One Bright Morning (11 page)

“
Are you the bright lady?”
he asked, still frowning.

Maggie misunderstood him, but it turned out
all right. “I’m Maggie Bright, yes. That’s right, Mr. Green. You
rode up to my house the other day, gunshot, and now you’re staying
here for a while.”

“
Maggie Bright,” Jubal
repeated, glad for that clarification at least. The name appealed
to him, for some reason, so he said it again. “Maggie
Bright.”

Shadowy flickers of recollection assailed
him once more, and he wondered if Maggie Bright was the same angel
who had been sleeping in his bed at night—some night—he couldn’t
remember. His concentration on the subject was so intense that he
wore himself out and his eyes drifted shut again.

Once Maggie was fairly certain that he was
sleeping, she caressed his brow again. Jubal smiled in his
sleep.

When she guessed she’d had enough of petting
Jubal Green’s face, Maggie went out to the kitchen. Jubal frowned
when she left him, but Maggie didn’t notice.

Four Toes Smith again accompanied her out to
the privy.

“
Mr. Green seems to be a
little bit better today,” Maggie ventured experimentally when she
got back to the kitchen in one piece.

“
Yeah. He’s resting better
and don’t seem as addled,” said Dan.

“
Addled,” Maggie murmured,
pleased with the word. He had seemed a little addled, at
that.

“
Is there anything you’d
like me to pay special attention to when you go get my baby, Mr.
Blue Gully?” Maggie asked Dan deferentially since she considered
him to be Jubal Green’s doctor. She was just the nurse, she
guessed.

Dan looked a little surprised that she would
be asking him what to do. He shook his head.

“
No. Just do what you been
doing. Whatever it is you do, it works. Keep him as comfortable as
possible, I guess. Don’t know what else you can do. If he has
to—”Dan stopped, embarrassed, as he struggled to find a polite word
for it. He finally decided on, “If he has to relieve himself, Four
Toes can help you.”

“
Thank you,” Maggie said.
Then she thought to ask, “Will you be all right, Mr. Blue Gully?
Will that French Jack fellow try to hurt you and my
baby?”

“
Naw,” Dan said. He didn’t
sound at all concerned. “He don’t bother me none, ma’am. I know how
to fool him.”

Maggie pondered that for a second. “Too bad
Mr. Green didn’t know how to fool him, too.”

Dan looked vaguely irritated and Maggie
hoped she hadn’t said something wrong.

“
That was just bad luck,
ma’am. Jubal Green’s the best there is. We was tired, was what done
it. That’s never happened before and it won’t never happen
again.”

“
Oh,” said Maggie. “Well, I
sure hope it doesn’t. It would be a shame.”

Then Dan said, “I’ll go fetch your little
girl now, Mrs. Bright. Do you expect she’ll be scared of me?”

Maggie laughed. Hers was a pleasant, sweet
laugh, and it made the two men in the room with her laugh, too.

“
Annie?” she said, still
amazed. “Lord no, Mr. Blue Gully. Annie loves everybody. She’s just
like her daddy. But I’d better write a note for Sadie. Now
she’ll
be scared to
death. Sadie’s a shrieker.”

Dan remembered the shriek that Sadie
Phillips had greeted him with and nodded.

The thought of her friend screaming at the
kindly Dan Blue Gully tickled Maggie and she continued to giggle a
bit as she wrote the note to Sadie.

Four Toes had made a breakfast of biscuits
and coffee, so Maggie gratefully sat at her kitchen table and ate
after Dan left. It was the second meal in as many days that she had
not had to prepare herself, a luxury she couldn’t remember ever
experiencing before. She actually began to wonder if being under
siege was really so bad after.

Then Four Toes went out to the privy and she
heard a shot ring out and slam into the thick log side of the
house, and she decided that being under siege was, too, bad. A
second or two later a barrage of gunfire shattered both the
early-morning stillness and her back-door window.

“
Damn,” Maggie grumbled.
“Kenny brought that window all the way from El Paso.”

Then she heard another volley of shots and
what sounded like a commotion in the woods.

Four Toes Smith’s voice sailed to her on the
tail end of the gunfire. “Mrs. Bright! Open the door quick!”

