her, for that matter. They must’ve made quite a pair, two beautiful people intent on deceiving each other.
He could close his eyes and feel Laura’s warm skin, taste her mouth, and he could hear her whisper, “Yes, I want it, too.” And her body had proven her words. The only thing she’d been unwilling to do was touch his manhood. I can’t—I’ve never done that before. It made him wonder if Jesse had cheated her as Lydia had cheated him. He didn’t guess he’d ever know that answer either.
Well, he’d offered to marry her, and she’d turned him down, freeing his conscience if he wanted to go. And go he would, because he had to. Somewhere there was a four-year-old motherless little boy who needed him, who had no other relatives closer than distant cousins left, and Spence could not fail him. They’d be strangers, but the love would come later. No, Laura had made her choice to stay, and he had chosen to go. And sooner or later, she’d leave his mind. It had to happen that way.
He’d taken this job to escape from her, to avoid falling into a trap he’d regret, and it hadn’t helped him much. He’d just forsaken a warm cabin, good food, and clean clothes for nothing. Now he was wandering around picking up sticks so he could build a fire in a bucket, feast on buffalo jerky and rock-hard biscuits, then try to sleep with that howling wind slashing through canvas walls. And the memory of another woman who did not want him was driving him mad.
Forcing his thoughts from her to the task at hand, he reached for a hollow branch and stopped dead, nearly paralyzed by shadowy figures riding behind the black, skeletal branches of leafless trees so silently he had to blink to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. Spence edged back into the cottonwood grove, thinking he had to alert the rest of the camp without giving himself away. His stiff fingers sought and closed around the Navy Colt, drawing it soundlessly from his holster as he watched the Cheyenne war party skirt the small cluster of tents. They were after the picketed horses, and a big buck had his eye on Clyde.
Spence put two fingers in his mouth and gave a long, shrill whistle, and the big chestnut gelding’s head came up. The second time, the animal kicked over a barrel anchoring the rope picket and broke out, heading for him with mane and tail flying, and the commotion stampeded the others, alerting the men in camp. Rolling away from a blazing campfire, most of the crew scrambled to get behind a pile of ties while a man who had a repeating rifle handy covered them. Within seconds, the thundering booms of buffalo guns had picked off two Indians trying to round up the horses, and after a mad dash back for the bodies, the rest of the war party took off.
Matt Hadley yelled, “Where’s Hardin? Did the sons of bitches get Hardin?”
“There he is!” somebody answered, seeing Spence running toward them. “Damned if he ain’t got that big horse of his chasin’ him! Must’ve been him that sounded the alarm!”
“That’s some eyes you got, Mr. Hardin,” Hadley told him as he caught up to them. “Don’t know how you seed ’em at night, but if you hadn’t, I reckon as soon as they got the animals, they’d been back for scalps.”
“Yeah.”
“Reckon at least some of us owe you for that whistle. I’d say you’re damned lucky them injuns didn’t come right at you soon as they heard it,” the crew boss went on.
‘Ί thought they’d be too busy chasing horses.”
“Well, you got guts and a cool head to go with ’em, I’ll say that for you.”
‘Thanks.”
“Looks like they’ll be looking for easier pickin’s on up the road—guess I’d better send somebody to warn the main camp.”
“Aw, they ain’t going there,” Billy Watson argued. “‘Sides, ain’t no way any of us could get ahead of ‘em the way they was hightailin’ it out of here.”
“Better warn Hawthorne, anyway,” somebody else countered. “Hell, Bill, they been bold enough to run off government horses over at McPherson right under the cavalry’s noses. Looks like they’re headed that way again, and a bunch of railroad men’s bound to look better to ’em than the U.S. Army.”
“Humph!” Billy snorted. “If we put ’em on the run, they ain’t got no stomach for a real fight, Ben. No, sir, they’ll be lookin’ for easy pickin’s, all right, so I’d say it’s folks they can catch alone that’s in for trouble. Like last summer when they killed that old German farmer right outside Fort Kearny. Hell, you know he thought he was safe settlin’ in less than a mile from an army post, but by the time anybody heard the commotion and the soldiers got mounted up, the damned savages had scalped the old gent and got clean away.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Hadley murmured, nodding. “Snuck up on him right at sunup, and if any-body’d been looking, they’d seen it from the fort.”
“I’ll go,” Spence offered.
“I dunno—don’t seem like you been out here long enough to be trailin’ injuns.”
“I’ve got the strongest horse.”
“Something to be said for that, Mr. Hadley, ‘cause you know they’ll be switchin’ off to rest those ponies, which is how they keep the cavalry from catchin’ ’em,” Billy observed.
The older man considered Spence for a moment, then sighed. “Think you can find your way without taking the road? There’s not much cover anywhere, but you’re out in plain sight if you stay on it.”
“Yeah, but if I don’t get going, I won’t catch up to them between here and McPherson.”
“They might make camp for the night somewhere. Seems like the times you got to watch out for the sneaky bastards is right before sunup or right after sundown.” Without turning around, Hadley called over his shoulder, “Frank, you lend Hardin that Spencer—you got a Quick Loader for it, ain’t you? He don’t need to be trying to reload in a fight,”
As Spence swung into the saddle, Frank Davidson ran up to hand him the rifle and a cartridge loader for it. “There’s thirteen seven-round loads in there,” he said as Spence stuffed it into his coat. “All you got to do is open the butt-trap, pull out the magazine spring, and drop the load in. Soon as the spring’s back in, you’re ready to go again—whole thing takes about five seconds.”
“Beats my Colt,” Spence admitted. “Thanks.”
“Just don’t forget where you got it, ‘cause I’m lookin’ to get it back—you hear?”
“I will.”
Pulling wide on the reins and nudging the big chestnut with his knee, Spence turned Clyde toward the road, then leaned forward as he applied his spurs, and the horse took off like a bullet from a full charge of powder. It took almost a furlong for him to ease off a gallop into a canter. At a wide bend, Spence left the road to skirt along the row of trees following the river.
It took him close to an hour to get his first glimpse of the war party. Relieved that he hadn’t missed it entirely, he dropped back to trail the Indians at a distance until he could find enough cover to pass them. Slowing to a trot, then to a steady walk, Spence told himself they’d probably turn off somewhere before McPherson, and he was probably making a long ride in a miserably cold night for nothing. But he wasn’t taking any chances as long as they could be headed anywhere near Laura and Jessie. The thought had already crossed his mind that if they scouted the perimeter of the main camp, they stood a good chance of stumbling onto her cabin, and tomorrow morning was wash day. It’d be damned easy for them to catch her and Chen Li outside hanging the laundry.
Hell, he didn’t even know where they were going yet, he reminded himself again. Nebraska Territory was a big place, and it was damned unlikely that out of thousands of square miles of empty land, a small band of Cheyenne would find one very small cabin perched on the side of a hill. But at least he had an excuse for coming home, one they both could believe.
Forcing his straying mind back to the Indians ahead, Spence realized that while he’d been lost in thought, they’d gotten away. Or they’d seen him and were lying in wait up ahead. The thought was enough to make his scalp crawl. Spurring Clyde into a lope, he took the river side of the road, where the moonlight on the ice made it easier for him to see. As he came around a wide bend, he gave a sigh of relief.
Yeah, there were five of them riding right up the middle of the road, and he was close enough to hear them talking to one another. Slowing again, he widened the distance. If they fell silent, he didn’t want the sound of Clyde’s hoofbeats alerting them. With McPherson still more than thirty miles away, it was hard to guess where they were going. Maybe he was green when it came to Indians, but it didn’t seem reasonable that a war party of five would want to go anywhere near a fort.
They were stopping. Moving Clyde into the trees, Spence watched them, wondering what the hell they were doing, until he heard more riders. A larger party was joining them. The whole group dismounted and stood around while someone made a small fire. It looked as though they might camp for the night.
Spence dropped from his saddle to the ground, then crept closer. They were chattering like magpies, joshing each other, posturing. As the tinder flared, there was no mistaking the yellow streaks on their faces—it was a war party all right. More riders joined them, and their leader waved a war lance, dipping it close to the fire for the others to see. Long blond hair rippled in the flickering light. He’d taken a woman’s scalp, and he was bragging about it.
Moccasins crunched on dead leaves and sticks about twenty feet from Spence. He held his breath, thinking he’d been a fool to leave his horse. They’d posted a sentry, making it almost impossible for him to leave unnoticed.
Spence lay on his stomach in the frosted grass, fighting sleep, telling himself it was too cold, that he’d freeze if he didn’t stay awake. As tired as he was, it seemed like yesterday’s dawn had been in another lifetime. Now that he had time to think about it, he realized every muscle in his arms, shoulders, and back ached from a full day of digging up broken track and hammering down new rails. A nine-pound hammer, they’d called the one he’d swung, but by the end of the day, it had felt like ten times that heavy.
They weren’t picketing the ponies, so they weren’t planning on staying the rest of the night, after all. They were just gathering a large party before they went on—and swapping tall tales while they ate, by the sound of it. Spence kept his eyes open by counting them. Sixteen full-grown warriors and two young boys, one of whom looked white, even with that war paint on his face.
It seemed as though they were there for hours while Spence shivered in the sharp-bladed, icy grass. Finally, they buried the fire, chose fresh ponies, and mounted up. The sentry dropped from his perch on a rock to follow them. The whole war party took the road west toward McPherson again. If he had to guess, Spence thought they’d get there just before dawn. So sore he groaned when he pulled himself to his feet, he found Clyde and mounted up again.
Sometime later, he dozed, then caught himself as his chin dropped to his chest. Rallying, he looked over his shoulder. It was still dark overhead, but a layer of red hugged the horizon, fading to a pink haze before it met the sky. He’d been up almost twenty-four hours. And McPherson was just a couple of miles up the road.
It looked as if they were going to skirt the fort, surprising him, but then the two boys split away from the rest of the party, dropped to the ground, and snaked through the grass on their bellies, right past two soldiers on guard duty. Spence considered sounding an alarm, but the rest of the party stood a good chance of getting away before a troop of cavalry could mount up to chase them. Besides, it was the others who worried him—there wasn’t much of anything else out here except the railroad camp. And Laura’s cabin. The cavalry couldn’t get there in time to warn anybody, and Spence couldn’t get past the Cheyenne himself.
In the graying light, the boys emerged again with a pair of government horses. As bold as you please, they swung up onto the animals’ bare backs and rode off, leading their ponies. They’d tweaked the U.S. Army and gotten away with it.
They were going for the railroad camp, all right. Alert now, Spence realized if they raided it, there was a good chance some of them would ride up that hill. Digging in his coat pocket for the Quick Loader, he checked it, then reached for the Spencer rifle. Five seconds to reload, Frank Davidson had said, but he doubted that. Between the Colt and the Spencer, he had twelve bullets, and after that, it’d be hell reloading under fire. But as long as he had a breath in his body, that war party wouldn’t get Laura and Jessie.
