High Country Bride (19 page)
Read High Country Bride Online
Authors: Linda Lael Miller
Tags: #Westerns, #Fiction, #Romance, #Western, #Historical, #General
Cavanagh nodded. Damned if he didn’t try to smile, too, and him with his leg in such bad shape that it might have to be sawed off.“Where’s that whiskey?” he asked.
They put a blanket under him, a man at each corner, and lifted him carefully into the back of the supply wagon. The mules were harnessed and hitched up. While Kade rode for town, Jeb took the reins of the rig, with Denver Jack riding in back, to hold Cavanagh’s leg steady, and loosen or tighten the tourniquet as need be. Angus rode alongside, keeping a close watch.
Rafe stood watching the rescue party move away, hoping to God Kade would find Doc sober, hoping, indeed, that he’d find him at all. Boylen was a skilled physician—as he’d proven, caring for Mrs. Pelton—unless he’d been overtaken by a melancholy state of mind, which was most of the time. When he was cheerful, he could handle just about anything. When he commenced to sorrowing, though, he drank, and when he drank, he was just plain worthless. It was probably a mercy to the general population of Indian Rock and the surrounding countryside that he tended to hide out at those times.
After a few moments, Rafe turned to face the remaining men, all of them quiet, all of them watching him, waiting for him to tell them whether to keep on working or head back to the ranch. He’d been champing at the bit to run the Triple M for years, but now that he was actually in charge, he was beginning to see the gray cloud behind that silver lining. He had a new respect, and a new sympathy, for his pa, and all the decisions he’d had to make over the years. It all boiled down to one thing, it seemed to Rafe—whatever else might be happening, he had to get on with the task at hand.
“We’ve still got a few hours of daylight,” he said, “and there’s a house to put up. Let’s get back to work.”
Kade found Doc Boylen in the Bloody Basin Saloon, stone sober and winning at faro. Boylen was a small man, with wild red hair and a beak the size of a potato. He always smelled faintly of carbolic acid, and he had the personality of a porcupine with its quills bristled.
“That poor Pelton woman having trouble again?” he asked when Kade approached the faro table.
“A man’s been hurt,” Kade said quietly. “Got himself pinned under a log, up at Rafe’s new place. Jeb and Pa took him to the ranch.”
“How bad?” Doc Boylen barked, throwing in his cards.
“Real bad,” Kade said.“His right leg was crushed.”
Doc swore. “Reckon I’ll need my surgical kit then, and some ether. Laudanum, too. I’ll stop by my office, and meet you at the livery stable. If they haven’t got a fast horse for hire, I’d better take yours.”
Kade nodded and turned to go.
As it happened, the livery stable didn’t have any horses on hand at all, except for an old swayback that would never make it as far as the Triple M, let alone get there fast. Kade surrendered his chestnut gelding, Raindance, with resigned reluctance. He’d pass the night at the Territorial Hotel, if there was a room available, and wait for someone from the ranch to bring back his horse. Doc might be out there for several days.
He saw Boylen off in front of the livery stable, then returned to the Bloody Basin for a few drinks and a round or two of faro. Doc had been enjoying good luck when he broke up the last game; maybe it was still floating around there somewhere, waiting for somebody else to smile on.
It was early evening, and his pockets were considerably lighter, when Kade headed for the hotel. Apparently, Doc had taken his run of luck right along with him; Kade hoped it would rub off on Cavanagh, the poor bastard. Just thinking about the shape that fella’s leg was in made Kade want to turn around and go back for another drink.
He thought he was seeing things when he stepped into the lobby of the Territorial Hotel, and blinked a couple of times. That didn’t clear his head; the nun was still standing behind the registration desk, big as life. She smiled at him.
“I need a room,” he said, feeling downright befuddled. What was in that whiskey?
She handed him the hefty registration book. “Sign here,” she said. “It’s a dollar a night, if you want supper included. Chicken and dumplings.”
He scrawled his name, leaving a few blotches of ink on the page in the process, and noted the signatures of Hester and Esther Milldown, entered above his own. He’d known a no-account claim jumper by that same name, a couple of years back. The rascal had up and disappeared one day, and not a soul went looking for him, either, even though he owed money to half the men in the territory.