Maggie heard somebody running madly across
the hard-packed dirt, and she did as he had hollered.

When Four Toes stumbled into the house, his
momentum propelled him clean across the floor to bump into the wall
on the other side of the kitchen before he could stop himself.

“
Sorry, ma’am,” he panted.
“Didn’t dare slow down.”

“
That’s all right, Mr.
Smith,” Maggie assured him. “I heard shots. Are you
hurt?”

Four Toes grinned a tight grin. “I’m not
hurt, ma’am.”

Maggie recognized his expression as one of
satisfaction. “Did you shoot Mr. Jack?” she asked with a hopeful
lilt to her voice.

“
Naw,” said Four Toes. “But
I scared the hell out of him.” He looked instantly abashed at his
bad language. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“
That’s all right, Mr.
Smith.”

It suddenly occurred to her that she was
saying those words about a whole lot of things she never would have
anticipated being all right with her. She guessed that’s just the
way life worked. You never knew what was going to happen next. At
least, she decided, this episode was nominally exciting, if she
didn’t get shot to death.

“
I guess they saw Dan
leaving,” Four Toes continued. “They was sneaking up to the back
porch. They probably won’t do that again.”

“
The porch?” Maggie was
aghast. That was her worst fear, that their besiegers would sneak
in through the screen.

“
Don’t worry, ma’am. We
won’t let them hurt you.”

Although Maggie didn’t say anything, she did
wonder about that. So far, it looked to her as if they had a
stand-off going, and she wondered if Dan and Four Toes were ever
going to try to get rid of French Jack, or if they were planning to
merely hold him at bay for the rest of their natural lives. The
awful thought crossed her mind that the two Indians were waiting
for Jubal Green to get better before they tried to rout the
villains.

Good Lord, that could take
months
, Maggie thought
unhappily.

She decided to ask Dan Blue Gully about it
when he got back. Right now, she figured she’d better check up on
Jubal. Those gunshots had been loud enough to wake the dead. They
might even have awakened poor, addled, Jubal Green.

They had.

When Maggie went back into her bedroom,
Jubal was glaring at her. That made her stop dead in her tracks
momentarily, because he had a powerfully ferocious glare. Then she
decided that it was most probably an impersonal glare and not one
directed specifically at her. After all, he couldn’t have known it
would be she who would walk through the door just then. Could
he?

She took a deep breath and approached the
bed. Jubal’s scowl didn’t leave his face.

“
I’m sorry for the noise,
Mr. Green. There’s some trouble outside.” Maggie decided to spare
him the details since she didn’t want him to waste energy worrying
about French Jack.

The gun battle had awakened Jubal with a
start that set his wounds and inflamed muscles to throbbing
viciously. He was furious that he should be lying in this bed,
helpless, and not know what was going on or be able to help,
whatever it was.

He hadn’t meant to frown at Maggie, really.
It’s only that he had been staring at the door when she walked in
and got trapped by his scowl. Then, when he saw her, his frown
changed from one of anger into one of concentration as he tried to
figure out who she was.

Maggie couldn’t tell the difference between
his various frowns, however. He just looked mean mad to her.

“
Did the gunfire startle
you, Mr. Green?” she asked gently.

Jubal decided that was too foolish a
question to answer. His brow wrinkled up as he looked at Maggie,
his eyes registering angry bewilderment.

What he remembered from the last few foggy
days was that he’d been shot all to hell and was now in the home of
a lady named Maggie and his friend Dan Blue Gully. When he added to
that the snippet of memory which told him that Maggie was a bright
angel who slept with him, nothing made any sense at all.

If Maggie were with Dan, she sure as hell
wouldn’t be sleeping with him, and if she was an angel, she
wouldn’t be here on earth. If this was earth. Besides, if Dan had
got himself a woman, wouldn’t he, Jubal Green, know about it? He
and Dan were like brothers, for God’s sake He couldn’t have been
sick for that long, could he?

There was also something about gentle,
peaceful hands, but he couldn’t sort that one out at all, so he
gave up.

“
Who the hell are you?” he
snarled weakly.

