The Christmas Brides (6 page)

“Come here to me, Jack,” Mrs. Halifax said. She'd finished feeding and burping the baby, laid her gently on the seat beside her; Nellie Anne was asleep, reminding Lizzie of a cherub slumbering on a fluffy cloud.

Jack scrambled to his mother, crawled onto her lap.

Lizzie felt a pinch in her heart. She'd held her youngest brother, Doss, in just that way, when he was smaller and frightened by a thunderstorm or a bad dream.

“I have some goods in the freight car,” the peddler said, tucking away the pistol, securing his case under the seat and rising. He buttoned his coat and went out.

Lizzie helped Ellen gather the scattered cards from their game. Mrs. Halifax rocked Jack in her lap, murmuring softly to him.

Morgan checked the fire, added wood.

“He'll be back,” he told Lizzie, when their gazes collided.

He was referring to Whitley, of course, off on his fool's errand.

Lizzie nodded glumly and swallowed.

When the peddler returned, he was lugging a large wooden crate marked Private in large, stenciled letters. He set it down near the stove, with an air of mystery, and Ellen was immediately attracted. Even Jack slid down off his mother's lap to approach, no longer sucking his thumb.

“What's in there?” the little boy asked.

The peddler smiled. Patted the crate with one plump hand. Took a handkerchief from inside his coat and dabbed at his forehead. Remarkably, in that weather, he'd managed to work up a sweat. “Well, my boy,” he said importantly, straightening, “I'm glad you asked that question. Can you read?”

Jack blinked. “No, sir,” he said.

“I can,” Ellen piped up, pointing to a label on the crate. “It says, ‘Property of Mr. Nicholas Christian.'”

“That,” the peddler said, “would be me. Nicholas Christian, at your service.” He doffed his somewhat seedy bowler hat, pressed it to his chest and bowed. He turned to Jack. “You ask what's in this box? Well, I'll tell you.
Christmas.
That's what's in here.”

“How can a whole day fit inside a box?” Ellen demanded, sounding at once skeptical and very hopeful.

“Why, child,” said Nicholas Christian, “Christmas isn't merely a
day.
It comes in all sorts of forms.”

Morgan, having poured a cup of coffee, watched the proceedings with interest. Mrs. Halifax looked troubled, but curious, too.

“Are you going to open it?” Jack wanted to know. He was practically breathless with excitement. Even John Brennan had stirred upon his sickbed to sit up and peer toward the crate.

“Of course I am,” Mr. Christian said. “It would be unthinkably rude not to, after arousing your interest in such a way, wouldn't you say?”

Ellen and Jack nodded uncertainly.

“I'll need that poker,” the peddler went on, addressing
Morgan now, since he was closest to the stove. “The lid of this box is nailed down, you know.”

Morgan brought the poker.

Woodrow leaned forward on his perch.

The peddler wedged one end of it under the top of the crate and prized it up with a squeak of nails giving way. A layer of fresh wood shavings covered the contents, hiding them from view.

Lizzie, preoccupied with Whitley's announcement that he was going to follow the tracks to the nearest town, looked on distractedly.

Mr. Christian knelt next to the crate, rubbed his hands together, like a magician preparing to conjure a live rabbit or a white-winged dove from a hat, and reached inside.

He brought out a shining wooden box with gleaming brass hinges. Set it reverently on the floor. When he raised the lid, a tune began to play. “O little town of Bethlehem…”

Lizzie's throat tightened. The works of the music box were visible, through a layer of glass, and Jack and Ellen stared in fascination.

“Land,” Ellen said. “I ain't—” she blushed, looked up at Lizzie “—I
haven't
never seen nothin' like this.”

Lizzie offered no comment on the child's grammar.

“It belonged to my late wife, God rest her soul,” Mr. Christian said and, for a moment, there were ghosts in his eyes. Leaving the music box to play, he plunged his hands into the crate again. Brought out a delicate china plate, chipped from long and reverent use, trimmed in gold and probably hand-painted. “There are eight of
these,” he said. “Spoons and forks and butter knives, too. We shall dine in splendor.”