Kade took out his wallet, extracted a silver dollar, and laid it on the counter. He definitely wanted supper; the pickled eggs he’d eaten at the Bloody Basin while playing cards were already wearing off. He narrowed his eyes, gazing at the nun, and pushed his hat to the back of his head in consternation. He was pretty sure that under all that heavy black cloth, there was a good-looking woman. “Are you—?”
“Yes,” said the girl, raising her chin.“I’m a nun.”
Damn the luck, Kade thought, and scooped up the key to room 4.
“I
DON
’
T
LIKE THE LOOKS OF THIS
,”
Concepcion said as she and Emmeline stood in the side yard, watching the team and wagon toil across the creek. Angus rode alongside, his horse up to its knees in the rushing water. Even from a distance, the grim expression on his face was plain to see.
Emmeline felt a chill of fear. Rafe, she thought, forgetting all their differences, and started toward the wagon, her heart pulsing in her throat. Where was Rafe?
Concepcion caught hold of her arm and stopped her flight. “We’ll know what’s happened soon enough,” she said quietly. “There’s no sense rushing out to meet bad news—it will always find its own way.”
“Rafe,” Emmeline whispered, in anguish.
“Hush, now,” Concepcion scolded kindly, giving Emmeline a hasty squeeze. “If it is Rafe, you can’t afford to fall apart. He’ll need you to be strong.”
Emmeline stood watching through tears of terror and frustration as the wagon lurched and rumbled toward them. Angus rode ahead, and swung down off his horse, leaving the reins to dangle.
“That new man, Cavanagh, got himself rolled on by a log,” he said, addressing his words to Concepcion and finding some strength, it seemed to Emmeline, in just looking at her.“He’s hurt real bad.”
Emmeline was wildly grateful that it wasn’t Rafe who’d been injured.
“Bring him inside,” Concepcion ordered, as the wagon drew up alongside the house. “He can stay in the spare room, and we’ll move Phoebe Anne in with me.”
It struck Emmeline then, what it might mean, having Holt Cavanagh in such close proximity, stshe was ashamed to catch herself wishing they’d taken him somewhere else. Suppose he said something, either intentionally or in delirium, about the night they’d spent together?
She couldn’t think about that now. She turned and hurried into the house.
Phoebe Anne sat by the stove, rocking and reading over the old letters Emmeline had brought from the cabin, the day of Seth and the baby’s funeral. “What’s happened?” she asked, her eyes going wide. By then, Phoebe Anne knew the cabin had been burned, and she’d taken the news with a strange calmness. It was encouraging to see her register any emotion, even alarm.
“It’s the new hand—Mr. Cavanagh,” Emmeline said hastily. “He’s been injured in an accident.” There were voices at the back door; no time to explain further. She hurried upstairs to the spare room to put fresh linens on the bed.
Cavanagh was unconscious when they brought him in, using an old door to support his weight, and he was so covered in blood and dirt that he was barely recognizable. Emmeline wished she’d waited to change the sheets, and then was stricken with guilt because she’d entertained such a petty thought.
“He’s going to need a lot of tending,” Angus said quietly, standing next to the bed. He was a strong man, Angus was, but he looked brittle to Emmeline in that moment, and somehow fragile. “He might not make it, anyhow. He’s lost a lot of blood.”
Emmeline stepped back, hands clasped together so hard that her knuckles hurt, and watched as Concepcion moved to the side of the bed to examine the broken man lying so still on the mattress.
If Emmeline could have been granted a single wish, by some passing fairy godmother, even an hour before, she probably would have asked for Holt Cavanagh to disappear as suddenly as he’d arrived, never to be seen or heard from again. That way, her secret would be safe. Now, though, seeing him mangled and broken, perilously near death, she felt nothing but compassion.
Concepcion rolled up her sleeves.“Jeb, Emmeline,” she said crisply, without looking back, “I’ll need hot water and all the clean rags you can find. Angus, if you aren’t going to help, kindly get out of the way.”
Emmeline rushed to obey, racing down the stairs to the kitchen, snatching up a basin, ladling steaming water from the stove reservoir to fill it. Jeb started pumping water into kettles and setting them on the stove to heat, and even in her agitation, Emmeline noticed that he kept glancing up at the ceiling, a look of solemn reflection on his face.