He could see them clearly now, and he could see a faint curl of smoke rising above the cluster of white tents. At least someone was up to raise the alarm if he didn’t get there. The damned Indians were intent on surprise, and he intended to give them one. He cocked the Spencer’s side hammer, jerked on the reins, and dug his spurs into Clyde’s flank, praying the big horse still had enough left to make a run for it. The chestnut took off across the road to the left side, then shot down it, and headed straight for the Cheyenne.
Bending down against Clyde’s neck, Spence pulled the rifle’s trigger, and an Indian pony went down. His second shot hit one of the kids bringing up the rear. The boy pitched forward, then fell under the horse. The Indians wheeled to defend themselves and rode hell-for-leather toward Spence. Knotting the reins over his saddle horn, he reached across to draw the Colt with his left hand as he urged Clyde to go right through the middle of the war party.
He hit them firing both guns, and for a few seconds he was surrounded by yelling, yipping Cheyenne warriors. He felt a hot sting in his ribs, and then he was past them. Clyde staggered, and for a moment, Spence figured he was done for, but the big animal’s front legs regained their footing, widening the gap as the war party wheeled to pursue.
He hit the camp at full gallop, shouting, “Indian raid! Indian raid!” before he saw men already scrambling from tents. They’d heard the gunfire. Two of the grimiest fellows he’d ever seen were dragging out the wagon, while someone else had climbed onto it to load the Gatling.
“Hold your fire! Let ’em get close!” Spence yelled. Dismounting, he reloaded the Spencer, crawled behind a supply wagon, and drew a bead on the closest Indian. Still thinking they had a chance of overrunning the defenders, they charged. “Now!” A volley of rifle fire, followed by the steady spitting of the Gatling, shattered the dawn, and as half the Cheyenne dropped, the rest fell back, trying to get out of range, while men with Sharps took over, picking them off. Within minutes, the battle was over. As Spence stood up, he was surrounded by railroaders wanting to shake his hand.
“Mister Hardin, I been in four years of war, and I ain’t never seen anything like what you just did— you got to be either the nerviest or the stupidest sonofabitch I seen yet,” a grinning man told him.
But all he could think of was getting to Laura. Pushing through them, he pulled himself into his saddle, turned Clyde toward the path, and shouted, “I’ve got family to look after—cover me up the hill!” As the horse climbed, he could hear men running behind him.
Laura came awake with a start, sitting up in bed. For a moment, she thought maybe the baby had made a sound, but when she lit the lantern and crept to look into the cradle, Jessie was asleep, her little rosebud mouth working as though she nursed in her dreams. It must’ve been something stirring outside in the dawn.
Turning to the window, she froze, and the hair at the nape of her neck prickled, sending a shiver down her spine. The face pressed against the pane was painted, the black eyes watching her. Trying not to panic, she turned away as though she hadn’t seen the Indian, and she knelt over the cradle to tuck the shawl around Jessie while her mind raced. She knew every move she made could be seen from that window, and as soon as she got to a gun, she’d better be prepared to shoot.
She began humming, then started singing “Dixie” as she picked up Jessie. The startled baby blinked blankly; then her eyes focused, and she let go with an indignant cry that gained volume and intensity while Laura carried her into the kitchen area. Rummaging in the cupboard drawer, she eased Jesse’s old Colt into a fold of her skirt before she turned around. For a moment, she stood there, trying to figure out how she could make a stand, what she could get behind that could stop a bullet.
There were two sources of light—the lantern and the fire. And when she doused one, they’d probably attack—in fact, it was a wonder they hadn’t tried to break in already. The hopeful thought crossed her mind that maybe there was just one and he wasn’t hostile; then it died. Out here there wasn’t any such thing as a friendly Indian, and if there were, he wouldn’t have yellow paint on his face. He was just taking his time getting down to the business, she decided. Or he was waiting for others to catch up.
Stalling for more time, she carried Jessie to the fire and unhooked the kettle of hot water. If worse came to worst, the first one inside was going to get his face scalded. She’d heard too many gruesome tales to go to her fate tamely. As she carried the kettle close to the bed, she counted her bullets. Six in the Colt, not counting the double load in the shotgun, and the heavy slug in the Sharps. But those guns were on the other side of the room.
Laying Jessie under the bed, she hesitated, then blew out the lantern. Dropping to the floor, she crawled in the near darkness with one hand clutching the gun, the other reaching for the shotgun. Now she could hear a horse, and it was coming at a full gallop.
Gunfire burst like popcorn over a fire, and when she looked up, there was no one at the window. Not knowing if he was creeping toward the door or he’d been joined by others, she tensed her finger on one of the shotgun’s triggers, ready to fire the first barrel. It sounded like men were running and shouting. Then the door shook as someone pounded on it.
“Open up—it’s Spence!”
She sagged in relief, then started to cry, overwhelmed by the fullness of her heart.
When she didn’t answer, he pounded harder. “Laurie, are you all right?—for God’s sake, answer me!”
“Yes—yes, I’m fine!” she called out, scrambling for the door. “Spence … oh, Spence … thank God you’re here!” she cried through her tears.
As she slid back the bolt, he shouted over his shoulder, “She’s all right!” before he stumbled across the threshold into her arms. In the light of the doorway, she could see he was half frozen and utterly exhausted. Wrapping her arms tightly around him, she walked him toward the rocker. “You look like death warmed over,” she managed, “but you sure are a sight for sore eyes. You’d better sit down before you drop.”
“No—I just want to hold you.” Weaving, he held onto her as though she were his life. “If I lost you, I think I’d want to die,” he murmured into her hair. Unable to speak, she turned her face into his and found it as wet as her own. His hands moved over her back and shoulders; then he buried his face in her tangled hair, and she heard him whisper huskily, “Oh, God, I love you, Laurie—more than anything.”
She held his shirt tightly as she looked up at him through tears. “What did you just say?”
“I’ve chased a war party nearly sixty miles in the dark to tell you I love you. I want you to know that before I ask you again to marry me.” His palm smoothed her hair back from her face. “Laurie, I want to take you to San Francisco as my wife. I’m not asking because I feel obligated to—I’m asking because I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” He could see her lip quivering. “Hey, I don’t want you to cry.”
“I can’t help it—I just want you to mean it”
“I do. I should’ve never gone off and left you like that. All I could think of all the way home was how much you and Jessie mean to me. It was the longest sixty miles of my life—and the coldest.”
He’d said home. Feeling as though her heart would burst with happiness, she smiled through her tears. “I love you, too, Spence, and I guess I have for a long time now—ever since Jessie was born. I’d be proud to be your wife, but I want you to be sure yourself. I don’t want you to be ashamed of me later.”
“Ashamed of you? What on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m not like your people, Spence. I was raised poor, and I don’t know much about being a lady.”
As tired as he was, he had to gape for a moment before he shook his head. “I was raised by a man I wish you could’ve met, Laurie,” he said quietly. “He used to say class isn’t what you have—it’s what you do. He was probably the smartest man I’ll ever know. Last night as I was riding back, I couldn’t help thinking how much he would’ve liked you.”
“He sounds like somebody I would’ve liked, too,” she said softly. Leaning into him, she rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, wishing she could hold him forever. As cold as he was, it took a moment for her to realize her nightgown was being soaked by something warm. Steeping back for a look, she saw the wet place on his coat. “You’re hurt!”
He let her go reluctantly. “It looks worse than it is—a bullet grazed a rib, that’s all.”
“You’ve got to take off your coat and shirt and sit down so I can look at that. You can’t know how bad it is without looking.”
“I’m a doctor,” he reminded her. “I’m just going to wash it off with a little turpentine before I turn in. Right now, all I want to do is find a warm place and go to sleep. And say hello to Jessie,” he remembered. “She’s squalling someplace.”
“Jessie!” she gasped guiltily. “Oh, Spence—I left her under the bed! It was the only place I could think of where she’d be safe if bullets started flying.”
“I’ll get her.” He crossed the room and leaned down to pick up the baby. Her indignant wail ended in a hiccough as she moved her head back to look at him owlishly. Her chubby little fists waved, and her mouth blew bubbles. He held her close, nuzzling the soft, silky hair on her head with his cheek, feeling an intense tenderness for the tiny little girl. “Yes, Miss Jessie, you are a wonder,” he murmured. “And one of these days, you’re going to be as pretty as your mother.”
“And the apple of your daddy’s eye,” Laura said, taking the baby. As she carried the baby to a chair, Jessie’s eyes stayed on Spence. “I guess you’re as glad to see him as I am.” Sitting down, Laura pulled the shawl over her shoulder, then unbuttoned her bodice. “As soon as I get her fed, washed, and into dry clothes, I’ll take a look at that wound,” she told Spence.
“Just tell me where to find the turpentine.”
“I poured it into the bottle in your bag. I figured if you weren’t going to use those things, I might as well. I’ve been reading your formulary, too, just in case I want to make my own medicine.”
He didn’t answer, but Laura heard him rummaging in it. Her gaze dropped to her daughter, and watching the baby suck, she couldn’t help thinking how much she owed Spence, how much she loved him. Happy beyond belief, she began singing softly as Jessie closed her eyes, but that little mouth just kept working.
When she finally decided the baby had to be full, she eased her to her shoulder and stood up. “It won’t take long to wash her, and then I’ll fix you some eggs before you go to bed. I know you’re bound to be hungry.” Looking to his chair, she saw the open bottle of turpentine, the rag in the washbasin at his feet. His bloody shirt was hanging open, revealing a shallow gash over his rib cage where the bullet had grazed it. He was sleeping soundly.
Moving closer, she studied the well-chiseled face, the tousled black hair, thinking he had to be the handsomest man she’d ever met. And the best. He’d ridden all that way because he loved her. Looking lower to his bare chest, she couldn’t help remembering the feel of his skin against hers, and she felt weak all over. She’d never been loved like that before. But she would be again, she reminded herself. As hard as it was to believe yet, he was hers.
“Spence …” When he didn’t respond, she shook him. “Spence, you need lie down. It’s been a long day and night for you.”
“Huh?” He sat up and rubbed his face. “Yeah.” Pulling himself up, he stumbled over to the bed, fell in face first, then rolled onto his side, still fully clothed. His eyes closed again as soon as his head touched the pillow.
Leaning over, Laura pulled the heavy covers over him, then tiptoed away. As soon as she got Jessie down for her morning nap, she was going to get in bed with him and hold him. She wanted to be there when he woke up. She wanted to see him open those bright blue eyes.
There was a dusting of white already on the ground, and the hazy clouds were spitting snow. Holding the heavily bundled baby close, Spence hurried to the wagon. Behind him, Laura closed the cabin door, then ran across the yard. “I think I shall never see a March day that it does not snow,” he muttered, giving her a hand up.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m ready for spring, that’s all.” He waited for her to settle onto the wagon seat before he passed Jessie to her. Grasping the cold iron ring, he pulled himself up beside them and took the reins. “By now, everything’s green in Crawford County.”