“What's ‘dine'?” Jack asked.

Ellen elbowed him. “It means eating,” she said.

“We ain't got nothin' to eat,” Jack pointed out. By then, the crackers and cheese Lizzie had found in the cupboard were long gone, as were the canned foods pirated from the freight car.

“Oh, but we do,” replied Mr. Christian. “We most certainly do.”

The children's eyes all but popped.

“We have goose-liver pâté.” He produced several small cans to prove it.

Woodrow squawked and spread his wings.

Jack wrinkled his nose. “Goose liver?”

Ellen nudged him again, harder this time. “Whatever patty is,” she told him, “it's vittles for sure.”

“Pah-tay,” the peddler corrected, though not unkindly. “It is fine fare indeed.” More cans came out of the box. A small ham. Crackers. Tea in a wooden container. And wonderful, rainbow-colored sugar in a pretty jar.

Lizzie's eyes stung a little, just watching as the feast was unveiled. Clearly, like the things stashed in her travel trunk, these treasures had been intended for some one in Indian Rock, awaiting Mr. Christian's arrival. A daughter? A son? Grandchildren?

“Of course, having recently enjoyed a fine repast,” Mr. Christian said, addressing Ellen and Jack directly, but raising his voice just enough to carry to all corners of the caboose, “we'd do well to save all this for a while, wouldn't we?”

“I don't like liver,” Jack announced, this time
managing to dodge the inevitable elbow from Ellen. “But I wouldn't mind havin' some of that pretty sugar.”

Morgan chuckled, but Lizzie saw him glance anxiously in the direction of the windows.

“Later,” Mr. Christian promised. “Let us savor the anticipation for a while.”

Both children's brows furrowed in puzzlement. The peddler might have been speaking in a foreign language, using words like
repast
and
savor
and
anticipation.
Raised hardscrabble, though, they clearly understood the concept of
later.
Delay was a way of life with them, young as they were.

Lizzie moved closer to Morgan, spoke quietly, while the music box continued to play. “Whitley,” she said, “is an exasperating fool. But we can't let him wander out there. He'll die.”

Morgan sighed. “I was just thinking I'd better go and bring him back before he gets lost.”

“I'm going, too. It's my fault he's here at all.”

“You're needed here,” Morgan replied reasonably, with a slight nod of his head toward John Brennan. “I can't be in two places at once, Lizzie.”

“I wouldn't know what to do if Mr. Brennan had a medical crisis,” Lizzie said. “But I
do
know how to follow railroad tracks.”

Morgan rested his hands on Lizzie's shoulders, just lightly, but a confounding sensation rushed through her, almost an ache, stirring things up inside her. “You're too brave for your own good,” he said. “Stay here. Get as much water down Brennan as you can. Make sure he stays warm, even if the fever makes him want to throw off his blankets.”

“But what if he—?”

“What if he dies, Lizzie? I won't lie to you. He might. But then, so might all the rest of us, if we don't keep our heads.”

“You're exhausted,” Lizzie protested.

“If there's one thing a doctor learns, it's that exhaustion is a luxury. I can't afford to collapse, Lizzie, and believe me, I won't.”

Wanting to cling to him, wanting to make him stay, even if she had to make a histrionic scene to do it, Lizzie forced herself to step back. To let go, not just physically, but emotionally, too. “All right,” she said. “But if you're not back within an hour or two, I
will
come looking for you.”

Morgan sighed again, but a tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth, and something at once soft and molten moved in his eyes. “I'll keep that in mind,” he said. And then, after making only minimal preparations against the cold, he left the caboose.

Lizzie went immediately to the windows, watched him pass alongside the train.
Keep him safe,
she prayed silently.
Please, keep him safe. And Whitley, too.