Phoebe Anne fetched the rag bag in from the back porch without being asked, and started sorting, setting the larger scraps aside to be used in cleaning Holt’s wounds.
Emmeline, meanwhile, scalded her thumbs, carrying that first basin up the stairs.
Concepcion had already commandeered all the clean handkerchiefs to be had, and when Emmeline arrived with the water, she soaked one and began cleaning Cavanagh’s wounds, in an attempt to assess the damage. The water in the basin soon turned crimson, and Emmeline went back to the kitchen to replace it with a fresh supply. Jeb accompanied her when she returned, having filled a couple of tin buckets from the stove reservoir.
“Is Mr. Cavanagh going to die?” Emmeline asked her brother-in-law, when they paused in the hallway outside the spare room.
Jeb’s face, boyishly handsome and usually full of mischief, was grave. “He left a trail of blood down the mountainside,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “We tried to control it, but by the time we got to the creek, the stuff was seeping through the floorboards of the wagon.” He sighed. “I don’t reckon his chances are all that good.”
Emmeline lifted her chin.“Was anyone else hurt?”
Jeb knew she was asking about Rafe, and he smiled a little, though his azure-blue eyes were still sad. “No,” he said. “Nobody. Kade went for the doc, and Rafe and the rest of them are still up there, working on the house.”
They descended to the kitchen again, and Jeb worked at refilling the reservoir and heating more kettles while Emmeline built up the fire. Phoebe Anne had delivered the rags Concepcion wanted and was busy scouting out more. Angus remained upstairs, helping Concepcion clean Mr. Cavanagh’s shattered limb. The bleeding had stopped by then, or at least slowed to a trickle, but the poor man was deathly pale, and still unconscious, which was a mercy, Emmeline supposed. He would suffer dreadfully when, and if, he awakened.
“We need blankets, Emmeline!” Concepcion called from upstairs, and that command was just the tonic she needed. Jeb had taken over the hot water detail, and he was handling it so efficiently that any efforts on her part would be more hindrance than help.
She and Phoebe Anne raided the blanket chest, at the far end of the upstairs corridor, and carried armloads into the spare room. Concepcion and Angus wrapped Mr. Cavanagh as best they could, while leaving his injured leg bare.
After that, for Emmeline time seemed to run together and blur, like a palette of watercolors left behind in a hard rain. The sunlight at the windows changed, first glaring, then fading its way through a series of colors, before disappearing entirely, and Emmeline fetched lanterns from the shelf on the back porch, filled them with oil at the kitchen table, trimmed the wicks, and scrubbed the glass chimneys. Soon, the spare room glowed softly.
There was no sign of Rafe.
Working steadily, Concepcion had loosely bandaged Mr. Cavanagh’s leg, and she sat beside him, holding a cold cloth to his forehead, whispering soothing words, now in Spanish, now in English. Angus, even more pensive than usual, had dragged in a couple of chairs.
Emmeline remembered that Concepcion’s husband had died violently, and felt certain that her friend must be reliving that experience as she tended Mr. Cavanagh. Maybe she’d looked after her Manuel in the same quiet, desperately efficient way, only to lose him in the end.
She went to Concepcion’s side, took her arm gently. “You need to rest,” she said softly, but in a firm tone. She glanced at Angus. “You, too. I’ll look after Mr. Cavanagh for a while.”
Just then, there was a commotion downstairs. Emmeline strained to hear Rafe’s voice, and heard the doctor’s instead. Jeb must have pointed him toward the stairs.“Up there, in the spare room,” she heard him say.
“Tarnation,” fretted the doc, as he made his entrance moments later, “it seems like I spend half my time on the Triple M these days.”