“Spring’s day after tomorrow,” she reminded him placidly.
“Yeah—a couple of hundred miles south of here.”
“You don’t like cold weather, do you?”
“Does anybody?” he countered.
“I don’t mind it.” Pulling a blanket from under the seat, she wrapped it around her and the baby, then leaned against him. “I feel pretty lucky myself.”
Glancing down at the melting flakes in her hair, he was struck again by the beauty of the woman beside him. In less than an hour, she’d be his wife, the baby in her arms his daughter by choice, not birth. Yeah, he felt it, too. “You’ve got your mother’s Bible?”
“Yes.”
“Then I guess we’re ready,” he decided, slapping the reins over the same mismatched team that had brought them here.
“You’re sure you want to go through with this?” she dared to ask. “I don’t want you to think you have to.”
“I want to.” As the wagon creaked into motion, he added soberly, “I just hope you never think marrying me was a mistake.”
“I won’t.”
He couldn’t help thinking how different this was from the day he’d married Lydia. Everything Laura owned wouldn’t fetch what Cullen Jamison had paid for one of his daughter’s dresses. The ring Spence had put on that slender white finger had cost a pretty penny, too—he’d paid three hundred dollars for that pigeon blood ruby. He wondered if Ross had it now, or if Lydia had sold that with everything else. Surprisingly, it didn’t matter to him anymore.
It was Laura who deserved things like that. Instead, she was wearing the least faded of the only three dresses she had, and if he had to guess, he’d say she’d made all of them out of calico flour sacks like the ones Bingham used to give to his slaves. But worst of all, he hadn’t had time to get her any kind of ring, not even a dollar gold band. Maybe he should’ve waited until he could do this right, maybe he was just plain selfish for not even giving her time to think this marriage over, but he wanted her now. He wanted the right to wake up next to her tomorrow morning.
“You’re awfully quiet.”
“Am I?” He forced a smile. “I guess I was just thinking you deserved a whole lot better than you’re getting.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she told him, smiling herself. “I’d say a doctor’s a pretty good catch.”
He let that pass.
She sighed. “That’s not what you wanted to hear, is it? You’re still being pigheaded about going back to doctoring, aren’t you?”
“I don’t want to—I don’t know if I ever will. Right now, I don’t think so, anyway.”
“The war’s over, Spence. You’d be healing folks instead of cutting off their legs and holding their guts in.”
“You don’t forget anything, do you?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “Daddy always said to put everything I read or heard into my mind and keep it, because it’s hard to tell what’s important and what’s not until it’s needed. In a lot of ways, he was like your Reverend Bingham, but he didn’t have the money for an education. If he’d had the chance, he would’ve made a good preacher.”
Thinking to change the subject away from himself, he asked, “And your mother—what was she like?”
“Mama?” She considered for a moment, then spoke slowly. “Well, everybody said I got my looks from her, and my mind from him, but it’s hard to tell. In her own way, she was a pretty smart woman when it came to things that mattered. She took sick a long time before she died, so she tried to prepare me for losing her. Galloping consumption, they called it, but it didn’t gallop—it was more like it crawled—she just got sicker slowly,” Laura recalled. “So she was able to teach me to do things a little bit at a time. I was nine when she first started coughing, and she didn’t die until I was eleven. She started showing me how to cook, because she was afraid we’d catch it from the food she fixed; then it was the washing and the cleaning, and in the last year it was how to take care of Danny if he got sick, what it’d be like when I was growing up, becoming a woman, getting married.”
“She sounds like she was a remarkable woman.”
“She was. She was afraid I wouldn’t remember everything, so she wrote it all down until she was too weak to write anymore. There were pages and pages of it—she filled three housekeeping journals for me.”
“I would’ve liked to have read them.”
“Well, I’ve still got all of them packed away in a box. I used to get those journals out and read them when things were bad, and I’d know if she could take the time to write all that down as sick as she was, I could do it. When we left North Carolina, Jesse wanted me to burn them—he said we didn’t have any room for anything we didn’t have to have—but I sneaked them into a box with the towels, anyway. They just meant too much to me to let them go. It was the same way with Mama’s Bible. He said we didn’t have any use for more than one, but she’d written down all the births, marriages, and deaths in hers and Daddy’s families in it, and I’d kept it going, so I wasn’t about to part with that either. That’s why I wanted to bring it today. It’s like having them with me.”
He reached for her hand, covering it with his, thinking how small it was. “Laura, I’m going to do my damnedest to take care of you and Jessie—as long as I’ve got breath in my body, it’s not going to be like that anymore. I don’t want you scrimping and saving and doing without, and it’s my job to see you don’t have to. You’re going to have what you deserve.”
“Just don’t treat me like Jesse—please,” she said, looking up at him. “He said he wanted me to have a big, fine house, a fancy carriage, things like that, but it was him that wanted them, and whenever things went wrong between us, he’d always throw it up to me that he was working himself to death for me. I don’t want to live like that, Spence—I’ve got nothing against having things if they’re what we want, but I want us to work together for them—I want us to be partners, Spence. In everything. I don’t want to be left out, then blamed for something I didn’t do. I don’t want to be left by myself on some pedestal, and just get dusted off when you happen to think about it.”
“I want to take care of you, Laura.”
“I’ve got to think that what I do means something, too—even if it’s just cooking and sewing and keeping the house clean. I spent too many years alone, and then I got myself a husband who didn’t want to talk to me—he and Danny’d get together and make plans for me, thinking they were my plans, too, but they weren’t. I’m not saying I didn’t love Jesse, or he didn’t love me—it’d be a lie to say that—I’m saying I wish he’d just listened to me sometimes.” Taking in a deep breath, she exhaled heavily. don’t guess that makes much sense to a man, does it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to be respected, Spence. Nobody ever loved anybody more than Mama and Daddy loved each other. Maybe they went through hell on this earth and everything was a struggle for them, but they did it together. I saw it, and that’s what I want.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal. I’ve always appreciated honesty, Laura.”
“No, I’ve got myself half a deal. I didn’t mean to make a speech just now, but since I did, you’ve got a turn coming, too. I’d like to know what you want from me.”
“I’m a man—the things I want are pretty simple.”
“Food on the table, clean clothes, and a clean house?”
“Well, I’d like that, too,” he admitted. Sobering, he looked into the depths of those beautiful eyes for a long moment. “What I want most is a woman who loves me, who wants me to touch her, who wants to wake up beside me. I want you to want me as much as I want you, Laura.”
She felt the lump rise in her throat. “Heart, body, and soul,” she answered huskily. “You won’t ever have to ask for that. You’ve got yourself a deal, Spencer Hardin.”
“Anything else you feel like settling here and now?”
“Children. If you’re thinking because I had a hard time twice before, I won’t want anymore—well, you’re wrong. We’ll have Josh and Jessie, I know, but we’ve got to have at least one more to tie them together and make them feel they belong to both of us. Then they’d each have blood in common with a little brother or sister. And two would be even better, because from what I’ve seen, an even number of kids makes for less quarreling.”
“You don’t plan on leaving much to chance, do you?” he teased her, grinning.
“Well, it’s up to God to decide whether they’re girls or boys. All I can do is tell him I’d like one of each.”
He reined up in front of the half-finished company store and tied the traces to a rusty nail at his feet. “You probably won’t want to wake up Jessie yet, so I’ll just go in and ask where we can find the preacher.”
“His name is Farrell, and he’s got the last tent before you’re out of camp.”
“Yeah, but they’re starting to build now, so he could’ve moved.”
“I don’t think that’s likely.”
“Just the same, I’d like to check.”
As he disappeared into the store, she leaned back against the board behind her. The snow was coming down steadily now, filling the air with huge white flakes, but in the absence of the usual wind, it made for a lovely, peaceful scene. By tonight, the countryside would be blanketed, making the little cabin seem isolated in a world all its own. As soon as she got home, she would put on supper, then play with Jessie before she fed her. She hoped the baby would be tired enough to go to sleep early.
She had two big white candles she’d been saving for years, waiting for something special to happen before she used them, and tonight she’d place them on the tables by the bed. When Spence came in from tending the animals, she’d have herself washed with that sliver of lavender-scented soap she kept in her underwear drawer, and she’d be wearing her tucked lawn nightdress with nothing underneath. It’d be a little cold this time of year, and it might shock Spence, but he’d probably appreciate not having to help her out of any extra clothes.
Closing her eyes, she relived every sensuous moment of that night almost two weeks ago, and she felt weak with the wanting again. He’d find her more than willing to keep her half of the bargain tonight and every night thereafter, whenever he wished. She wouldn’t have to lie awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering if there was anything left in this life for her anymore. She’d be Mrs. Spencer Hardin, his wife, the mother of the rest of his children.
“Well, you were right,” she heard him say. When she opened her eyes, he was climbing up beside her, then stowing a sack under his seat. “His name’s Farrell, and he’s right up the street.”
“What’s that?”
“Not enough, but it’ll have to do until we can get something better.”
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Smoke curled from a firepot at the side of the last tent, and Spence took it for a hopeful sign. “Looks like he’s home,” he observed, pulling up in front. Retrieving the sack, he braced a boot on the wooden block he’d nailed to the side of the wagon, and he dropped to the ground. “Hand me the baby, and I’ll help you down.” Taking Jessie, he balanced her against his hip, then reached for Laura. She missed the step and slid the length of him before she gained her feet. “Are you all right?” he asked quickly.
“Well, if you weren’t marrying me, I’d be pretty embarrassed, but otherwise I’m fine. Here—I’ll hold her.”
“No sense in passing her back and forth, is there? We’re getting along all right.” Shifting Jessie to his shoulder, he took Laura’s arm. Squinting into the falling snow, he exhaled fully. “Well, I guess this is it.”
“Right now, you look like a man about to be hanged,” she chided.
“No. I just wish it was a church, that’s all, but I guess the words will be the same.”
“I expect so.” Pausing to look up at him, she added, “You can still escape, you know.”
“Not on your life. I went through hell getting here last night, wondering if you were all right, and I’m not leaving again without you.”
“Then I guess we’d better go in.”
As they ducked under the tent flap, a man stood up. To Spence, he looked more like a gambler down on his luck than like any man of God he’d ever seen. Seedy was the word that came to mind. And the way the fellow was looking at Laura irritated him.
“Are you the Reverend Farrell?” he asked finally.
“I might be. Depends on what you’ve got in mind.”
Feeling Spence’s arm tense under her hand, Laura stepped forward quickly. “This is Dr. Spencer Hardin, and I’m Laura Taylor. We were hoping you could marry us.”
Farrell’s gaze shifted to the baby on Spence’s shoulder, and his mouth curved knowingly. “Little late now for that, I’d say.”
“She’s a widow,” Spence snapped. “I was a friend of her husband. Come on, Laura—let’s go. You don’t have to put up with this.”