John Brennan began to cough. Lizzie fetched one of the cups, dashed outside to fill it with snow, set it on the stove. The chill bit deep into her flesh, gnawed at her bones.

Ellen and Jack whirled like figure skaters to the continuing serenade of the music box, Mr. Christian having demonstrated that it could play many different tunes, by virtue of small brass disks inserted into a tiny slot. Woodrow seemed to dance, inside his cage.
Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings took in the scene, smiling fondly.

“I'm burnin' up,” Mr. Brennan told Lizzie, when she came to adjust his blankets. “I need to get outside. Roll myself in that snow—”

Lizzie shook her head. She had no medical training, nothing to offer but the soothing presence of a woman. “That's your fever talking, Mr. Brennan,” she said. “Dr. Shane said to keep you warm.”

“It's like I'm on fire,” he said.

How, Lizzie wondered, did people stand being nurses and doctors? It was a sore trial to the spirit to look helplessly upon human suffering, able to do so little to relieve it. “There, now,” she told him, near to weeping. “Rest. I'll fetch a cool cloth for your forehead.”

“That would be a pure mercy,” he rasped.

Lizzie took her favorite silk scarf from her valise, steeled herself to go outside yet again.

Mr. Thaddings stopped her. Took the scarf from her hands and made the journey himself, shivering when he returned.

The snow-dampened scarf proved a comfort to Mr. Brennan, though the heat of his flesh quickly defeated the purpose. Lizzie, on her knees beside the seat where he lay, turned her head and saw that Zebulon Thaddings had brought in a bucketful of snow. Gratefully, she repeated the process.

“It would be a favor if you'd call me by my given name,” Mr. Brennan told her. His coughing had turned violent, and he seemed almost delirious, alternately shaking with chills and trying to throw off his covers. “I wouldn't feel so far from home thataways.”

Lizzie blinked back another spate of hot tears. “You'll get home, John,” she said, fairly choking out the words. “I promise you will.”

A small hand came to rest on her shoulder. She looked around, saw Ellen standing beside her. “I could do that,” the child said gently, referring to the repeated wetting, wringing and applying of the cloth to John's forehead. “So you could rest a spell. Have some of that tea Mr. Christmas made.”

Lizzie's first instinct was to refuse—tending the sick was no task for a small child. On the other hand, the offer was a gift and oughtn't to be spurned. “Mr. Christmas?” she asked, bemused, distracted by worry. “Don't you mean Mr. Christian?”

Ellen smiled, took the cloth. Edged Lizzie aside. “Here, now, Mr. Brennan,” the little girl said, sounding like a miniature adult. “You just listen, and I'll talk. Me and my ma and my brother Jack and my little sister, Nellie Anne, we're on our way to the Triple M Ranch—”

Lizzie got to her feet, turned to find Mr. Christian holding out a mug full of spice-fragrant tea, hot and strong and probably laced with the very expensive colored sugar.

Mr. Christmas. Maybe Ellen had gotten the peddler's name right after all.

T
HE COLD WAS BRUTAL
,
the snow blinding. Morgan slogged through it, following the rails as best he could. It was in large part a guessing game, and he had to be careful to stay away from the bank on the left. That presented a challenge, since he couldn't be entirely certain where it was.

Carson, the damn fool, had left footprints, but they were filling in fast, and the man was clearly no relation to the famous scout with the same last name. Tracking him was more likely to lead Morgan to the bottom of the ravine than the nearest town.

Cursing under his breath—the wind buffeted it away every time he raised his head—Morgan kept going, ever mindful of the passing of time. If he took too long finding Carson and bringing him back, he knew Lizzie would make good on her threat to mount a one-woman search. John Brennan was too sick to stop her, let alone make the trek in her stead, and the peddler, well, he was a curious fellow, now guarding that sample case of his as if it contained the Holy Grail, now serving up goose-liver pâté and other delicacies on fancy china plates. He might keep Lizzie in the caboose, where she belonged, or send her out into the blizzard with his blessings. Morgan, by necessity an astute observer of the human animal, wasn't sure the man was completely sane.