Concepcion and Angus moved aside so he could approach the bed, and he stood looking down at the patient, shaking his head.
| “Sweet heaven,” he muttered, “what happened to this man?” “He got in the way of some runaway logs,” Angus said. “Hello, Boylen.” The doctor didn’t even spare him a look. His attention was all for Mr. Cavanagh and his mangled limb. He made a harrumph sound and barked,“I need to wash up before I do anything. And somebody might want to put Kade’s horse away for the night—he worked up quite a lather getting out here.” “The kitchen is this way,” Emmeline said. “You can wash there.” “I’ll see to the horse,” Jeb said from the doorway. “I take it you and Kade didn’t ride double on the way out, so he must have stayed in town.” “He’ll be there until I get back, I reckon,” said the physician.“My guess is, he’ll find plenty of ways to amuse himself in the meantime.” Jeb looked thoughtful at that, but he left the house to put Kade’s gelding up for the night. In the kitchen, Emmeline provided the doctor with a bar of yellow soap, a towel, and a basin of hot water, and watched as he scrubbed his hands. Phoebe Anne had started a supper of fried ham, potatoes, and onions; she greeted the new arrival with quiet friendliness, then set another place at the table. “I won’t have time to eat for a while,” Boylen said, watching her with a paternal interest as she moved about the kitchen. “You been feeling all right, Mrs. Pelton? When I saw you last, you were in pretty bad shape.” Phoebe Anne smiled slightly. “I’m gettin’ stronger by the day,” she said. “The McKettricks have been real good to me.” Except for burning your home to the ground, Emmeline thought, and felt a fresh spurt of irritation at Rafe, even though she was wishing he’d ride in, so she’d know he was safe. “Well,” said the doctor,“you just get your rest, and take in all the fresh air and good food you can. You still look a mite bony to me.” Phoebe Anne nodded a little. “I’ll keep a plate warm for you, Doc.” She turned her steady if somewhat haunted gaze toward Emmeline. “What about you, Emmeline?” she asked.“You’d best have something.” “In a little while,” Emmeline agreed. She didn’t have the slightest appetite, but she knew she had to keep up her strength, if only to be ready for the next crisis. It seemed to her that life on the Triple M was one calamity after another. Up in the spare bedroom, a few minutes later, Doc Boylen began unpacking equipment from his bag. He brought out a bottle of ether, a mask of some sort, and a variety of surgical instruments. Emmeline swayed, just looking at them. “Buck up,” ordered the doctor; apparently, he’d seen her reaction out of the corner of his eye. “I’ll need your help. Concepcion is ready to collapse, and Angus oughtn’t to be under this kind of strain.” He paused to peer at both of them over the rims of his glasses. “Contrary to what he’d have the rest of us believe, Angus McKettrick is not made of steel.” Emmeline swallowed a throatful of protests that she couldn’t possibly assist in an operation, and stiffened her spine. Whether she liked it or not, this was the lot that had fallen to her. Concepcid Angus had been watching over Mr. Cavanagh for several hours; indeed, they might well have kept him alive thus far, but for the time being they’d given all they could. It was her turn. Reluctantly, they left the room, and Emmeline heard their quiet voices as they went downstairs. “Just tell me what you want me to do,” she said. The doctor looked up from the bandages he’d been peeling away. “Go and scrub your hands. We’re going to put this leg back together.” Knees trembling, Emmeline nodded and went to the kitchen, where she began washing up. Angus and Concepcion were there, drinking coffee Phoebe Anne had made for them, watching numbly as she set the table to serve a light supper. “You don’t have to do this, Emmeline,” Angus said. She turned from the sink, drying her hands on a clean towel. They looked as if they’d been through a war, the two of them, Concepcion dazed, her dress bloodied, Angus wan and pale. “I’ll be fine,” she said, but she couldn’t help glancing toward the darkened windows when she heard horses passing by, moving in the direction of the barn and the bunkhouse. Rafe was back, then. How she yearned to see him, if only for a moment. A look, a word, would give her the strength she needed so badly to meet this new challenge. “Emmeline!” Dr. Boylen called, from upstairs. “What’s keeping you? We need to get started in here!” Emmeline drew a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and marched up the steps. Frank Boylen placed the masklike contraption over Mr. Cavanagh’s face. The patient happened to be semiconscious at the moment, and he was looking up at Emmeline with an unreadable expression in his eyes. Unreadable, that is, except for simple recognition. Holt Cavanagh definitely remembered her from Kansas City, and for whatever