Without Words (29 page)

“Beaten, shot. I think this is his wife. According to Jed Yancy and that lot she just walked into the saloon and lured the men into the street where this one was tied on a horse. She hasn’t said a word to anyone.”

The doctor grunted. “Shock maybe. If you’ll get hot water, I’ll see what we’re dealing with here. After that maybe some hot tea would help the young lady tell us what happened.”

The doctor peeled away the bandages and most of Bret’s clothing. So much blood, such ugly dark holes torn in flesh.

After a look, the doctor wrapped the leg wound tight again. The woman reappeared with a pitcher of hot water and tried to get Hassie to leave. “Come on out to the kitchen. Let’s clean you up and see about that tea. My husband knows what he’s doing.”

Hassie shook her head, shrugged the woman off. The doctor exchanged a look with his wife.

“I’ll bring the tea here,” she said.

He nodded. After the woman left, the doctor took Hassie by the shoulders. “You can stay, but you have to stand back. My wife knows what needs to be done, but you can’t help. Understand?”

Understanding was one thing, agreeing another. The doctor pulled Hassie’s hand away from Bret’s and sat her on a chair by the counter under the rows of bottle-filled shelves. Once she gave in and sat, Hassie feared she’d never be able to get up again.

The doctor’s wife bustled back in with the cup of tea. Hassie tried to ignore it, but didn’t succeed. The woman curved Hassie’s hands around the cup. “You won’t do him any good if you pass out and we have to take care of you,” she whispered.

Hassie drank the heavily sugared tea.

The doctor’s wife lit the lamp that hung over the table. The two of them scrubbed their hands to the elbows, and the doctor bent over Bret’s shoulder.

“This is bleeding the worst, and it needs to be stopped,” the doctor said, “but the leg is a mess. If you clean up his face, a few stitches will take care of that. Even if there’s a zygomatic fracture, the damage there is nothing. Let’s hope no one else needs a doctor tonight.”

Hassie clutched the teacup so hard the handle broke off with a little pop. She sat it on the counter and twisted her hands together. Neither the doctor nor his wife noticed.

The hours of the night passed slowly. As the doctor wielded terrible probes, scissors, and scalpels, Hassie prayed Bret wouldn’t wake up until it was all over.

Then she prayed that he would wake up when it was all over.

B
RET WOKE TO
total darkness, his heart racing, body and mind both convinced he was in mortal danger. Memories flashed of men and guns, the blast of a shotgun, a man’s face dissolving behind a mist of blood. And Hassie. Hassie not running but standing frozen with a shotgun on her shoulder. Hassie.

Pain tore through his right arm when he tried to sit up. He flailed the other arm, and it came down on silky softness.

Hassie’s hair. Bret drew in great gasping breaths as his eyes adjusted to the dark enough to distinguish the gray square of a window, a hint of dawn there surely. He made out Hassie’s form beside him and calmed.

Wherever they were now must be safe. She slept peacefully beside him. He fingered her hair, wrapped as much as he could get hold of around his hand and held tight. Reassured by the feel of it, he closed his eyes and drifted away from his questions and his pain.

When he woke again, Hassie was still beside him on the bed, sitting up against the headboard, holding his hand. He tried to sit up too.

“Where are we?”

“Doctor’s. Stay still.”

“I don’t want to stay still. I want....”

“Sshh.” She held a cup of water against his mouth.

“I need to get rid of water, not take more in.”

She laughed. “Drink first.”

The water was bitter with minerals, but he was too thirsty to care. After they took care of the other needs, he said, “I remember you handcuffing them to the trees, but after that pretty much nothing. What happened after I passed out?”

The slate was on the nearby dresser. She’d been thinking awfully clearly if she remembered to bring that along with his unconscious body. Come to think of it, she was wearing the pink dress, and how the hell could that be?

She wrote, erased, wrote more.

“I rode that horse?” His horror at the thought disappeared somewhere in the brilliance of her smile.

“The sheriff and his deputies went and got the bad men and Jasper and Packie and all our things. Those men are in jail now.”

“Gunner?”

She ran a finger over the crown of her head and then over her shoulder.

“Grazes?”

“Doctor gave me salve.”

