One More Sunrise (5 page)

Moments later, Dane pulled up in front of the doctor’s office, noticing that his father’s horse and buggy were there. Grabbing his suit coat and the medical bag, he hopped out, tied the reins to the hitch rail, and entered the office. He knew that by now, Nurse Ella Dover and his mother had already gone home.

Dr. Jacob Logan was just escorting a middle-aged woman from the waiting area toward the door of the examining room. He looked over his shoulder and stopped at the door. “Mrs. Williams, you go on into the examining room and sit down. I’ll be with you shortly. I need to talk to my son for a moment.”

The woman gave Dr. Dane a petulant glance, nodded, and moved on through the door.

Dr. Jacob closed the door behind her, then moved toward his son. “Your mother told me you had gone to the Donaldson ranch. Is Joshua—” His eyes were suddenly fastened on Dane’s blood-speckled shirt. “How’d you get that blood on you? Certainly not from Joshua.”

Dane’s features tinted. “Of course not. I had to stop a bully from beating up on Ernie Piper. I guess you know the guy. Name’s T. J. Finnegan.”

“Oh, sure. T. J. gets his belly full of whiskey, then becomes Mr. Troublemaker. So today, it was pound on poor little Ernie, eh?”

“Uh-huh. Trouble started right in front of the Lone Pine. I had to knock him out. Took several punches, so I split his lips. Got some of his blood on me.”

“Sheriff and deputies weren’t in on it?”

“No. They were out of town. Came back just after T. J. went down for the count.”

“Ernie okay?”

“Mm-hmm. Just some sore ribs.”

Jacob nodded. “I started to ask you if Joshua is all right.”

“He’s fine, Dad. It was a fairly simple dislocation of the shoulder. I guess Mom told you he got bucked off a horse.”

“Yes. I’m glad he’ll be all right.”

“Oh yeah. He was a brave boy. He’ll be back to normal in a few weeks. With that houseful of females to tend to his every need, he’ll enjoy his recuperation time.”

Jacob smiled. “I’m sure you’re right about that.”

“The Donaldsons were surprised to learn that you had an adopted son. They had never heard about me.”

“Well, now they know.”

“Yeah. So how did the delivery go? Everyone okay?”

“Mm-hmm. Mother and husky son are both doing great. The father … well, you know how fathers are. He sure was frantic when he banged on our door early this morning. The sun wasn’t even up yet.” He yawned. “So I’m sort of tuckered out.”

“Tell you what, Dad …”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Williams has to be our last patient for the day. Let me tend to her and you go on home. I’ll be there shortly. I’m sure Mom has supper on the stove.”

“Okay, son. But … ah … Mrs. Williams can be pretty cantankerous. And since you’re new to her, just be prepared for lots of questions and some argument.”

Dane grinned. “Don’t worry, Dad. Believe me, I’ve had my share of cantankerous people. I’ll just turn on my irresistible charm, and Mrs. Williams and I will get along fine.”

His father laughed and shook his head. “Well, enjoy yourself, son.” Jacob picked up his medical bag and headed for the front door. “See you at supper.”

“Right. Tell Mom I’ll be there shortly.”

When Jacob went out the door, Dane turned, squared his shoulders, and headed toward the examining room.

By September 1880, Dr. Dane Logan was getting quite well known by the people of Cheyenne and the farmers and ranchers in
a thirty- to forty-mile radius. Like his adoptive father, he put his patients in the Cheyenne Memorial Hospital and performed surgeries there whenever possible. Sometimes—like with his father—emergency surgeries had to be done in the homes of the patients, especially those on farms and ranches.

As time continued to pass, Dane thought of Tharyn Myers daily, and prayed for her, wishing he knew where she was and if she was well and happy.

Though Dane lived in a boardinghouse a half-block from his parents’ home, he ate nearly all of his evening meals with them.

One evening in mid-September, while the Logans and their son were enjoying supper together, father and son were talking about a new farm family named Jones who had brought their twelve-year-old daughter to the office with a rash on her face. Both doctors had looked at her.