“No. A shifty-eyed messenger doesn’t make the message wrong,” she declared, holding onto his arm. “Are you licensed to perform marriages, Mr. Farrell?”
“I am.”
“Of what persuasion?”
“Baptist.”
“If he is, you can bet he’s been defrocked,” Spence muttered.
“There’s all different kinds of Baptists,” she said mildly. “You can either go ahead with this, or you can tell me you don’t want to marry me.”
“Damn it, Laura, Thad Bingham would turn over in his grave if he could see the fellow.”
“Yes, well, he’s not here, and there’s not another preacher around, unless you want to go over to McPherson tomorrow.”
“It’s about time for supper,” Farrell told them, “so you’d better make up your minds. It’s a dollar-fifty if you just want the words, nine if you want a fancy Bible to go with ’em.”
“I have my own Bible, sir, but I’d be obliged if you’d sign the wedding, page for us.”
“I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
“You want him to marry us?” Spence asked incredulously.
“I don’t want to wait for tomorrow,” she said softly. “I’ve already got a big supper planned.”
The way she said it made his mouth go dry, and the pressure of her small hand on his sleeve told him he hadn’t gotten the message wrong. “It’s your wedding,” he managed finally. “If you’re satisfied, I am.”
The words were brief, the vows amounting to little more than two “I do’s” apiece, and then Farrell was signing the territorial certificate and Laura’s Bible. As he handed over the money, Spence asked the man, “You in a hurry to get someplace?”
“As a matter of fact, I am—there’s some boys getting up a poker game over at the hog ranch, and I told ‘em to count me in.”
Handing her into the wagon again, Spence told her, “I’ve half a mind to drive over to the fort, anyway. You can’t even feel married after that.”
Settling onto the seat, she took Jessie before she retrieved the folded certificate from the Bible. “Well, it’s got our names spelled right, and the seal makes it legal. And to tell you the truth, I’d rather go home than anywhere right now. But if it’d make you feel better, once we’re out of sight, you’re welcome to kiss your bride.”
As he forked hay for the two horses and the mule, Spence knew he ought to be bone-tired after an all-night ride followed by less than five hours of sleep, but he wasn’t. And he wasn’t hungry either. He’d sat across the table, watching how her hair shone in the lantern light, the way her smile lit up those beautiful eyes, thinking he had to be the luckiest man alive. Right now, he couldn’t even remember what he’d had for supper.
Today, he’d made himself responsible for a wife and daughter, and tonight he’d make himself a husband, sealing those few words he’d said earlier with his body. And, God willing, it’d be right this time, and this union would heal her pain and his anger with the balm of love and give him a measure of peace.
Maybe it already had. He didn’t hate Lydia anymore—he could think of her now without feeling much of anything. But he didn’t know how he felt about Ross yet, whether he still wanted to kill him, and he probably wouldn’t know until he found Josh. And he had the gnawing fear that might never happen. Come May, the trail would be cold, and if Ross wasn’t still in San Francisco when he got there, he might never know if Josh had gotten there alive, if Ross still had him, or for that matter, if both of them had died of cholera somewhere along the way. There might not even be a marked grave.
His thoughts turned to the woman inside, and he realized in his anger with Farrell, he’d forgotten to give her his gift. Laying the pitchfork aside, he checked the place where an Indian lance had glanced off Clyde’s flank, then rubbed some of Laura’s goose grease and turpentine salve on it. The snow crunched under his boots as he walked back, but for the first time all winter, he didn’t mind it. Tonight, he had a roaring fire, a soft feather bed, and the prettiest woman on earth waiting for him.
Inside the door, he pulled off his boots, hung his coat on the peg, and headed for the fire before Laura caught his eye, and he stopped dead in his tracks. Two candles burned by the bed, casting her shadow on the wall. Her bare arms were pale in the soft light as she brushed her shining hair. He felt his mouth go dry with desire as his hungry gaze took in her bare legs, the outline of her body under the thin nightdress.
“You’re going to freeze to death in that,” he heard himself warn her.
She turned around, and her mouth curved into a smile. “I’m expecting you to keep me warm, Spence,” she answered softly. “I’ve been saving these candles for years, but if you want, I’ll blow them out.”
“No. I’d like to see all of you,” His pulse pounding in his ears, he walked toward the bed, unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers felt too big, too clumsy for the little holes. As she slid off the side of the bed to face him, he smiled crookedly. “I guess I could use a little help.”
He closed his eyes and stood as still as stone while she finished taking off his shirt. It was as though every inch of his body was acutely aware of hers. He could smell lavender on her skin, feel the heat of her hands on his bare chest, on the buttons of his pants, and he could hear her sharp intake of breath as he grew beneath her fingers. Instead of backing away, she touched him lightly, running her fingertips the length of him, sending an exquisite ripple of desire through his whole being.
“I never thought a man’s body could be beautiful, Spence,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “but you are.”
As her hands slipped under his waistband, he caught his fingers in her silken hair, imprisoning her face for his kiss. He tasted her warm lips eagerly until she parted them, giving him access to her mouth. While his tongue explored its depths, his pants loosened, then slipped down his legs, followed by his drawers.
There was no other time, no other place than this, no other woman beyond the one in his arms. His hot mouth devoured every part of her he could reach, while his hands moved over the thin lawn, smoothing it against her back and hips, molding her body into his. His blood coursed through his veins as though it were liquid fire, igniting every sense with total desire.
She pulled away to whisper breathlessly, “Tell me what you want, Spence, and I’ll want it, too.”
“I want to know every inch of you.”
He could see her throat move as she swallowed, the rise and fall of her chest beneath the thin cotton lawn, and his own breath caught as she untied the satin ribbon over her breasts, then quickly released the row of tiny buttons, revealing the white skin, the pink nipples. Her arms came up, her hands grasped the crocheted neckline, and she pulled the nightgown over her head slowly, letting the hem linger at her knees, her thighs, her waist, before her gleaming body emerged whole. For one brief moment, her composure wavered under his gaze; then she managed a smile.
“Here I am.”
“God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered hoarsely.
Stepping out of the trousers and drawers at his ankles, he followed her as she backed toward the bed. The naked desire in his eyes fueled her own. As the back of her leg touched the edge of the bedstead, he caught her and they sank into the depths of the feather mattress. Her last rational thought was that he was hers, that she didn’t have to hold anything back now. There’d be no shame in giving him anything he wanted.
As his mouth explored her ear, her throat, her breasts, her hands opened and closed restlessly in his hair. Turning her away from him, he nuzzled the nape of her neck, her shoulder, while his arms circled her, his palms brushed her nipples, his fingers stroked her belly to the thatch below. Parting her legs, she gave herself over to his probing fingers until her breath came in great panting gasps, her low moans rising into a crescendo of cries. As his hand left her, he rolled her over him, and her whimpered protest died as she took him inside.
“I’m all yours now,” he panted. “Do what you want.”
She moved tentatively at first, savoring the feel of him. When she looked down, his eyes were closed, his expression intense as his body anticipated every twist, every rock. “Ride,” he urged her. “Ride hard! Now!” Grasping her hips with both hands, he bucked beneath her, pounding into her as she ground her body against his, seeking ecstasy. Biting her lip, she worked harder, until she felt it build, until the flood sated her. Drawing her knees tight against his sides, she curled forward into his embrace, exhausted.
Despite her weight on him, he felt as though his mind floated, buoyed by the languorous peace of utter physical fulfillment. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to move. He just held her, listening to her ragged breath, feeling her heart pound above his chest. Finally, he reached to stroke her damp hair back from her temple.
“I love you, heart, body, and soul,” he whispered, giving her own words back to her. “I swear it.” The back of his hand brushed her cheek. “Laurie, are you crying?”
“Yes, but I can’t help it—I just love you so much I can’t stand it.” Turning her face into his shoulder, she confessed, “I’m a crier, Spence—sometimes, I cry when I’m too happy to laugh.”
“I guess you had a good time,” he murmured.
Her fingers crept to caress his bare shoulder.
“What makes you think that?” she managed to ask.
“Well, for one thing, you were howling your head off,” he teased her. “I thought Jessie’d wake up and think I was killing you.”
“I did not.”
“Oh, yes, you did. I never heard such caterwauling in my life before tonight.”
She could feel her cheeks redden, and she was grateful he couldn’t see her face right now. “Well, it was probably from shock—I … uh … well, I never . . . ,” Her face was so hot she couldn’t go on.
“Never what?”
“Well, Jesse wasn’t … I mean, I was never on top before. But I liked it … I just didn’t know anybody did this quite that way. I guess he just wasn’t one to spend much time courting—he …” Her voice trailed off guiltily. “One man doesn’t want to hear about another, does he?”
“Only if he’s better.”
“Much, much better.”
“Then it’s all right.”
“There wasn’t anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t much for hugging and kissing.” She felt his arms tighten around her, holding her even closer. “Most nights, I didn’t know he was interested until he pulled up my nightgown and put his knee between my legs.”
“He probably would’ve suited Lydia better than I did. I don’t know what Ross thought he was getting with Liddy, because she wasn’t exactly a passionate woman—she liked being admired by men, and she enjoyed flirting with them, but she was pretty repelled by where it led.”
“But she was so beautiful.”
“No more than you—no more than you,” he said softly. “And you’ve got a hundred times more heart than she did. But unless you’ve got an overwhelming interest in her, I’ve said about all I want to on the subject. I just want to lie here with you.”
“Yes.” She felt him slip from her as she eased off him. “But I almost feel sorry for her, because she didn’t know what she could’ve had with you. That’s the last thing I’m going to say about her—she cheated herself as much as she cheated you.”
“That’s two things,” he reminded her, turning against her. “Did anybody ever tell you, Mrs. Hardin, that you have the most incredible eyes?” he murmured.
“No, but I always wished they were darker.”
“Now that would be a pity. There’s nothing I’d change about you but your hands, and that won’t take long.”
“They’ve always been pretty rough. And hanging wet clothes out in this weather doesn’t help them any,”
“Wait here—I’ll be right back.” Picking up his shirt, he covered himself before he walked over to the table. When he returned, he had the mysterious sack, and he had a smug grin on his face. “I’ve got the real wedding present on order from Omaha, but this will have to do for now,” he said, climbing back into bed.
“But I didn’t give you anything.”
“You just did.”
“Yes, but that’s not—”
“Go ahead—take a look inside.”
“Well, one’s a jar of something,” she observed curiously. Holding one to the light, she read, “ ‘Mrs. Holland’s Recipe for Soft Skin.’ I sure need that.”
“Go on,”
She took out a flat, tissue-wrapped package. As she unfolded the paper, she gasped, “It’s beautiful!”
“It’s just a comb.”
“But it’s silver—and it’s got little roses on it.”
“There’s one more.”
It was a stoppered bottle. Holding it gingerly, she removed the glass top and sniffed the contents. “It smells a little like lilacs—Spence, this is French perfume! Real French perfume!”