reason, he wanted her to know it. “This bottle contains ether,” the doctor went on, shoving it into Emmeline’s hand. “Drip it slowly onto the mask. Emmeline’s ears began to ring, and she had to stiffen her knees just to keep them from buckling, but she nodded. She did as Dr. Boylen showed her and, after a few minutes, Mr. Cavanagh closed his eyes. Dr. Boylen listened to the patient’s heart with his stethoscope, nodded to himself, and reached for his instruments, wiping each one with a cloth soaked in carbolic acid. Then he began to cut, mend and stitch. He pressed the bones back into place with his bare hands, and there was plenty of blood. Emmeline felt woozy several times during the long ordeal, but she concentrated on administering the ether. Drip, drip, drip. The doctor’s counsel echoed in her head: Mr. Cavanagh must have been very tough indeed, because he lived through that operation. When it was over, Dr. Boylen had worked for more than four hours over the patient, pausing only to wipe sweat from his brow with a bunched table napkin, reassembling bone and sinew like the parts of a puzzle, disinfecting the wound, closing it with sutures, disinfecting it again. Toward the end, he’d shouted for someone to come and run an errand, and Rafe had stepped in, glancing at Emmeline, telling her with his eyes that he’d have taken her away from that awful scene if only he could. Frank Boylen sent him to cut the ends off a pair of shovel handles, and when he returned with them, the doctor cleansed them with carbolic acid, just as he had the scalpel and other instruments. He used the lengths of hardwood as splints, setting the leg, then binding them in place with long strips of cotton sheeting, the same material Concepcion had used to create bandages earlier. Emmeline was sitting in the kitchen, bloodstained and exhausted, when Rafe came to her, crouching beside her chair. She’d drawn it up close to the stove, cold to the marrow of her bones, sure that she would never feel warm again. Rafe took her hand, kissed it, even though it probably smelled of ether. “You did a fine job, Emmeline,” he said quietly.“Doc Boylen said so himself.” Emmeline turned her head, looked at her husband. She felt strangely dissociated from everything, as though she were wandering in a dream, unable to find her way out.“I was afraid it was you they were bringing back,” she said, almost whispering the words. “When I saw that wagon, I knew someone had been badly hurt, or even killed, and I was so afraid it was you.” He squeezed her hand. “When—when I saw him—I was glad,” she blurted, and clapped her hand to her mouth in a vain attempt to stifle a sob.“I was Rafe gathered her in his arms, buried his face in her hair. “Shhh,” he said. “You’re plumb worn out. Let’s get you upstairs to bed.” He stood then, and scooped her up in his arms like a child. He carried her to their room, where he helped her undress and get into her nightgown. Then he tucked her in and kissed her gently on the forehead. She was already drifting off to sleep when he put out the lamp and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. Angus stood looking down at Cavanagh, asleep in the spare-room bed, his face awash in moonlight, and he knew what it was that had been nipping at the back of his brain ever since he’d first encountered the man, early that morning, out by the barn. “Holt,”he said, and dropped into the chair nearest to the bed, too overcome, for the moment, to stand. He buried his face in his hands for a long moment, remembering the little boy he’d left behind in Texas, his firstborn son. It had torn his heart out at the time, and he’d never gone so much as a day since without wishing there’d been another solution. Holt opened his eyes. “You,” he said. His voice was like a hasp striking rusty metal. Angus chuckled, even though he felt tears gathering in the back of his throat and behind his eyes, and had to squeeze the bridge of his nose hard, between thumb and forefinger, to keep them back. “Yup,” he said, when he could trust his voice.“You hurting?” “Everywhere,” Holt admitted. Then, in the grip of some sudden terror, he tried to sit up, groping wildly with one hand. Angus put his hands on the younger man’s shoulders and pressed him back onto the pillows. “Settle down, Son,” he said.“You’ve still got both your legs.” Holt let out a long breath. “For a moment there, I thought—” “You’ll have to take it easy for quite a while,” Angus told him. “In time, the doc figures you’ll be able to walk and ride, same as always. Might be a little hitch in your get-along, course.” He reached for the bottle Frank Boylen had given him, uncorked it, and poured a generous dose of the brown liquid inside into a serving spoon from Concepcion’s kitchen. “Here,” he said gruffly. “This’ll take the edge off, anyway.” Holt raised his head to take the laudanum and then lay still again, cursing under his breath. “What brings you to Arizona Territory?” Angus asked, when a long time had passed, and he figured the dope was starting to work. Holt’s breathing had evened out a little; it seemed deeper, and less rapid. Holt turned his head to look at him. “I wanted to get a good look at you,” he said, straight out. But then, Angus would have figured any other answer for a bold-faced lie. “My old man. See if you were the polecat I always reckoned you to be.” Angus’s shoulders moved, and he laughed, but no sound came out.