Dane chuckled. “You know what, Dad?”

Jacob looked at him from across the table while chewing a piece of Naomi’s delicious fried chicken. “What?”

“I was just coming out of the examining room into the office as Mr. and Mrs. Jones were standing with the girl at Mom’s desk, and when I heard Mrs. Jones tell Mom her daughter’s name was Sharon, at first I thought she said Tharyn. It sort of gave me a start. And then when Mom repeated it while writing the girl’s name down, I realized I had heard wrong.”

Naomi set soft eyes on her son. “Honey, it seems to me that you must carry Tharyn in your heart twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and three hundred sixty-six days every leap year.”

Dane smiled at her. “You’re right, Mom. She’s still ‘little sis’ to me, and I suppose she always will be. If I just knew she was well and happy, it sure would relieve my mind.”

Jacob took a sip of hot tea, and set the cup down. “Son, your mama and I have told you this before, but I’ll say it again. Tharyn
belongs to the Lord. I have no doubt that He led her to a good Christian family when she was on that orphan train. From what she told you about wanting to become a nurse, I have a feeling she achieved her goal.”

“Yes,” said Naomi. “You’ve talked about her so much all these years, I feel like I know her. From what you told us about her personality, I’d say since she is now twenty-two years of age, she is an excellent nurse at some good doctor’s side, or in some clinic or hospital. And she is probably married to a good Christian man.”

Dane’s face pinched at those last words.

“Son, I know you think a lot of that girl, but it seems to me the feelings you have go deeper than just thinking of her as the sweet girl you adopted as your little sister in that Manhattan alley,” Jacob said. “You were fifteen and she was thirteen when you met, and you haven’t seen each other since. You were both too young to be in love at that time, but you sure seem to feel that way about her now, even though you haven’t seen her in over nine years. The Lord has a young lady all picked out for you, and when He is ready to cross your paths, He will do it, and you’ll
really
fall in love.”

Dane drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nostrils. “I know you’re right, Dad. Tharyn is the only girl who ever captured my heart. I’ve just never met anyone like her. But, of course, we were too young to be in love back then. No doubt when I meet that special gal the Lord has chosen for me, my thoughts of Tharyn will fade.”

“That’s right, honey,” said Naomi. “They will.”

That night when Dane was in his bed at the boardinghouse and trying to get to sleep, he found Tharyn once again on his mind.

He rolled from one side to the other, then flopped on to his back, staring up at the ceiling in the dim light that came through the window from a half-moon.

Once again, he tried to imagine where Tharyn might be in the vast expanse of the West. Was she indeed a nurse? And was she married?

He thought of how she depended on him to take care of her when her parents were killed, and how lost and afraid she was when he was arrested and put in prison.

He closed his eyes. “Lord, as I’ve asked You so many times before, take care of her, wherever she is. And—and please bring the young lady You have chosen to be my wife into my life very soon.”

The next day, Dr. Jacob Logan was with a patient in one of the curtained sections of the examining room while Dr. Dane was with a small boy in another section, being assisted by Nurse Ella Dover while the boy’s mother looked on.

At the desk in the front office, Naomi Logan looked up to see a white-faced farmer named Clyde Ballard come in. The Ballards had long been Dr. Jacob’s patients.

Naomi smiled up at the farmer. “Good morning, Clyde. Do you need to see the doctor?”

Clyde removed his hat. “Not this time, ma’am. You know that my seventy-two-year-old mother lives with us.”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mama fell down the stairs in our house about a half hour ago, all the way from the second floor to the bottom floor. She’s in a great deal of pain and her legs are numb. Can your husband or your son come and look at her?”

Naomi rose to her feet. “They’re both with patients in the back room. Let me go see which one will be free first to go with you.”

Clyde Ballard paced the floor, wringing his hands while waiting for Naomi to return.

After three or four minutes, she returned. “Dr. Jacob will be
ready to go first, Clyde. He’ll be through with his patient in just a few minutes.”