“I thought it smelled pretty good,” he admitted.
“Good! It’s lovely, that’s what it is. I’ve never had any perfume in my life—ever.”
“Then it’s about time.”
“But you must’ve spent a fortune!”
“No.”
“I’ll bet it was close to ten dollars.”
“It was a tad more than that.”
“Then I didn’t need it.”
“Well, since I won’t be buying you a ticket east, I could afford a lot more than this. I would’ve, too, but the sutler didn’t have much to choose from.”
“But these are women’s things, so I wonder who he thought he could sell them to.” She wet the stopper, then dabbed the perfume behind her ears. “How do I smell?”
“Good enough to kiss,” he answered, taking the bottle from her. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never tell her it had been ordered by someone at the hog ranch. Reaching past her, he set the bottle next to one of the burning candles. “You know,” he murmured, nuzzling the nape of her neck, “there are more than two ways, if you’re interested.”
As his warm breath caressed the sensitive skin there, she felt a shiver of excitement, and she knew exactly what he was talking about. “How many?” she asked weakly.
“Probably dozens.”
Turning over to face him, she slid her arms around his neck. “Oh, then, I want to learn all of them,” she whispered huskily.
“It’ll take a little time,”
“We’ve got the rest of our lives, don’t we?” With the scent of French lilacs rising from her skin and the flickering light of a candle reflected in her eyes,
Laura settled deeper into the feather bed. “But I expect we’ll need some practice.”
As he lowered his head, Laura’s lips parted, inviting him to love her again, and he felt whole in heart, body, and soul.
Perched on the seat of the wagon, Laura wrote in her journal, despite the roughness of the road. At her feet, Jessie lay snugly wrapped in the wooden box Chen Li had made for them. A gift, he’d called it when he’d come to take possession of the cabin. It’d taken some doing, but Laura had finally managed to persuade the railroad officials to let him have it, using the argument that it was ideally suited to the laundry business she’d just sold to him. In her last memory of the odd little Chinese man, he’d shown up in red silk padded pajamas to bid them good-bye, then stood in the cabin doorway to wave them out of sight.
To mark her new life with Spence, she’d started this journal the day after her wedding, and she intended, to keep writing in it until she died or went blind. Someday, it would belong to Jessie, so she filled her account of each day with descriptions of what she’d done and seen, observations of people she met, the little joys and hardships of travel in the prairie schooner Spence had bought for this journey, daily recipes, and whatever advice struck her mind. While Spence teased her, saying she was writing so much she’d need a whole library just to store her journals by the time she was done, she wrote in the hope Jessie would cherish them as much as she’d cherished those her own mother had kept for her.
One thing she wouldn’t recommend was traveling so far in a wagon. Even with a new team of six mules pulling it, the cumbersome Conestoga was slow, grinding out the miles at a rate of three to the hour on flat road, less than two where it was rocky, and hours to the mile on the steep, winding grades of mountain passes. By the time she got to California, she was sure her behind would be made considerably wider by sitting all these days on the hard wooden seat.
Not that the trip so far was without interest. She and Spence had fallen in with a military wagon train headed west from Fort Kearny in Nebraska to establish a new fort of the same name in northern Wyoming, journeying with them between McPherson and the place where the Bozeman Trail left the Platte Road to head toward Montana. The army wagons had been accompanied by the remarkable old mountain man Jim Bridger, who’d had nothing good to say about Mormons, but was considerably more philosophical when it came to Indians, possibly because he was reported to have married more than one of them in the course of his colorful life. She’d duly recorded his observation, “Whar you don’t see no Injuns thar, they’re sartin to be the thickest.” Not a comforting thought given the ever-increasing hostility of the Sioux and the Cheyenne to the hordes of whites settlers, even though most of them were crossing the land, not moving in for good.
Indian troubles seemed to be on everybody’s mind as war parties shadowed the Platte and Bozeman routes, harassing wagon trains, running off horses and cattle brought along for milk and meat, and cutting off anyone who lagged behind. Well-armed men had to go out in groups to get firewood, and only fools strayed from night camps. A headstrong Miss Peake, declaring, “I refuse to be intimidated by the rumor of heathens,” had walked over a hill and disappeared two days out of Fort Casper, Laura had noted in the journal.
Unlike the military train, which had had seven hundred soldiers, more than two hundred wagons, and ambulances carrying officers’ wives and children, the group they were with now was terribly small—forty-two people in ten Conestogas, four supply wagons, sixty-four oxen, nine mules, and twenty-three cows, all guided by a former army scout and a half-breed Crow, who only spoke to the scout.
Several disputes had broken out since Fort Casper over Matthew Daniels beating his pregnant wife so badly she now walked with a cane. After a brawl between Daniels and the other men resulted in his being exiled, his wife and five children had refused to go with him, and the desperate family was now trying to survive on handouts and by living in one of the supply wagons. Every time Laura saw Abigail Daniels, she tried to give her something. She remembered too well what it was like to be dirt poor.
“You’ll be down to nubs and out of paper long before we reach California,” Spence commented.
“I don’t want to forget anything—since she’s too young to remember her journey, I want Jessie to know everything about it.”
“Everything?” he teased, raising an eyebrow. “How much have you put about me in there?”
“Not quite everything,” she admitted. “I try to keep it decent enough for her to read. Maybe someday she’ll have children who’ll want to know what life was like in 1866. As much as things have changed in the twenty-five years I’ve been living, there’s no telling what’s going to happen before I die. They might want to know about goose grease salve and willowbark tea someday. Or about what was in a Conestoga, for that matter. Once the railroad gets clear across the country, not too many folks are going to travel like this.”
“Is that the sort of thing your mother wrote for you?”
“Well, we didn’t go anywhere to write about, so hers was mostly how to take care of things, what to use, how to tell what ailments we had, how to make up her home remedies and special concoctions, things like that.”
“I’d still like to read it. I’d like to know what you were like as a little girl.”
“Daddy used to say I was ‘yaller-haired and skinny’—my hair didn’t start turning brown until I was thirteen or fourteen. And Mama didn’t write much about how I was—it was more about what I ought to do. Only thing she said much about me was I used to get sick a lot, and she was afraid my lungs were weak, and I’d get her consumption, she used to grease my chest up every night it was cold out with stuff she made out of turpentine, camphor, clove oil, and lard; then she’d wrap a long piece of flannel around me until I looked like one of those Egyptian mummies when I went to bed. I don’t know what it did for my lungs, but my nose never got stuffed up. She put that recipe in one of those journals, along with a lot of others. She had concoctions for everything from cleaning soot out of chimneys to making hair shine.”
“Did you use all of them?”
“If I had the ingredients handy. And whether you believe it or not, they all worked. And some of her medicines were a lot like ones in your formulary—when she dosed a body up, he knew he was dosed. She just couldn’t do anything with consumption, though, and she sure tried. Mama wanted to live to see me and Danny grow up more than anything.”
“Yeah. She would’ve been proud of you, Laura.”
“I hope so—I’d like to think so, anyway.”
“She would.”
“I still miss her. I’d give anything if she could be here now, if you could know her.”
“I’ll get to know her through those journals.”
“You really want to read them?”
“Very much. I don’t know too many remarkable people—most of them just think they are.”
“Well, you are.”
“No. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I spent years learning to do something I came to hate, so it was pretty much a waste of my time and Thad Bingham’s money. When I showed up at your tent over by Kearny, I was going to San Francisco to kill Ross—maybe Lydia, too—then. I was planning to take Josh up to Canada and hide out someplace the law wouldn’t find me. I didn’t even know what I was going to do after that.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know what I’ll do to Ross when I see him. A lot depends on what he’s done with Josh.”
“But you’re not going to kill him.”
“No, but I may horsewhip him within an inch of his life. Since I’ve got a wife and family to look after, I’m not going to do anything that’ll get me hanged.”
“It still hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly.
“I haven’t thought about it in a while, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Not even about Lydia?”
“Just as Josh’s mother. She’s not part of me like you are, and she never was. If I’d had the time to get to know her, I’d have spared myself a lot of grief. She wasn’t anything like I thought she was, and she obviously thought I was somebody else. I don’t even know why she wanted to marry me—maybe because we both had black hair and she thought we’d look like a matched pair.”
“You’re a handsome man, Spencer Hardin.”
“I don’t know. I just know if she hadn’t left me, living with her would’ve been hell for both of us. I had all those dreams about coming home to her loving arms, and that’s all they were—dreams, delusions. Separation made it easier to pretend we had something—I could look at the picture of her and Josh, and it would take my mind off the hell I was in then without having to give much thought about what she was really like.”
“You’re still bitter, Spence.”
“No, the bitter part’s over—life’s downright sweet now. I’ve got you and Jessie to love, and the only thing that’s missing is Josh.”
“We’re going to find him. He’s been in my prayers every night, and I know we’re going to find him.”
“If he’s not dead. If he and Ross both came down with cholera, there wouldn’t have been anyone to put up markers for them. A year later, anybody coming through would never find the graves, even if they’d been buried. Hell, for all I know, the wolves could’ve eaten the bodies, and left nothing but a few bones.”
Laying aside the journal, she turned to him. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that—it’s faith that carries a person through, not pessimism. You’ve got to believe, or you can’t make it happen.”
“I’m in this wagon, Laurie. If I didn’t think there was a chance, I’d be going east not west. Unless we have a child, he’s the last of my blood, and that means everything to a man. He may be the only one to carry on my name. As much as I love Jessie, she can’t do that for me—she’ll have her husband’s name, not mine. And until then, she’ll grow up a Taylor, not a Hardin.”
“I don’t guess she has to,” Laura murmured.
“It wouldn’t be right to take that away from Jesse. He wanted that baby,”
“Like every other man, he wanted a son, Spence. When we lost the other baby, it was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wanted that boy so bad.”
“He nearly lost you, Laura.”
“That made him mad—it was his son he wept over.”
“It’s the name I’d feel bad about—it’s all he had to leave her. I’ll have the joy of raising her, of watching her grow up. I’ll be the one some totally unworthy boy asks for her hand in marriage. I’ll be the one not wanting to give her away to him. Jesse won’t be here to see it, but I will. Besides, her middle name’s Spencer, so she’ll know I wanted her to have it. I just don’t want to take Jesse from her.”
“I have to believe he knows we’re in good hands,” she said softly. “I have to believe he’d be pleased.”
“You don’t think about him much, do you?”
“I do when I look at her—she’ll hold her head in just such a way sometimes that I can see him in her. And there’s an emptiness, a sadness that doesn’t completely go away. But it’s tempered with happiness, because I’ve got you. We’ve got something that he and I never had—we talk, we share, we show our love to each other. Maybe he wanted to, but he couldn’t do those things. I know he loved me, and I know I loved him, but in a lot of ways, the depth just wasn’t there. He made up his mind about things, and that’s the way they were. He never asked, he just told me what I wanted, Spence. I had to follow him to Nebraska because he wanted to go.”
