A Lantern in the Window (12 page)

At last the wind lessened. It was
still black dark and snowing when he stood up. There was no
guarantee that the storm was really over, but he was cold and
dangerously sleepy.

Sending a silent thanks and a last
good-bye to the old horse, Noah stamped feet that felt like blocks
of solid ice and staggered off across the snow covered landscape in
the direction he prayed would lead him to the ranch.

Annie and Bets gave the old workhorse
his head, and Bright stoically waded through the drifts with the
two of them perched on him.

Every few moments, Annie called Noah’s
name, but the sound was muffled by the heavy fall of snow. Her
hands and feet grew numb with cold, and she was grateful for Bets’s
warm body pressing close against her aching back.

Her throat was hoarse from hollering
when at last she thought she heard an answer, faint and far
away.

"Whoa.” She tugged on Bright’s reins,
afraid even to hope.

“
Noah?” Her voice sounded
lost in the icy darkness.

"Noooaah,” she screamed, every ounce
of her own desperation in the call, and this time she was certain
she heard his voice respond.

She urged Bright on, and soon a tall,
snow covered figure came staggering out of the darkness toward
them.

“
Noah.” With a mixture of
laughter and tears, Annie slid down from Bright's back and into his
half frozen arms.

"Oh, Noah, thank God you’re all right.
What happened? Where’s Buck?”

In a few stark sentences, he told her,
holding her close, his strong arms locked like a vise around her,
her huge belly cradled against him.

“
I’ve been such a damned
fool, Annie,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “I love you, and I’ll
love this baby of ours when it comes. Now, let’s hurry and get you
home where it’s warm. It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re going to
celebrate, just the three of us.”

She turned her face up to him, green
eyes full of joyful wonder, hardly able to believe what she’d
heard. And in that ecstatic moment, the first horrendous pain
ripped through her abdomen.

“
Owwww!”

Holding her, Noah felt her brace with
the contraction, then fall against him, stunned at its intensity
and duration.

A new and awful fear gripped him. He
supported her until it was over, doing his best not to let her
suspect the utter panic that he felt.

Was she about to have their baby in
the middle of this snowstorm? He kept his voice calm so as not to
alarm her.

“
How long have you been
having pains, Annie?”

She leaned on him, panting as the pain
receded, her forehead damp with perspiration and snowflakes. “Only
this one, but my back’s been sore all day.”

Noah swallowed hard. God willing,
there’d be time to get her home, but the baby was undoubtedly
coming, and the storm would make it impossible to bring the doctor.
Even sending Bets for Gladys Hopkins was out of the question. It
was too far and there was far too much snow.

He’d birthed animals, plenty of them,
but Noah hadn’t even been allowed in the room when Jeremy was
born.

"Let's get you home, sweetheart.”
Catching Annie under the arms, he lifted her up on Bright’s back.
"We'll be there in a few minutes." He pulled a frozen mitten off
and with a few rapid signs, told Bets what was
happening.

“
Hold her tight, Bets,” he
signed.

A few moments before, struggling
exhausted and alone through the darkness and the snow, Noah had
thought with every single step that he couldn’t force himself to
take another.

Now, he took Bright’s reins and ran
easily beside the huge horse. They had to stop twice more as sharp
pains gripped Annie, and giddy relief spilled through Noah when at
last the lantern the women had lighted and left in the window
became visible in the distance, shining through the snow, a beacon
welcoming Noah and his family home.

Later, Annie remembered the haze of
the lamplight as Noah gripped her hands in his strong ones and
urged her to push out their child.

His sleeves were rolled up, and
perspiration rolled down his face. He smiled and spoke loving words
of encouragement, giving her not the slightest inkling that he was
deathly afraid that he’d be unequal to the task ahead of
him.

As soon as they had Annie warm and
settled, Bets had brought him the book Elinora had sent, entitled
Advice To A Mother.

Desperate for any small bit of
assistance, Noah flipped through it. The book actually had
illustrations that depicted the birth of a child, and he propped it
on the bedroom dresser and dragged the dresser close to the bed.
Referring to the instructions it contained, he and Bets lit lamps
and found scissors and folded flannel into pads and filled the
copper washtubs with water and set them to heating.

With Bets in charge of keeping the
fires burning well and fetching anything he thought he needed, Noah
stationed himself beside Annie, glancing more and more distractedly
at the book as the hours passed, urging Bets to turn the pages back
and forth, soundly cursing the volume’s numerous omissions as the
birth inevitably progressed in spite of him.

* * *

At ten past noon on December 24, 1886,
with the able assistance of his young sister-in-law, Noah Ferguson
successfully delivered his tiny daughter, Mary Elinora.

Annie and Bets survived the ordeal
exceptionally well, but the first sound of his baby’s outraged
squalling so relieved her father that dizziness overcame him, and
he had to sink down on the bed with her minute, naked body cradled
awkwardly in his two huge hands.

He actually thought for the first time
in his life that he was about to faint, and he had to draw deep
breaths before he could really examine the child he
held.

She was scrawny, but already he could
sense Mary's enormous life force. The damp curls plastered against
her minute skull were undeniably red, and when she opened her eyes
and looked vaguely up at him, Noah saw an exact reflection of his
own coal-dark gaze.

Annie was watching, and it was evident
from the besotted expression on his face that in that first
instant, Mary Elinora had captured her father’s mighty heart in her
tiny fist.

Annie and Bets looked at each other
with tears in their eyes and giggled.

From their vantage point
in a corner of the room, an old man and a young woman with a
laughing little boy between them smiled angelic smiles and nodded
at one another with the satisfaction of a job well done. They alone
could clearly see the magnificent golden glow that filled the room,
the radiance of intense and lasting love, and at last they knew it
was time for them, too, to leave, to go toward the
light.