Less than ten minutes later, Dr. Jacob came through the examining room door with a middle-aged man who was wearing a bandage over his left eye. Jacob had his medical bag in hand.

He told Naomi to make an appointment for the man in two days so he could examine his eye, then looked at Clyde. “Let’s go.”

Naomi glanced out the big window and watched her husband jump into his buggy while Clyde swung aboard his horse. As they hurried away, she looked up at the man with the bandage over his eye. She opened the appointment book and they agreed on the time for him to come in on Wednesday.

The man moved out the door, and at the same time, a man and his wife came in. Naomi knew they had an appointment. She told them to be seated, and Dr. Dane would be with them shortly.

Naomi went into the examining room to see how it was going with the four-year-old boy who had fallen out of a tree and broken his collarbone. She stepped up and said, “Well, Dr. Logan, how’s Bobby doing?”

Dr. Dane spoke without taking his eyes off his work. “Bobby will be all right once I get him trussed up, Mom. He will heal up in a few weeks. I heard you talking to Dad a few minutes ago. Was that Bertha Ballard who fell down some stairs?”

Naomi knew her son had helped care for Clyde Ballard’s mother when she was in Memorial Hospital a few months ago. “Yes. Your father is on his way to the Ballard farm right now, following Clyde.”

“I sure hope she isn’t seriously hurt.”

“Me too. Well, I have to get back to the office. Mr. and Mrs. Wakefield are here.”

Dane nodded. “I’ll be ready to see them in about ten minutes.”

I
t was early morning, Tuesday, September 14. In Fort Collins, Colorado—some forty miles south of Cheyenne, Wyoming—a stagecoach and its six horses waited in front of the Wells Fargo office. The air was cool as the sun began to flush the sky over the eastern plains, casting a faint scarlet hue on the towering, jagged Rockies to the west.

Inside the Wells Fargo office, driver Buck Cummons had his stalwart young shotgunner, Doke Veatch, at his side as he ran his gaze over the five passengers who would soon board the stage for its trip north. Crew and passengers had eaten breakfast together and had become somewhat acquainted.

Four of the five would be staying aboard to Casper, Wyoming—the stage’s final destination before turning around. There were only three stops between Fort Collins and Casper: Cheyenne, Wheatland, and Douglas. Passenger Vern Stanton would be getting off at Douglas.

Stanton was a huge, hard-faced man in his midforties. At breakfast, everyone learned that he had been a sergeant in the Union Army during the Civil War, and though none had shared their impressions of the man with the others, they felt he would have been a typical sergeant with his crusty, no-nonsense personality.

The other two male passengers were Clayton Jubb, who was a Casper hardware store clerk in his midthirties, and Wayne Hoover, Casper’s forty-six-year-old mayor.

One of the female passengers was Stella Yoder, a widow in her early sixties. She wore a calico dress on her ample frame, and her silver hair was pulled into a tight bun atop her head. Her face was crisscrossed with deep lines on her leathery skin.

At the breakfast table, Stella told the others that she had spent most of her life on the rugged Wyoming prairie. She still lived on the six-hundred-acre ranch just north of Casper, where she was taken from Missouri as a very young bride and still ran the ranch with the help of a handful of ranch hands. She told the others that her husband and two sons died in a blizzard ten years before while driving cattle home that they had purchased from a ranch near Powder River, Wyoming.

The other female passenger was twenty-year-old Anna Devries, from Rochester, New York. She was on her way to Casper to become a mail order bride and had stopped in Fort Collins to spend a day with a friend from school who had come to Colorado a year ago to become a mail order bride. The young man Anna was planning to marry worked a ranch with his father a few miles west of Casper.

Anna was wearing a simple dress of deep apple red broadcloth. The only trimming was a double row of navy blue rickrack around the collar and cuffs. A navy crochet shawl covered her slim shoulders, meant to ward off the slight chill of the September day.

Anna’s honey blond hair was pulled back from the sides of her pretty face and tied at the crown with a dark blue ribbon. The rest of her blond tresses fell down her back in soft waves almost reaching her waist.