“You’re following me to California.”
“Maybe that’s the difference—I don’t want to be without you. I got used to being without Jesse.”
The late afternoon sun haloed her brown hair with gold and lit those light brown eyes, filling him with pride, not only in her beauty, but her artlessness. Everything about her was the genuine article.
“You’re always honest, aren’t you?” he said softly.
She cocked her head at that, and the corners of her mouth lifted into a elfin smile. “Well, not quite always,” she murmured. “I told you to go when I didn’t want you to leave. When I told you to pack your clothes and take them with you on the rep track, I had to figure out some way to make you come back.”
“Oh?” ‘
“The morning you left, I told you I couldn’t get all your clothes ready, that you’d need to stop back by for them, but since I’d already ironed the shirts, I had to stick them in the washtub so they wouldn’t be done. I wasn’t going to chance never seeing you again.”
“But you weren’t going to let me live there. You’d already told me I’d have to find another place to stay.”
“That part of it wasn’t a lie. I just wanted you to have to come by for a visit. I thought maybe if you’d had time to clear your head some, you might rethink your proposal.”
“As I recall it, it was you who turned me down,” he reminded her.
“Well, there wasn’t any enthusiasm in it. You thought you were obliged to marry me, but you didn’t want to do it. If I didn’t mean anything to you, that proposal wasn’t worth anything to me either. I may be practical, but I’ve got my pride, Spence.”
“I know. I must’ve heard the charity speech a dozen times.”
“Some people take a while to learn.” Changing the subject abruptly, she noted, “We ought to be stopping before long, so I’ve got to figure out what I can fix that will have enough leftovers to feed Abby and her family.”
“Food for six people isn’t leftovers, Laurie. It’s the whole meal.”
“I know, but she’s got her pride, too. If she thought I’d made something up just for them, she wouldn’t want to take it, and those boys of hers are beginning to look kind of scrawny. Here she’s got a baby teething, another one on the way, and four more under the age of six. If I ever cross Matt Daniels’s path again, I’ll horsewhip him. Spence, that’s a baby a year!”
“So much for your mother’s theory about nursing.”
Ignoring that, she went on. “And day before yesterday, Jimmy tore a hole in his leg when he fell out of the wagon. He caught it on an old nail sticking out the side.”
“Which one’s Jimmy?”
“He’s four. I think you ought to take a look at it, Spence. She says it’s beginning to fester.” As he took on a pained expression, she shook her head. “I’m not asking you to practice medicine—I’m asking you to look. Maybe you can tell her what to do for it.”
“That is practicing medicine.”
“You’re a surgeon. I’m not asking you to cut it off. Besides, I told her you’d give her some advice when they come to supper.”
He suppressed a groan. “I don’t mind feeding them, Laurie, but I’d rather not eat with six little heathens. I’m tired, and they’ll be crawling over everything,”
“It’d be better if they weren’t all boys,” she conceded. “But there’s only five—it’ll be a couple of months before there’s six.”
“They’re like a litter of mongrel puppies, fighting and yipping all the time.”
“You don’t even know them. All you see is them running around when we make camp.”
“Everywhere. If they were mine, I’d tie ‘em down.”
“There’s no room in that supply wagon. How does ham and greens with bread and jam sound?”
“Meager for nine people.”
“Nine?”
“I can eat at least enough for two.”
“Well, there’s enough ham for that,” she said. “I’ll have to boil it before I fry it to get some of the salt out, and that’ll make it swell up some. You don’t mind, do you, Spence?”
“I guess not. I just hope they don’t get Jessie tuned up for the night.”
“They’re more apt to tucker her out. After I feed her, she’ll probably sleep like the dead until morning. And as cozy as it is back there, that’s not exactly a bad thing, is it?” A slow, seductive smile curved her mouth as she added huskily, “I’ll make the inconvenience of company up to you later.”
“You’re shameless—you know that, don’t you?”
“But you love me.”
“Very much. Heart, body, and soul.”
“She’s definitely going to sleep tonight,” Laurie said. “Even if I have to wool her around a little myself.”
As Spence washed up after tending to the mules for the night, he heard the shrieks and laughter that told him the Daniels’ brood had found his wagon, and he wondered why the woman couldn’t make them behave. Every night, two of them ran wild in camp while their mother hid out in a supply wagon with no thought to anybody else, and the collective sympathy was shrinking daily.
“Spence, you haven’t actually met Abby, have you?” Laura said as he came around the side of the Conestoga. “Mrs. Daniels, this is my husband, Spencer Hardin.”
“Right pleased,” the woman murmured.
He was stunned. While he’d seen her around, he hadn’t paid much attention, but she looked worse up close. The only real curve in her body was her big belly. Everything else just hung from her bony frame. And the thin, stringy hair didn’t help the overall gauntness at all. Her nose had obviously been broken more than once, and when she smiled, two front teeth were missing. She walked slowly, obviously with pain. She was a young woman made old by poverty, too many children, and a brutal, loutish husband.
“Mrs. Daniels,”
“She didn’t bring Jimmy, Spence.”
“He wasn’t feelin’ up to it, bless his soul—said he wasn’t hungry,” the woman explained apologetically.
“Maybe you ought to go take a look,” Laura told Spence.
“Oh, no—he’ll be all right. He ain’t felt really good since his pa left. Maybe he’s missin’ him—I don’t know. But you know how kids is, always under the weather with something.”
“Laura says he hurt his leg,”
“He did. Fell out o’ the wagon day before yesterday mornin’. Got hisself cut up on a nail stickin’ out,”
“What did you treat it with? Turpentine?”
“Didn’t have nuthin’—we just tied it up t’ stop the bleedin’, that’s all. It ain’t the first time he’s hurt hisself, and it ain’t going t’ be the last. You get boys, you expect ‘em to get all scarred up, you know. If it ain’t him, it’s one of the others—always something.”
“But you washed it?” Laura asked quickly.
“I was goin’ to, but I wanted to keep the blood from gettin’ over ever’thing in the wagon, since most of it ain’t mine, so I just covered the hole. Washed it this mornin’, though, in the river, and it was festerin’ some, so I put a piece of pork over it. That’ll draw it out, you know.”
“My husband’s a doctor, Abby.”
“That so? Then I reckon he knows that’s about all t’ do for something like that.”
“Spence—”
The warning tone of his wife’s voice kept him from saying what he really thought. “It depends on how deep the wound is,” he explained diplomatically. “If he starts running a fever, or if the area feels hot and has red streaks, it could be serious. If it’s swollen or discolored, I’d be worried, too. There are several things that can happen to a puncture wound—tetanus, blood poisoning, gangrene, cholera, to name a few—and they’re all serious. You can wash with river water if you boil it, but otherwise with the dirt and animal dung in it, you’ll run the risk of introducing infectious material into the body.”
“He ain’t drinkin’ it,” Abigail Daniels hastened to assure him. “We just been washin’ with it.”
“Spence will look at Jimmy’s leg,” Laura volunteered.
“Ain’t no need—it’s just a hole. And I ain’t got no money for a doctor, anyways.”
“There’s no charge, Mrs. Daniels,” Spence found himself telling her. “When you go back after supper, I’ll send you some medicine to put on the wound, but it’s a little late now—there’s already been close to sixty hours for anything to incubate.”
“It ain’t got that—it’s just a little pussy, that’s all.”
“Anyway, I want you to wash the area thoroughly with boiled water as hot as he can stand it, then put two teaspoons of salt into a cup of hot water and make a compress with it. Keep it hot, and keep it on the wound at least half an hour, and it’ll help draw the pus out better than pork. And burn that piece of meat before you throw it out, or somebody’s dog’s apt to get sick from eating it.”
“That hole’s just got to bust open, then it’ll heal,” the woman insisted.
“Not if a deep infection is present. When you get back, I want you to light a lantern and hold it close enough to get a good look at the wound. If any of those conditions I mentioned—in dry gangrene, the area will be dark and without feeling, and the skin above it will be red; in the wet form, it will look the same, but there will be blisters on it, and it’ll stink to high heaven; in blood poisoning, there’ll be red streaks down the limb, and it will feel hot.”
“What about the other two—cholera and that other thing you mentioned?”
“Tetanus—you probably call it lockjaw. It’s too early to tell yet. I’d say if he develops a bad stomach ache with a fever within the next week, he’ll be coming down with typhoid or cholera. Lockjaw takes a little longer to manifest itself—usually about two weeks, sometimes more. He’ll have a stiff neck and jaw, fever, and joint pain, followed by an inability to talk, a drawing of the body backwards, and light will cause convulsions.”
“Spence, you’re scaring her,” Laura protested.
“I’m just telling her what she needs to look out for,”
“Where did you learn all this stuff?” the woman asked, awed.
“Medical school and the army.”
“He graduated from one of the finest institutions in the country, Abby—and he was the best surgeon in the whole Confederate Army,” Laura told her proudly.
“You don’t say,” Mrs. Daniels murmured, looking at him with new interest. “And we was all thinkin’ he was just a plain mister. I’ll have to tell it around.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I’m not practicing right now,” Spence declared flatly. “I’m giving myself time to discover if I want to do it anymore.”
“He cut off thousands of legs, Abby, and he had one of the highest recovery rates recorded. He just got a little sick of it.” But as Laura explained the situation, she realized that he’d cracked the door a smidgeon. “Four years of seeing nothing but dead or broken bodies was hard for a man who cared. He sees all those dead men, but he forgets the thousands who went home alive because of him.”
“Laura—”
“Well, it’s the truth.”
“Anyway,” he said, returning to the matter at hand, “if any of those conditions I mentioned exist, you’ll need to bring him over here so I can take a look at him. Do you want me to repeat the symptoms again?”
“I understand what you said.”
“Good.”
“Jimmy’s going to be all right. He’s my sweet boy—makes me wish I had a dozen of him. Nate and Frankie’s the wild ones, you know. Jack’s too little to be much trouble, and the baby’s teething right now. I guess you could say I got my hands full. But I’m better off without Matt, I keep tellin’ myself. I just wish he hadn’t took hisself off with all the money, that’s all. It’s gettin’ hard to feed my boys.”
“Mmm—you smell good,” he murmured, nuzzling Laura’s neck while his hands explored her body beneath the covers.
“It’s that French perfume—when we’re doing this, I close my eyes and think I’m somewhere else instead of in a wagon.”
“As long as you don’t think you’re with anyone else.” He found the hem of her nightgown and began easing it up. “Someday, Mrs. Hardin, we’re going to be enjoying ourselves in the finest hotel in San Francisco.”
“I wouldn’t have anybody else, Spence.” Twining her arms around his neck, she pulled his head down for her kiss.
“I’s got to find the doc! I’s got to find the doc! Ma says he’s over here somewheres, but I ain’t findin’ ‘im!”
A child’s high-pitched, agitated voice penetrated the cocoon of intimacy, breaking its spell. “What the hell—?” Spence muttered. “It’s too late for a kid to be out”
Pulling her nightgown down, Laura sat up. “You’re the only doc around, Spence. He’s got to be screaming for you.”