* * * * * *

If you enjoyed reading
A Lantern in
the Window
, continue reading for an excerpt from Bobby
Hutchinson’s novel
Drastic Measures
.

By Bobby
Hutchinson

CHAPTER ONE

St. Joseph's Medical Center sprawled
in Vancouver's watery June sunshine like a gigantic gray toad,
solidly situated on a large and expensive chunk of land smack in
the center of the city's downtown core, a few short blocks from
both skid row and some of North America's most breathtaking and
expensive beachfront real estate. The hospital had none of the
attractive patina aging sometimes endows on even the ugliest
architecture.

St. Joe's had aged badly, its vast
assortment of buildings patch worked haphazardly onto the original
six bed infirmary founded in 1914 by Mary Margaret Constantine, an
intrepid and invincible sister superior with the Angels of
Mercy.

It was eight minutes before eleven on
a Tuesday morning, and the emergency room was abnormally
quiet.

Emergency physician Dr. Alexandra Ross
had been at work almost four hours and she'd only seen one other
patient besides the one she was presently treating. The first
patient had been what the staff called a "mandown," an alcoholic
from the nearby skid row area who'd suffered a seizure with
resulting lacerations and minor head injury. She could hear him in
one of the observation cubicles, intermittently cursing and begging
the nurses for a drink.

This quiet time was undoubtedly just a
lull before the hurricane struck, Alex mused as she looked at the X
ray and assessed the young and healthy specimen of muscular manhood
sitting in the wheelchair in front of her.

He wore purple jogging shorts, a green
headband and a white tee. His bare right foot was propped on the
chair's extended footrest, and the middle toe was obviously
fractured.

"It's a clean break, Mr. Siddon. We
can either anesthetize you to set it or—" She cradled the man's
wide, long foot in one hand, steadying it, and gave a sudden sharp
pull on the crooked toe. Just as Alex had known they would, the
clean edges of the bone snapped into place and the toe was straight
again.

"Or we can just do this," Alex
purred.

"Ooowww. Son of a bitch—" The young
man turned red in the face and glared up at Alex from the
wheelchair. "Damn it all, Doc, that hurt like hell."

"Sorry, Mr. Siddon, but that was so
much easier on you than having to undergo anesthesia just to set a
toe, don't you agree?"

She grinned wickedly at him, and after
a moment, he attempted a white lipped smile and nodded.

"All we need to do now is bind this to
the next digit, to keep it steady while it heals." She swiftly
wound a length of gauze around the injured toe and the one next to
it and secured it with tape.

"Now, I'll just give you a
prescription for pain, and then you're out of here in time for
lunch. You allergic to anything?"

He shook his head and Alex scribbled
on her pad, ripped a page off and handed it to him. "Take these
only if and when you need them. Keep off that foot as much as you
can. You'll need a set of crutches for a while, but your toe'll be
like new in about six weeks. And don't go running into any more
bricks, okay? Now, did someone bring you to Emerg, or shall I have
Lorraine call you a cab?"

"My buddy's right over there, waiting
for me. Say, you work here all the time, Dr... ?" His eyes dropped
to the nameplate attached to her lapel, lingering an instant too
long on her breasts.

"Dr. Ross?"

"Yup, I'm afraid I'm here all of my
working hours." Actually, a large portion of her life had been
spent here, she mused. She'd been born in this very hospital
thirty-four years ago. She'd interned here, done her residency
here, gotten this job in Emerg three years ago, and she'd even met
her husband here. There were times when Alex wondered what it was
about her and St. Joe's.

"You look awfully young to be a
doctor."

It was a comment Alex was accustomed
to hearing. "It's the excitement of setting broken toes," she said
breezily. "Keeps a person from aging."

Mr. Siddon was now looking at Alex in
an entirely different fashion than he had a moment before, taking
in the riotous mop of thick golden brown curls reaching past her
shoulders, the delicate features devoid of any makeup, the wide
mouth, naturally rosy and full lipped. She had thick-lashed dark
blue eyes and graceful curves not quite hidden by the white lab
coat. He liked what he saw.

"So, Doc, you ever get any time away
from this joint, like, say, for food?" His voice was husky, his
tone suggestive, the anger of a moment before transformed into heat
of a different sort. "I know this great Italian restaurant just
over on Robson. I'd love to take you there for lunch."

Alex raised her eyebrows and smiled at
him again, a smile totally devoid of any flirtatiousness. It was
obvious his toe was better if other parts of his anatomy were
kicking in.

"Once in a long while they let me out,
and when they do, I tend to spend time with my husband."

It was his turn to give her a rueful
grin. "Can't blame a guy for trying. He's a lucky man. Tell him I
said so."

"Shall do."

The triage nurse, Leslie Yates,
interrupted them. There was a note of urgency in her quiet
voice.

"Paramedics are arriving with a young
male MCA—" it was the term the team used for motorcycle accident
"—ETA three minutes. We're set up in two."

"Thanks, Les. There goes our quiet
morning." Adrenaline poured through Alex as she hurried with her
small group of nurses to trauma room two. Hastily they donned
protective clothing, sterile gloves and glasses. The room had an
outside port for the ambulance's arrival, and in seconds the
attendants hurried in with a stretcher.

Alex glimpsed one scuffed high-heeled
cowboy boot. The other boot was gone. A blue stocking covered the
foot, and it was immobilized in a pillow splint.

"Blood pressure 80 over 50, heart rate
150, respiration 34 and shallow—"