Lizzie. In spite of his own situation, he smiled. What a hardheaded little firebrand she was—pretty. Smart as hell. Calm in a crisis that would have had many females—and males, too, to be fair—wringing their hand kerchiefs and bewailing a cruel fate. He hadn't been joking when he'd said she'd make a good nurse.

Now, in the strange privacy of a high-country blizzard, he could admit something else, too—if only to himself. Lizzie McKettrick would make an even better doctor's wife than she would a nurse.

He felt something grind inside him, both painful and pleasant.

It was sheer idiocy to think of her in such intimate terms. They barely knew each other, after all, and she was set on teaching school, married or single. On top of that, she'd been fond enough of Whitley Carson to bring him home to her family during a sacred season. Her irritation with Carson would most likely fade, once they were all safe again. She'd forget the man's shortcomings soon enough, when the two of them were sipping punch beside a big Christmas tree in some grand McKettrick parlor.

The realization sobered Morgan. He felt something for Lizzie, though it was far too soon to know just what, but opening his time-hardened heart to her would be foolhardy. Rash. Until this trip, Morgan Shane had never done anything rash in his life. A week ago, even a few
days
ago, he wouldn't have considered taking the kind of stupid chance he was in the midst of right now, bumbling into the maw of a storm that might well swallow him whole.

Yes, he was a doctor, and a dedicated one. He was
a pragmatist's pragmatist, in a field where the most competent were bone skeptical. He believed that, upon reaching the age of reason, everyone was responsible for their own actions, and the resultant consequences. Therefore, if Whitley Carson was stupid enough to set off looking for help in the middle of a snowstorm, he had that right. From Morgan's perspective, his own duty, as a man and as a physician, lay with John Brennan, Mrs. Halifax and her children, the peddler, the Thaddingses, and Lizzie.

Hell, he even felt responsible for the bird.

So why was he out there in the snowstorm, when he knew better, knew the hopelessness of the task he'd undertaken?

The answer made him flinch inside.

Because of Lizzie. He was doing this for Lizzie. Whatever her present mood, she loved Carson. Bringing the man home to the bosom of her fabled clan was proof of that.

Flesh stinging, Morgan kept walking. His feet were numb, and so were his hands. His ears burned as though someone had laid hot pokers to them, and every breath felt like an inhalation of flame. He fumbled for the flask Nicholas Christian had given him earlier, managed to get the lid off, and took a swig, blessing the bracing warmth that surged through him with the first swallow.

He found Carson sprawled in the snow, just around a bend.

Was he dead?

Morgan's heartbeat quickened, and so did his half-frozen brain. He crouched beside the prone body, searched for and found a pulse.

Carson opened his eyes. “My leg,” he scratched out. “I think I've broken my leg…slipped on the tracks… almost went over the side—”

Morgan confirmed the diagnosis with a few practiced motions of his hands, even though his wind-stung eyes had already offered the proof. He opened the flask again, with less difficulty this time, and held it to Carson's lips. “I'll get you back to the train,” he said, leaning in close to be heard over the howl of the wind, “but it's going to hurt.”

Carson swallowed, nodded. “I know,” he rasped. He groaned when Morgan hoisted him to his one good foot, cried out when he tried to take a step.

Morgan sighed inwardly, crouched a little, and slung Carson over his right shoulder like a sack of grain. He remembered little of the walk back to the train—it was a matter of staying upright and putting one foot in front of the other. At some point, Carson must have passed out from the pain—he was limp, a dead weight, and several times Morgan had to fight to keep from going down.

When the train came in sight, Morgan offered a silent prayer of thanks, though it had been a long time since he'd been on speaking terms with God. The peddler, Mr. Christian, met him at the base of the steps leading up to the caboose. Stronger than Morgan would have guessed, the older man helped him get the patient inside.