“Well,” he said, after quite a while,“what did you decide?” “I’m still considering the matter,” Holt said. His speech had slowed to a drawl, but he was making sense, anyway. Angus emitted a raw chuckle, close kin to a sob. He rested his elbows on his knees and steepled his fingers, waiting for Holt to go on, knowing what was coming, and dreading it, too, all of a piece. “I guess calling myself Cavanagh got to be a habit,” he said. He was drifting as the drug took hold, hardly able to keep his eyes open. Angus wished he had something to dull what Angus gave him a sip of water from the glass on the bedside table. “Directly after you sent back that money I tried to give you, I reckon,” he said. “I didn’t want your damn money then,” Holt told him, “and I don’t want it now.” “Took you a long time to head this way,” Angus said gently.“What kept you?” “You left when I was a baby,” Holt reminded him, as if he needed reminding, his words thick and muddled. He struggled visibly to keep his eyes open and said his piece with slow and painful deliberation. “You ever look back, even once?” Angus’s voice was gruff. “Of course I did,” he said. “I was young, and when I lost your mother, I lost my mind, too. For a long time, I was just plain crazy.” “You’ve got three other sons,” Holt said. “You must have married again.” Angus nodded. He had a lot to apologize for where Holt was concerned, but he would Holt was rambling now, sort of groping his way from word to word. Angus figured listening was the least he could do, however painful it might turn out to be, so he leaned forwardsting his arms on his thighs, and took it all in. “I used to tell myself that one day, I’d find you, and cut your gizzard out. Time passed, though, and I had some luck. Wound up with land and a herd of my own. I decided to let you live.” Angus smiled a little, nodded.“Glad to hear it,” he said. “There’s been a time or two in my life when I would have welcomed being killed, though. Did they look after you, your mother’s people?” “They did the best they could,” Holt said, after a long time. “I learned to ride and shoot and work. God, yes, I learned to work.” Angus closed his eyes for a moment, overcome by sadness, by the loss of those years with his eldest son, years that could never be replaced or redeemed. It was the drug that made the boy say what he did next; Angus knew he’d deny it, once the stuff wore off. “I used to wonder what it would be like to have brothers,” he said. “To be part of a real family.” “I’m sorry,”Angus said. It was all he had to offer, under the circumstances. Holt didn’t answer, and for a few seconds, Angus was afraid he’d gone and died. He didn’t think he could have borne that. Then the young man mumbled something, and Angus knew he’d merely fallen asleep. Best thing for him. He sat back in the chair and kept his vigil, his hands folded in his lap, flipping through old memories grown musty in his mind, like daguerreotypes in a forgotten album. Georgia, delighting in their children, teaching them to walk and talk, read and write and figure. Sweet God, the two of them, he and Georgia, would have been glad to fetch Holt back home and raise him with his brothers; they’d talked about it a thousand times. There’d always been some reason to put off the trip—a hard winter, sick cattle, money running short. Angus sighed, thinking of his other three sons. He’d never gotten around to telling them about Holt when they were young, partly because he was ashamed of how he’d handled the whole matter and partly because he’d never wanted them to think he was going to ride out one day and leave them behind, too. It was enough that they’d lost their mother. Of course they were men now, and he could have told them, but somehow he’d never found the words. So he’d kept the secret, even though it nettled him like a burr. All this time, he’d kept it. He let out a long, despairing sigh, and started a little when he felt Concepcion’s hands come to rest on his shoulders. He hadn’t heard her come into the room. “You must sleep, Angus,” she said softly. “You’re exhausted.” “I reckon I’m afraid to close my eyes,” he replied. He glanced back at her, saw that she was wearing a nightgown and wrapper. Her lustrous black hair was plaited into a heavy, gleaming braid, resting over her shoulder and reaching nearly to her waist. Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight. “I’m afraid I’ll die if I do,” he said, “and go straight to hell for all my sins.