“You were supposed to run and hide.”

She hung her head, looking for all the world as if she was ashamed of what she had done.
“I could not leave you.”

His thoughts were disintegrating, swirling away in heavy fog. He managed to ask, “Did you keep your eyes open?” but not to stay awake for the answer.

I
N HIS FEW
lucid moments, Bret ascribed the cloud that wouldn’t lift from his mind to fever. Until the morning he woke halfway clear-headed and thought about how bitter the water here tasted sometimes but not all the time. He’d never had to take laudanum, but he’d heard it described by those who had.

The next time his sweet wife approached with broth, he said, “Is there laudanum in that?”

Her guilty look confirmed his suspicion.

“I’m not drinking another swallow until you swear it doesn’t have that stuff in it.”

She put the broth down to sign. “The doctor says you need it.”

“I don’t care what the doctor says.”

“You have to drink.”

“No, I don’t.”

She disappeared, and Bret eyed the water pitcher on the bedside table. He was thirsty, and surely the whole pitcher wasn’t poisoned. He rolled to his side, ignoring the fire in his leg and shoulder and reached.

“You get yourself flat back down again, or I’ll tie you.”

So this was the doctor Hassie had elevated to hero status. Bret had vague recollections of a tall, thin man leaning over him, making the pain worse. “Dr. MacGregor, I presume?”

“Yes, the doctor who put you back together and who says you need to take laudanum for at least another week.”

“Why?”

The doctor moved into the room and frowned down at Bret as ferociously as a man with a pale, delicately boned face could. “Because the pain will have you doing something stupid soon, and because unless that leg stays absolutely still for at least another three weeks, you’re going to be lame for the rest of your life.”

“You don’t think the next dose could wait until the pain gets bad, and I could have a few moments of clarity now and then? It’s addictive, isn’t it?”

“It can be.”

“I don’t want any more.”

The doctor sighed and lowered himself to the chair by the bed. “Your wife says you’re pigheaded beyond belief.”

“That’s the word she used, ‘pigheaded’?”

“The word she wrote may actually have been stubborn. Her vocabulary is more refined than mine, and she doesn’t deal with fools who won’t take care of themselves as often as I do.” As he spoke the doctor turned back the bed covers and peered at Bret’s leg. “It’s a bad break, and I had to take out some sizable pieces of bone. If this had happened during the war, that leg would have been lopped off, you know.”

“The surgeons didn’t have much time for finesse back then.”

A slight smile played across the doctor’s face. “No, we didn’t.”

“I admit I’m grateful to wake up with everything still attached. Thank you.”

“Thank your wife that you’re still alive. By the time you got here you didn’t have much more blood to lose.”

Bret knew that. He’d known the odds when he told her to leave him and get help.

Flipping the covers back in place, the doctor continued, “If I could cast that leg, I wouldn’t be so worried, but with the open wound, I can’t. So you have a splint instead, and you have to behave yourself, no acrobatics of the sort you were just trying. Under no circumstances are you to put any weight on that leg. Don’t even put your foot on the floor.”

The doctor poured a glass of water from the pitcher and handed it to Bret. “Unadulterated, I promise.”

After a wary taste verified the doctor’s promise, Bret drank it down. “So how bad will this be in the end? Are you telling me if I play dead for weeks, I won’t be lame? What about my arm?”

The doctor rubbed his forehead as if deciding what to say. “No, I can’t guarantee how well either the arm or the leg will work after they heal. What I can tell you is that in my experience with wounds like these, some people find the pain of using the limb too much and don’t try. Muscles atrophy, and they never have full use again. Others are pigheaded—stubborn—and refuse to let pain stop them from doing as they please. A certain percentage of those people regain full use of the limb.”

“What percentage?”

“I don’t keep records. More than half at a guess, and the rest do better than expected. First you have to heal properly, and then you’re talking a year or so before you know for sure.”

Bret stared at the ceiling, thinking about it. He had expected a more cut and dried answer.

“Suppose I tell Mrs. Sterling laudanum upon request only,” the doctor offered.

“I appreciate that. How’s she doing?”

“My wife is ready to adopt her. They’re getting along famously.”

Good. Someone needed to be getting along famously.