Lizzie had concocted something on the stove—a soup or broth of some sort, from the savory aroma, but when she saw her unconscious beau, alarm flared in her eyes and she turned from the coffee can serving as an improvised kettle. “Is he…he's not—”

Morgan shook his head to put her mind at ease, but
didn't answer verbally until he and the peddler had laid their burden down on the bench seat opposite the place where John Brennan rested.

“His leg is broken,” Morgan said grimly, rubbing his hands together in a mostly vain attempt to restore some circulation. He had a small supply of morphine in his bag, along with tincture of laudanum—he'd sent his other supplies ahead to Indian Rock after agreeing to set up a practice there. He could ease Carson's pain, but he dared not give him too much medicine, mainly because the damned fool had been tossing back copious amounts of whiskey since the avalanche. “I have to set the fracture,” he added. “For that, I'll need some straight branches and strips of cloth to bind them to the leg.”

Lizzie drew nearer, peering between Morgan and the peddler to stare, white-faced, at Carson. “Is he in pain?” she asked, her voice small.

No one answered.

“I'll see what I can find for splints,” the peddler said.

Morgan replied with a grateful nod. He'd nearly frozen, hunting down and retrieving Carson. If he went out again too soon, he'd be of no use to anybody. “Stay near the train if you can,” he told Christian. “And take care not to slip over the side.”

The peddler promised to look out for himself and left. Mrs. Halifax and the children were sleeping, all of them wrapped up together in the quilt. Mr. and Mrs. Thaddings were snoozing, too, the sides of their heads touching, though Woodrow was wide-awake and very interested in the proceedings.

“When your friend regains consciousness, he'll be
in considerable pain,” Morgan said, in belated answer to Lizzie's question. Her concern was only natural— anyone with a shred of compassion in their soul would be sympathetic to Carson's plight. Still, the intensity of her reaction, unspoken as it was, reconfirmed his previous insight—Lizzie might
think
she no longer loved Whitley Carson, but she was probably fooling herself.

She did something unexpected then—took Morgan's hands into her own, removed the gloves he'd borrowed from Christian earlier, chafed his bare, cold skin between warm palms. The act was simple, patently ordinary and yet sensual in a way that Morgan was quite unprepared to deal with. Heat surged through him, awakening nerves, rousing sensations in widely varying parts of his anatomy.

“I've made soup,” Lizzie told him, indicating the coffee can on the stove, its contents bubbling cheerfully away. Morgan recalled the tinned ham from the peddler's crate and the dried beans from the freight car. “You'd better have some,” she added. “It will warm you up.”

She'd warmed him up plenty, but there was no proper way to explain that. Numb before, Morgan ached all over now, like someone thawing out after a bad case of frostbite. “Best get Mr. Carson ready for the splints,” he said. “The more I can do before he wakes up, the better.”

She nodded her understanding, but dipped a clean mug into the brew anyway, and brought the soup to Morgan. He took a sip, set the mug aside, shrugged out of his coat. Using scissors from his bag, he cut Carson's snow-soaked pant leg from hem to knee and
ripped the fabric open to the man's midthigh. Lizzie neither flinched nor looked away.

Morgan had the brief and disturbing thought that Lizzie might not be unfamiliar with the sight of Carson's bare flesh. He shoved the idea aside—Lizzie McKettrick's private life was patently none of his business. He certainly had no claim on her.

“I've got a petticoat,” she said.

The announcement startled Morgan. Meanwhile, Carson had begun to stir, writhing a little, tossing his head from side to side as, with consciousness, the pain returned. Morgan paused to glance at Lizzie.

She went pink. “To bind the splints,” she explained.

Morgan nodded, trying not to smile at her embarrassment.