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Nonsense,” she said, and though she was smiling, he could see tears in her eyes. “The devil wouldn’t have you. You’re too much trouble and far too cantankerous.” He chuckled, patted her hand. “I hope you’re right,” he said. “Come,” she said, urging him to stand. “I will sit with you until you sleep, and chase the devil away if he dares come near you.” There wasn’t much to Concepcion, she was such a little thing, but she could herd him around right well when she had a mind to, and that night was no exception. She led him out of the spare room and straight down the hall to his own. “What about the Doc? Did you find him a bed somewhere?” he asked. “He’s sleeping on the parlor sofa,” she replied. Fortunately, Jeb had turned in long ago, and so had Rafe and Emmeline. Angus didn’t want any scandals in his life at this late date, and it would have aroused comment, for sure, if anybody saw Concepcion go into his bedroom in the middle of the night. They were always careful when she came to his bed. She lit a lamp, after closing the door, and Angus sat on the edge of the mattress to yank off his boots. He felt as if he’d been dragged down the mountainside by those mules of his, and then stomped on for good measure. “Who is he, Angus? This Holt Cavanagh?” Concepcion asked, settling into the chair at his writing table. “There have been a lot of men hurt on this ranch, but you never sat with them half the night.” Angus tossed back the covers on his bed, stripped off his shirt, and shed his trousers. He never stood on ceremony with Concepcion—not when they were alone, anyway. They’d known each other too damn long for that. “I knew there was something familiar about that boy the moment I met him,” he said, stretching out. The older he got, the more his joints ached when he lay down at night; it was as if his damn bones spent the whole day rusting up, just to give him grief. “It was peculiar—I felt like I’d seen him someplace, but I couldn’t figure where. Just came to me a little while ago, while I was sitting there, watching over him.” A lot of women might have started in to prattling when he left off talking, but not Concepcion. She had the patience of a bird on a nest when it came to things that really mattered, and she waited. “I told you I was married once, and widowed, before I met Georgia,” he went on. “What I didn’t say was, we had a child together. A boy I called Holt, after her mother’s folks. I was young when my wife died, and sometimes the grief was so bad that I’d ride out into the countryside and just holler ’til I was too hoarse to keep it up. I commenced to drinkin’ more than I should have, too, and I was itching to leave that place behind me. I guess I thought I could outrun the pain someway. “The boy’s aunt finally convinced me that I ought to leave the boy with her and her husband until I got myself straightened out. It didn’t have to be permanent, she told me. Just until I could give Holt a proper home and all.” Concepcion came to sit on the side of the bed when he stopped to recover for a moment. She took his big hand in her two small ones and kissed the knuckles.“But it was permanent,” she said softly. He nodded. “I was a long time getting myself headed in the right direction,” he said. “Holt’s aunt and uncle asked me to let them adopt him, and I agreed. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time, but I always regretted it. Georgia would have been glad to take my son in, and raise him like her own.” “Yes,” Concepcion said, smiling. “She would have. She s a wonderful woman, your Georgia.” “By the time we were married, and had the ranch turning a steady profit, it was too late. Holt was somebody else’s son by then.” He swallowed hard, searched Concepcion’s face for any trace of the condemnation he felt for himself, and saw only tenderness there, only warmth and compassion. “I don’t know much about what his life was like, but I believe it was a hard one.” “Oh, Angus,” Concepcion said softly, touching his face. “I should have gone back there, Concepcion. I should have made sure Holt was all right. Dammit, he’s my own flesh and blood.” She kissed his forehead, touched an index finger to his mouth. “You had every reason to believe he was safe,” she said, “and you were more than a thousand miles away, building a ranch, starting a new family. You couldn’t have traveled to Texas then without causing a lot of hardship for Mrs. McKettrick and the boys, as well as yourself.” He closed his eyes, sighed. She was balm to his spirit, this woman, simple and practical and sweet, and he began to let go, muscle by muscle, thought by thought, breath by breath, of all his burdens. In time, he slept, and dreamed that Concepcion was chasing the devil around the front yard with a fireplace poker, railing at him in Spanish. |
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