“The hell he is.”
Somebody stuck a head out of another wagon, cursing. “Get out of here, you goddammed little varmint—we ain’t got no doc!”
“I gotta fetch ‘im! I just gotta! It’s Jimmy, and he’s taken bad!”
“I’ll find your bag,” Laura murmured, rolling from the feather mattress. Calling through the hole in the gathered canvas, she shouted, “He’s in here! He’ll be right out!”
Spence sat still for a moment, taking several deep breaths. He didn’t want to do this, he told himself. If the wound was making the boy sick, it was going to be bad, all right. He just didn’t want to face any more sickness and death.
Holding his bag in one hand, Laura laid the other on his shoulder. “Spence, you’ve got to—you said you would.”
“I don’t have to do anything, Laura! If it’s the wound, the stupid woman’s already killed him! What am I supposed to do?—sit there and watch a kid die?”
“You told her—”
“I know, but the way she was talking, it was nothing—she didn’t even care enough to clean it up! Now she wants me to make it right—and I’ll bet she never even put the carbolic acid I sent with her on it!”
“It could be something else. You don’t know what she’s thinking now.”
“She’s thinking I’ll fix him up!”
“Spence—”
The small boy crawled through the hole, sobbing. “My ma’s skeered, mister! Jimmy’s out of his head, and he ain’t feelin’ nuthin’! She’s a-cryin’, sayin’ he’s a-dyin’!”
“Did she put the medicine my husband gave her on his leg?” Laura asked the child.
“She couldn’t right away, ‘cause—”
“I told you she didn’t,” Spence muttered.
“‘Cause Billy was a-crying, mister! He’s yallerin’ his head off, too, ‘cause his teeth ain’t wantin’ to come in, an’ that sugar titty ain’t doin’ ‘im no good. Ma’s got to keep ‘im quiet, else folks is gonna turn ‘er out. But she just got around to gettin’ everything quiet, so’s she could help Jimmy.”
“You’re Nate, aren’t you?” Laura asked gently. Pulling the scruffy kid onto her lap, she wrapped her arms around him. “It’s got to be hard bein’ the man of the family,” she added softly, soothing him. “Spence, where’s the horehound candy? Nate needs a piece to calm him down.”
He felt as though the walls of a prison were closing in on him, that he was trapped. “I don’t know—under the seat, I think.” Heaving himself to his feet reluctantly, he reached for the leather bag. It seemed as though it had the weight of the world in it.
“Ma ain’t got nobody else,” the child whispered, resting his head on Laura’s breast. “I gotta be strong, she says, ‘cause I’s the oldest one,”
“How old are you, Nate?” she asked, leaning as far as she could to reach under the seat. Holding him with one arm, she managed to open the sack with the other. “I’ve got something little boys like right here. If you suck on it, it’ll make you feel better.”
“I’s five.” As he popped a piece into his mouth, he looked up at her. “Kin I take some to m’ brothers?”
“It’ll make it easier for her to keep them quiet, Spence,”
“Yeah. Well, come on, Nate—you’ll have to show me where we’re going. And don’t give any candy to the baby, or he’s apt to choke.”
As he walked across the dark and silent camp with Nate Daniels’s small hand in his, Spence almost wanted to cry himself. Five was too young for a kid to be bearing such a burden. Hell, he didn’t want to bear it himself.
“What seems to be the matter with Jimmy?” he asked finally.
“He cain’t feel nuthin’ in his leg—when Ma took the hot water to it, he didn’t cry or nuthin’. And the stuff you give ‘er for ‘im—she said it was supposed to burn, but it didn’t do nuthin’ to ‘im neither.”
“I see.”
“That’s bad, ain’t it?”
“Well, it might be.”
“He gets well, I’m givin’ ‘im this whole bag of candy,” Nate decided. “He’s always been a mite sickly long as I ‘member, but he ain’t a bad brother, mister.”
“How old is he?”
“He ain’t but four.”
Laura had told him that, Spence recalled now. “Four,” he repeated.
“You got any boys?”
“One. He’s four, too.”
“Oh.”
He sounded downcast, forcing Spence to ask, “Why’d you say that?”
“Ma says she cain’t feed all of us. I guess she’s fixin’ to give us away.”
“She won’t do that,”
“I was thinkin’ if you wasn’t havin’ no boys, you might could take Jimmy, seein’ as he’s the one that’s gettin’ sick mostly, and you bein’ a doctor man. I’d miss ‘im, but Ma cain’t take care of him proper, and ain’t nobody gonna want ‘im like he is.”
“She’s not going to give any of you away,” Spence consoled the boy. “Mas don’t do things like that.”
“She cain’t help it. We ain’t eatin’ most times. And it ain’t gettin’ no better, ‘cause Pa ain’t comin’ home. He done busted her up for the last time, and he ain’t comin’ crawlin’ back, even if she’s got to starve, she says.”
To Spence’s way of thinking, that was a damned sordid situation, for Abby Daniels to be discussing with a child. As hard as things had been for his own mother before she married Bingham, she’d never let on to him. It had taken him years to realize it for himself.
“I ain’t goin’ to no orphan place,” the kid went on. “And when I get growed up big enough to work, I’m gettin’ back any of us that does.” Nate stopped in his tracks. “We been talkin’ till I went plumb past it—that’s Ma’s wagon over there. Well, it ain’t ours,” he conceded. “But we got to live in it.”
“It’s easy to miss in the dark.”
“She ain’t lightin’ the lantern agin till I get you here, ‘cause we ain’t got enough kerosene neither. I got ‘im, Ma!” he yelled, climbing onto one of the supply wagons.
“Let me get the light on, or he’s liable to fall. There—you kin bring ‘im in now,”
The wagon was a mess. Boxes of supplies came up above the canvas, leaving little room for six people to live, but the Daniels woman had covered the flattest area with a ragged blanket and called it bed for the entire brood. The only things he saw that could pass for her belongings were two gunnysacks stuffed with what looked to be clothes. An Indian in a teepee was a lot better off than this.
Her haggard face looked up at him as Spence climbed over the boxes barring the entrance. “Well, you was right, Dr. Hardin, and I was just dead wrong,” were her first words to him. “It ain’t just a hole anymore. His whole laig’s swolled up, clear above his knee bone—I had to take a knife to his pants just to get a look at it. Guess I ain’t paid enough attention to know how bad it was gettin’.”
“I’ll have to have some room.”
“Nate, you and Frankie take Jack outside.”
“Ma, I hain’t got no britches on,” a small boy protested.
“You hush that, Frankie. I’ll be comin’ out with the blanket when I bring Billy out. He’s last, ‘cause I don’t want ‘im catchin’ cold while he’s teethin’, or ain’t nobody gettin’ no sleep. We’ll wrap up together, and nobody’s goin’ to know if you’re nekked or not”
Spence waited until they were all outside before he opened his bag. He was probably going to need help, but there wasn’t room for all those kids, and the last thing he wanted was a cranky baby screaming in his ear. He had to crawl to reach the sick child, and even then, he couldn’t stand up.
“Jimmy?” he said gently, touching the boy’s face. It was hot enough to burn him. “Jimmy, it’s Dr. Hardin. Your mama wanted me to look at that leg.”
The little boy’s fever-dulled eyes fluttered open. “It ain’t there,”
A chill ran down Spence’s spine. “Yes, it is,” he said, touching it, finding the skin hot and tight.
“See?”
“It ain’t hurtin’ no more.”
Holding the lantern closer, Spence looked down, and his gorge rose in his throat. The boy was so thin his eyes looked huge in a small, pinched face, but his injured leg was as big as Spence’s forearm. From the knee down, there were about two inches of hot, red flesh, but below the zone of demarcation, the skin ranged from slate gray to black. The wound itself stunk like something rotten. The June warmth had helped the infection along.
“How bad is it?” Abigail Daniels asked from outside.
“Damned bad.” Closing his eyes for a minute, he summoned the strength to break the news to her. “It’s gangrene.”
“I was afeard of that once I seen it tonight. I guess he’s goin’ to die, ain’t he?” There was a fatalistic sadness in her voice—no anger, just acceptance. “It’s my fault,” she added, sighing. “I wish t’ God, I’da paid more attention, but I didn’t.”
He wasn’t going to disagree with her. “Send Nate for my wife,” was all he could say. “Have him tell her to ask Mrs. Wilson to look after Jessie.”
“I kin look after her.”
Nearly too angry for words, he wasn’t about to let her touch his daughter. “You’ve got enough to take care of,” he answered curtly. “I just want Mrs. Hardin here right now.”
The wait seemed like an eternity, but he knew it wasn’t. She had to dress, get Jessie up, and wake Mrs. Wilson before she could come. But he wanted to talk to her before he decided what he’d do, and that made the minutes pass slowly.
Finally, he heard her tell Nate, “You’re such a good young man,” and he wanted to cry. A boy of five needed to be a child.
“Spence, what’s the matter?” she asked, climbing into the wagon. “Nate said you wanted me, and Abby isn’t saying anything.”
“Because she knows she killed her son.”
“What?” she fairly screeched. “He’s dead?”
“Not yet.”
Crawling over crates and boxes, she managed to get to him. Her eyes found the child’s face first. “Oh, Jimmy—how you must hurt,” she whispered, smoothing dirty hair back from his forehead. Kneeling beside the little boy, she murmured soothingly, “It’s going to be all right, honey—you don’t listen to anybody who says it isn’t. Spence is going to do his best to make you better,” Looking up at her husband, she said, “He’s burning up.”
“I don’t know that Spence can make him better,” he said wearily. “Laura, it’s gangrene. You can see the demarcation clearly. He can’t feel anything below it because the tissue’s died. And by now, he’s probably got blood poisoning to go with it.”
“You can’t say that in front of him—he’s got to fight.” Tears welled in her eyes, and her throat was so tight she could scarce breathe. She had to force herself to look at the child’s leg. “Good God!” she gasped before she gagged. When she finally managed to swallow, she whispered, “But how could this happen so quickly?”
“There are a lot of reasons, but two are pretty obvious—the wound was dirty, and it’s summer.”
“Yes, but—” She had to bite her lip to keep from crying. “He’s just four, Spence.”
“Yeah.” His palm caressed the boy’s forehead, absorbing the burning heat. “I’ll need chloroform.” As she looked up, he took another deep breath, then nodded. “I’m going to amputate, Laura—it’s the only chance he’s got, and even then it may not be enough. If the poison’s in his blood, everything’s going to fail. She lied to you, Laura—I don’t know why, but she lied to you.”
“What?”
“This wound’s more than sixty hours old. Maybe she didn’t want anybody to know she hadn’t done anything for it. I’d say this leg started swelling up day before yesterday instead of today. It’s got to come off.”
“Oh, Spence—I’m so sorry—so very sorry.”