Lizzie stepped back, out of his sight. There followed a poignantly feminine rustle of fabric, and then she returned to present him with a garment of delicate ivory silk, frothing with lace. For one self-indulgent moment, Morgan held the petticoat in a tight fist, savoring the feel of it, the faint scent of lavender caught in its folds, then proceeded to rip the costly fabric into wide strips. In the interim, Lizzie fetched his bag without being asked.

Carson opened his eyes, gazed imploringly up at her. “I meant…” he whispered awkwardly, the words scratching like sandpaper on splintery wood. “I meant to find help, Lizzie…. I'm so sorry…the way I acted before…”

“Shh,” she said. She sat down on the bench, carefully placed Carson's head on her lap, stroked his hair.
Morgan felt another flash of envy, a deep gouge of emotion, raw and bitter.

Christian returned with the requested tree branches, trimmed them handily with an ivory-handled pocket knife. The scent of pine sap lent the caboose an ironically festive air.

“This is going to hurt,” Morgan warned Carson bluntly, gripping the man's ankle in both hands.

Carson bit his lower lip and nodded, preparing himself.

“Can't you give him something for the pain?” Lizzie interceded, looking up into Morgan's face with anxious eyes.

“Afterward,” Morgan said. He didn't begrudge Carson a dose of morphine, but it was potent stuff, and the patient was in shock. If he happened to be sensitive to the drug, as many people were, the results could be disastrous. Better to administer a swallow of laudanum later. “It'll be over quickly.”

“Do it,” Carson said, and went up a little in Morgan's estimation. Perhaps he had some character after all.

Morgan closed his eyes; he had a sixth sense about bones and internal organs, something he'd never mentioned to a living soul, including his father, because there was no scientific explanation for it. He saw the break in his mind, as clearly as if he'd laid Carson's hide and muscle open with a scalpel. When he felt ready, he gave the leg a swift, practiced wrench. Carson yelled.

But the fractured femur was back in alignment.

Quickly, deftly, and with all the gentleness he could manage—again, this was more for Lizzie's sake than
Carson's—Morgan set the splints in place and bound them firmly with the long strips of petticoat.

Taking a bottle of laudanum from his kit, Morgan pulled the cork and held it to Carson's mouth. “One sip,” he said.

Sweating and pale, Carson raised himself up a little from Lizzie's lap and gulped down a mouthful of the bitter compound. The drug began taking effect almost immediately—Carson sighed, settled back, closed his eyes. Lizzie murmured sweet, senseless words to him, still smoothing his hair.

Morgan had set many broken limbs in his time, but this experience left him oddly enervated. He couldn't look at Lizzie as he put the vial of laudanum back in his kit, took out his stethoscope. There was something intensely private about the way she ministered to Carson, as tenderly as a mother with a child.

Or a wife with a husband.

Morgan turned away quickly, the stethoscope dangling from his neck, and crossed the railroad car to check Mr. Thaddings's heart, which thudded away at a blessedly normal rate, then moved on to examine John Brennan again.

“How are you feeling?” he asked the soldier gruffly. The question was a formality; the feverish glint in Brennan's eyes and the intermittent shivers that seemed to rattle his protruding skeleton provided answer enough.

Brennan's voice was a hoarse croak. “I heard that feller yell—”

“Broken leg,” Morgan said. “Don't fret over it.”

A racking cough tore itself from the man's chest.
When he'd recovered, following a series of wheezing gasps, Brennan reached out to clasp at Morgan's hand, pulled. Morgan leaned down.

Brennan rasped out a ragged whisper. “I got to stay alive long enough to see my boy again,” he pleaded. “It's almost Christmas. I can't have Tad recalling, all his life, that his pa passed….” The words fell away as another spate of coughing ensued.

Morgan crouched alongside the bench seat, since there were no chairs in the caboose. He was not accustomed to smiling under the best of circumstances, so the gesture came a lot harder that day. Brennan had one foot dangling over an open grave, and unless some angel grabbed him by the coattails and held on tight, he was sure to topple in.