L
YING AROUND LIKE
a corpse would be easier if his nurse was some big hairy fellow instead of Hassie. After only a single clear-headed day, Bret wanted to pull her down on the bed on top of him every time she came close.

She slept beside him, and he almost wished she still had to wear the borrowed nightgown from the doctor’s wife. He had a hazy memory of the oversized gown and the way it had hung in baggy folds, the hem dragging on the floor. The worn cloth of Hassie’s own gown molded to her no longer half-starved body.

What he needed, Bret decided, was a male nurse. A big man with his belly hanging over his belt. Maybe one who chewed tobacco, had brown teeth, and spit often.

When the living embodiment of Bret’s imaginary perfect nurse knocked on the frame of the bedroom door and walked in, Bret said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Pardon?”

Catching sight of the badge on the man’s wide chest, Bret said, “Never mind. I thought you were someone else.” At least the lawman’s cheeks showed no sign of a chaw.

“Sheriff Thomas Fleming,” the big man said offering his hand then drawing it back. “Sorry, guess you won’t be shaking any hands for a while.”

“Not for a while,” Bret said agreeably. He glanced at the doorway, surprised Hassie wasn’t right there, worried he might be too tired to see the sheriff, or hungry, or thirsty, or anything else.

“I asked Mrs. MacGregor to talk your wife into going to town with her. I wanted to talk to you alone for a few minutes, get your version of what happened out there.”

“There are versions?”

“My deputies and I went out there and picked up two bodies, two live men, and one mostly alive, and let’s just say there are variations in their recollections, and it seems like Mrs. Sterling didn’t see everything.”

“No, she was back by the horses when they first showed up. Thank God.” Bret described events until the point he lost consciousness, wondering as he did it what the sheriff meant by “one mostly alive.” The sheriff was bound to enlighten him any minute now. “The rest you’ll have to get from my wife. She can write it out for you.”

“She already did that. The thing is....”

The sheriff pulled some papers from inside his vest and handed them to Bret. “Read that.”

Hassie’s handwriting was far more elegant rendered in ink on paper than with a chalk pencil on the slate, but Bret still would have recognized it from across the room. After a puzzled look at the sheriff, he began reading.

Halfway through he looked up. The sheriff was studiously scraping a spot on his trousers with a fingernail. Bret finished Hassie’s statement and dropped the sheets on his chest.

“I never would have noticed,” the sheriff said, “but the fellow she shot is a talker, and he’s sure she should be in the next cell. Then the other two chimed in backing him up.”

“You can’t be thinking of arresting her.”

“Of course not. Pretty soon folks around here will be taking up a collection in church to give her a medal.”

“I didn’t know she shot another one of them. It never occurred to me to ask her how she got me on a horse.” And until yesterday he’d been too doped up on laudanum to think straight. Bret read the sentences again. “She didn’t lie.”

“No, she didn’t, but it is a mite misleading. At first I just figured you did all the shooting. Most men would, I guess. Doc says you don’t strike him as the kind of man who would get ugly with a wife who let it be known she saved his bacon. So why did she do it?”

“I’ll thank the doctor for his character reference the next time I see him,” Bret said dryly as he picked up Hassie’s statement again.
“The dog distracted the bad men, so it was possible to shoot one with the shotgun.”
Further on:
The man would not go back to the tree and tried to get a gun so it was necessary to shoot him.”

“She doesn’t like guns. I can’t tell you how much ammunition we’ve wasted, and she can’t pull a trigger and keep her eyes open. She told me once she could never shoot a human. My guess is she’d rather nobody know.”

The sheriff shook his head. “I’d give her that if I could then, but it’s all over town now. Doc treated the fellow, and he probably didn’t say anything, but my deputies had no reason not to talk about it. Neither did I.”

Bret shrugged, trying to hide the effects of the throbbing pain in his leg. He hadn’t slept much last night and was already debating the wisdom of his new laudanum-free recovery.

“I have something else to show you,” the sheriff said, pulling out more papers.

Bret shuffled through the five wanted posters, gave the sheriff an incredulous look, and went through them again. Starting with the twenty-five hundred dollar reward for Pock-Face, the bounties on the five men totaled forty-eight hundred dollars.