“I need chloroform, Laura, and I don’t have any. If I have to do it without putting him out, as bad as he is, the shock’s going to kill him.”
“I don’t want him to hear that.”
“He’s too sick for it to sink in. He told me the leg was gone.”
“I don’t know where to find any chloroform—it’s not anything a body’d be carrying with him.”
“Ask around. If we can’t get that, we’ll have to use something, and whiskey’s not much of an answer. As small as he is, enough to put him out will give him alcohol poisoning.”
“I’ll see what I can find You want his mother in here, don’t you?”
“No. I want you here to help me. I want you to see what it’s like, and maybe you’ll understand why I can’t do it anymore,”
The very thought made her sick, but she nodded. “I’ll do what I can for you. But Abby—”
“I don’t want to look at that woman again in this life.”
“You’ve got to tell her.”
“I’m going to let you do it. I already told her it was gangrene, and I don’t think she cared. All she could say was she probably should’ve paid more attention when it happened.”
“I don’t know what to say to her.”
“I had to say it a thousand times to somebody— you can say it once.”
“All right. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Do you need anything else?”
“Not for this. Ask her to boil water, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“You’re being hard on her, Spence.”
“Any woman who tells her kids she’s giving them away doesn’t deserve to have any. I don’t care how poor she is, she had no right to say something like that to Nate. And don’t get started on that, Laura, because I don’t want to even talk about it I’m just damned mad.”
Leaning his head against the cold metal canopy frame, he closed his eyes, thinking God had led him to the promised land, only to show him hell again. He could hear Laura outside, explaining, “If the leg doesn’t come off, he’s going to die, Abby. He may, anyway. Why didn’t you say something sooner, when Spence could have done something else?”
“It happened like I told it,” the woman maintained stubbornly. “Just like I told it.”
“But not when you said it did.”
“To tell the truth, I didn’t know when it happened. I’d been feeling bad, and Nate was looking after the kids. It was him that tied it up, I guess.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, Abigail Daniels! You’re not shifting responsibility to a five-year-old child!” Laura told her hotly. “It’s just not right, and you know it. I don’t care how bad things are for you; God gave you those kids to raise, and you’re supposed to do it”
“It ain’t like that. You just don’t know what it’s like bein’ poor like me.”
“I’ve probably been poorer than you,” Laura snapped. “But rather than dispute over that, I’ve got to find some chloroform so that man in there can do something he despises, and it’s because you didn’t take care of that child! You’re going to have a boy hobbling around on one leg, Abby—and if you don’t want him, I do!”
It took a few moments for the words to sink into Spence’s consciousness. What the hell was she talking about? He had enough on his plate without adding to it.
“I want my boy, Mrs. Hardin! I want all of ‘em— but you tell me how I’m supposed to feed ‘em!” Abigail shouted after Laura. “Does God want me to watch ‘em starve?”
He couldn’t hear his wife’s answer. He straightened up and shrugged his shoulders, trying to ease the tension in them, before he crawled closer to Jimmy Daniels. Unable to do anything else at the moment, he lay down next to the boy and held the hot little body, offering what comfort he could.
He must’ve dozed, because the next thing he knew, Laura was telling him, “Aside from whiskey, all I could find was some peyote.”
“Peyote?” he mumbled, rousing.
Behind her, the half-breed Crow guide hovered. “Cheyenne get peyote from Comanche. Peyote heap good medicine.”
“He can talk, Spence. He says it comes from a cactus.”
“I know what it is.”
“Peyote make dream.”
“I don’t think he had much contact with the white side of his family,” Laura offered. “But he can speak, and he thinks the stuff will help.”
“You don’t make much of an interpreter.” Opening his formulary, Spence thumbed through the index. He probably wouldn’t find it under peyote. If it was in here anywhere, it’d be listed in Latin. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “‘Mescal A potent intoxicant, capable of producing inebriation and hallucinations.’ I don’t have any idea of a dosage, but I’m willing to give it a try. God knows I don’t have much else to use. I’ll have to have a medium for delivery, and I’ll have to give a little at a time until I know what its effect is.”
In the end, he used a mixture of medicinal alcohol and water, steeping the crushed buttons in it, reasoning it was better than using mineral oil. He didn’t want any oil getting into the kid’s lungs if he vomited the peyote up.
Since the kid was almost unconscious anyway, he used the mixture sparingly. When he finally took his surgical kit from the bag and unrolled it, Laura flinched. Closing his eyes briefly, Spence prayed silently, then turned his attention to the boy’s leg. “I want you to get his arms,” he told her. “I’m going to tourniquet the leg, and then I’ll hold my end down. If he jerks, hold on. I want a clean incision before I start sawing.”
Jimmy Daniels didn’t respond when the catlin knife cut through his skin. White-faced, Laura watched from above the child as Spence pulled back the skin just above the knee, then sliced open the muscle to expose the bone, to scrape it clean where he intended to saw. The sound of the surgical saw cutting through bone made her almost sick, but at least it didn’t last long. It seemed as if he’d just gotten started when he was tying off blood vessels with silk thread. He filed the bone stump nearly smooth, then pulled the skin flap over it and closed it with neat stitches. When he finally sat back on his heels, she realized her dress was wet with her own sweat.
“That’s it,” he said. “I’ll need to dispose of the severed limb and clean up some of the mess, but whether he pulls through or not, it’s not going to be gangrene that kills him. I got all of it off.”
‘Then he’ll make it.”
“Not necessarily. There’s still the danger of blood poisoning, but I’d say his chances are considerably improved right now.” Looking across the still little body, he met her eyes for a moment. They were brimming with tears. “It’s all right,” he said quietly. “You need to go on and get Jessie. She doesn’t need to be up all night.”
“What about you?”
“I’m going to stay here for a while and see what I can do about his fever. It’ll be a couple of hours before I can expect any kind of improvement, anyway, but I’ll feel better if I can get his temperature down.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome. I’ll try not to wake you when I climb into bed.”
He sat with Jimmy Daniels most of the night and it wasn’t until the gray light of dawn crept through the open canvas that he decided it was safe to leave. While the boy hadn’t regained consciousness, his fever had come down enough for him to rest peacefully, and the bleeding was now minimal.
Bone-tired, he crawled into the back of the Conestoga and crept on his hands and knees, trying to keep from waking Laura or the baby. They were asleep together, Laura’s body curved around Jessie’s. He didn’t move for a moment; he just stared at their faces, thinking they had to be the two most beautiful females in the world. Rather than disturb them, he decided to sit up a while longer. She’d have to drive while he slept later.
As he was about to crawl back out, he felt something crackle under one knee, and he realized he was crushing her journal. Taking it with him to smooth the pages out, he tried to make out the words of her last entry, but it was still too dark. Curious as to what she’d written in all those pages, he found the lantern and lit it.
June 19, 1866. Beneath the date, she’d chronicled the usual things, all the way down to a description of supper. But it was the last paragraph that caught his attention.
Tonight, my husband did the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen. He saved the life of a four-year-old boy by removing a gangrenous leg with such precision that I felt as if I were watching a great artist at work. He has as much God-given talent for surgery as Michelangelo for art. While he believes heroes are made on the battlefields of this life, he does not realize he is one himself. Great generals send men into battle to die; Spencer Hardin repairs broken and diseased bodies, giving many of the fallen a chance to go home. Surely God did not give him this gift if He did not mean for him to use it as he did tonight.
Somehow all of her spoken words on the subject had not moved him, but there was no denying the effect of the lines she’d written on this page. They’d never been meant for his eyes, something that made them even more powerful, because he knew they’d been written from her heart.
As the stars faded into the grayness above the rich, warm hues of dawn, he closed the book and crept to bed, where he eased his body onto the mattress behind hers and reached his arm around her to hold her close. “I love you,” he whispered.
She stirred, then turned over to face him. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. I just read your journal.”
“Oh. I wasn’t writing it for you to find, but it’s the truth, anyway. I wanted Jessie and Josh to know the kind of man you are.” She yawned sleepily, then asked, “What time is it, anyway?”
“Sun’s coming up.”
“How is Jimmy?”
“It’s too soon to tell, but I’m hoping he’ll make it. I cut it high enough to get all of the gangrene, and his fever was down some by the time I left. Not normal, but down.” Brushing her tangled hair with his fingertips, he murmured, “Where did you learn to write like that?”
“Mama. But she was better at it. She didn’t have much education either, but she had a way with words.”
Rolling onto his back, he stared up at the metal supporting the canvas. “I feel pretty good about his chances. I liked what you said to his mother, too.”
“I was just plain mad at her, Spence. It’s one thing to make a mistake, but when it’s made worse by not admitting it, that’s something I can’t excuse. When I saw that leg, I was sick to my stomach. I don’t know how you did it—I honestly don’t.”
“It was a pretty clean cut,” he admitted. “But I ought to be good at it—God knows, I’ve had enough practice.”
“It’s more than practice. Whether you want to admit it or not, it’s a gift.”
“That’s what you wrote in your journal.”
“Well, it is.”
“Michelangelo, huh?”
“Well, he was the first painter who came to my mind. I could just as easily have said da Vinci.”
“Now that would have been the ultimate compliment,” he murmured.
“If my words impressed you so much, what are you going to do about them?”
“I don’t know—maybe read your mother’s journals. I’d like to know where you come up with some of the things you say. I figure maybe there’s something in them that’ll tell me.”
“I don’t think like her, Spence—Mama was more practical than I am.”
“Now that’s impossible. You don’t have a foolish notion in that steel-trap mind of yours.”
“But you’re going to think it over, aren’t you? You know I wrote the truth.”
“I’m going to think it over, but I can’t promise anything. All I know is I’m glad I knew what to do. I looked at him, and I thought he could’ve been Josh.”
“They’re both four.”
“If I didn’t think I’d be biting off a lot of trouble, I’d take them, you know.”
“Who?”
“Nate and Jimmy.”
“Then who’d take care of Frankie?”
“Laura, I’m not opening an orphanage. You know, you’re just like Bingham—every stray dog that came to Willowood wound up staying.”
“Well, maybe if Abby had some money, she’d do better.”
“Maybe. If I’ve got anything left by the time we get to Sacramento, I’m giving it to her,” he decided. “God, I’m tired.”
“I’m not—not since you woke me up.” Turning to face him, she ran a fingertip along the dark shadow on his jaw. “There’s something real masculine about a man right before he shaves,” she murmured.
“The baby’s going to wake up.”
Her fingertip moved to tickle his ear. “Mrs. Wilson couldn’t get her settled down, so I just finished feeding her less than an hour ago, and she took a lot of milk. But—I guess if you’re tired, I might as well get up.”
“Not on your life—you know where all that teasing leads, don’t you?” he whispered, rolling her onto her back. “I don’t like teases who don’t pay up, Mrs. Hardin.”
Her arms reached for his neck. “Well, you don’t have to worry,” she assured him softly. “I’m a woman who likes to settle things right.”