Maggie blinked down at him, distressed at
his tone. She hoped he wasn’t a touchy sort of man.

Well
, she thought,
I guess getting shot
up might make a saint cranky
, so she
decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She dipped a cloth in the bowl full of water
that rested on the bedside table and began to wipe his brow.

“
My name is Maggie Bright,
Mr. Green,” she said. “I told you that last night, but I guess you
don’t remember.”

Suddenly Jubal did recollect having been
told that before.

“
Oh, yeah,” he said with a
bare hint of surliness in his voice.

What she was doing with that cloth felt
really good to him. He looked up at her suspiciously.

“
You’re not an angel?” he
asked, fearing the answer.

Maggie laughed softly. She had a very pretty
laugh, and that worried Jubal, too.

“
No, Mr. Green, I’m not an
angel. Just a widow lady on a farm in New Mexico Territory trying
to get you healthy again.”

But Jubal didn’t seem to be paying attention
after the first part of her explanation. “Then I’m not dead?” he
asked. There was just the faintest touch of fear icing the edges of
his words.

Maggie smiled at him tenderly. Jubal Green
touched her, for some reason. She guessed it was because he was
obviously a strong man and mad as hell at his present helplessness.
She supposed he wasn’t a man who allowed himself to be taken care
of any too often. If his size and strength were any indication, he
probably did most of the taking care. That thought started an
unsettling series of warm ripples flickering through her insides,
so she stopped thinking it immediately.

“
No, Mr. Green,” she said
softly. “You’re not dead, thank the Lord.”

He sighed weakly and looked relieved. Then
he nodded just a little bit.

“
You don’t look like an
angel,” he said. That was true. Maggie looked entirely too earthy
to be an angel in Jubal Green’s opinion. Not that that was a bad
thing.

Maggie wasn’t sure if she had just been
insulted or not, but she decided to let it pass if it was an
insult. “Would you like some water, Mr. Green?” she asked
instead.

Jubal thought about it. His tongue felt as
though it had been replaced by cotton wadding, and the inside of
his mouth felt like flannel. He guessed water sounded like a good
idea.

“
Yes.”

Then he was horrified when Maggie stopped
bathing his forehead and looked like she was going to go away.
Although it took an incredible amount of effort and hurt like fire,
he reached up and grabbed her by the wrist.

“
Don’t go,” he whispered. He
would have yelled, but it had taken all of his energy to grab
her.

Maggie was shocked.

“
I’ll be right back, Mr.
Green. I won’t leave you. I’m just going to get you some
water.”

Jubal stared at her in disbelief for a
second or two. Then his hand began to shake from pain and weakness,
and he let go of Maggie, although he didn’t want to. His hand
flopped back onto the bed, and he experienced a feeling of
incredible, terrible loss as he watched Maggie walk out of the
room. He shut his eyes and felt gloomier than he could remember
feeling since his brother died.

When Maggie came back to his bed a minute
later, carrying a glass of water, his eyes were still closed.

“
Mr. Green?” Maggie ventured
softly, wondering if he had gone back to sleep.

But his eyes opened immediately, at the
first sound of her voice. “You came back,” he whispered
incredulously.

Maggie smiled. “Why, of course, I came back,
Mr. Green. Why did you think I wouldn’t come back? I was just
getting you some water.”

As he listened to her explanation, Jubal
decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell her the truth. He had
believed her to be a figment. He was really glad to know that she
wasn’t a figment, but was instead a real, live, peaceful woman
named Maggie who had brought him water. He struggled painfully for
a second or two, in a vain effort to sit up.

Maggie was appalled. “Mr. Green, stop that
right now. You just lie back there and don’t move. For heaven’s
sake, Mr. Green, you nearly died. You can’t sit up yet. Here, let
me hold your head and I’ll help you drink.”

Jubal frowned at her for a second. Then,
when her arm slipped behind him to cradle his head and she held him
close against her soft bosom and leaned over to bring the glass to
his lips, he decided this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. His
eyes never left Maggie’s face, which was lost in concentration as
she tried to help him drink without jostling his poor wounds. When
she withdrew the water glass, he smiled.