The Vigilante's Bride (10 page)
“Where are my clothes?” he asked.
“We had to cut them off.”
“You undressed me?” Heat crawled up his neck.
“Doc Maxwell said to keep clothes off you until the sutures heal.” She stepped back and frowned down at him. “I don’t believe it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were blushing.”
“Get me some clothes,” Luke ordered.
“Lie back down. When he comes today, I’ll ask him if you can wear a nightshirt.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those things!”
Unwavering green eyes locked his. “It’s either a nightshirt or you stay like you are. Doc Maxwell says cuts heal faster if they stay uncovered for a week.”
“We’ll just see about that. Emily McCarthy, get me my clothes, I said. I’m going downstairs – now.”
“Then you go down bare chested and in your cute little drawers.”
He wouldn’t and she knew it. There were women and little girls down there. She hated him. She definitely still hated him.
She fluffed his pillow and patted it. Small, strong fingers gripped his shoulders and eased him back down.
“A whole week in this bed and I’ll go out of my mind,” he muttered.
Or maybe I won’t.
He closed his eyes and smiled.
Emily fumed. For one whole week he ran her ragged. Hand and foot, he made her wait on him. He had her read to him and then corrected her pronunciation.
She snapped at him. “I said it exactly right. You speak with a cowboy twang. I don’t.”
He sent her chasing up and down two flights of stairs to get him something from the kitchen he forgot – and conveniently remembered only after she left the room.
One afternoon he wrinkled his nose and pushed the bowl of slippery tapioca pudding away. “Looks like fish eyes and glue,” he said.
Emily snatched the dish away. The beef tea she’d made for him was also untouched. She put the tea on the tray next to the tapioca. It had taken her all of yesterday to fix that tea, soaking the meat overnight, simmering it for hours, and then drying it and grinding it to a powder. Mixed with the soaking water and served in a thin china cup, it was nourishing and good for him. It most certainly was
not
sticky and clotted and nasty tasting, she fumed.
“And that makes me gag!” he said, turning his head away, refusing the scalded toast she’d brought him for breakfast. “Hot, soggy bread and milk – what kind of meal is that for a man?”
“It’s good for you. And it’s not necessary to shout.” She took a deep breath and silently counted to ten.
“That’s not shouting. I’ll show you real shouting, you keep feeding me this slop.” His jaw jutted. “I want ham and eggs.”
“You can’t have it. That’s too heavy. You’re sick.”
Hot tears welled in her eyes. She sniffed. Everything she tried to do for him was wrong. Blinking hard, she spooned up a bite of the damp white bread swimming in milk, wondering what she could do to make him like it. She looked at the spoon and then at him. Like a huge baby bird, Luke opened his mouth. Quickly, she popped it into his mouth.
“I am not sick,” he said, milk dribbling down his chin. “I never get sick. I’m hurt. There’s a difference.”
“Oh, it’s unmanly to get sick, is it?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it. Big stubborn cowboy.”
The spoon flew in a silver arc while she argued with him, distracting him, all the while scooping food into him. As long as she fed him, it appeared he’d eat anything. She held the cup and the back of his head. With a shudder he closed his eyes and swallowed down the tea.
But nothing else she did was right. If she made him biscuits, he pouted until she went downstairs and baked corn bread. He carped at her when she was there and sulked if she left him alone.
He wasn’t sleeping well. Each night, hour after hour, he mumbled and tossed from one side to the other.
“You should be sleeping better by now,” she said, worried after he’d had a particularly bad night.
“Witch hazel rubs might make me relax. It might help if you rubbed my back.” His lips twitched.
“Might help if you put a shirt on, too.”
“I’ll think about it . . . after the back rub.”
Emily flounced out of the room and slammed the door. The witch hazel was downstairs in the kitchen, which he knew.
When Emily came back with the witch hazel, she brought along a set of gray winter underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, and pants that reached his ankles. Luke smiled to himself as she shook the legs loose, warming them in front of the fire. He had news for her. He wasn’t about to put them on. Bossing him around, was she? He’d give her a dose of her own medicine.
Emily laid the freshly laundered underwear across the footboard of the bed and left the room discreetly. She came back a few minutes later to find the underwear still draped right where she’d left it and Luke Sullivan propped up against the pillows, long hairy legs crossed on top of the sheet. He wore his cotton drawers, an insolent smile, and nothing else.
“Have you lost your mind? Cover yourself up,” she sputtered, hands on her hips.
“Why should I?”
“You’re sitting around in your underwear, that’s why.”
Folding his arms across his chest, he raised his eyebrows at her. “How you gonna rub my back if I’m wearing a shirt?”
Emily backed out of the room and stamped downstairs again.
“I’m so embarrassed, I could just die!” she ranted to Molly, waving her arms in the air. “He’s gross. What is wrong with him?”
Molly sighed. “I don’t understand. He’s usually so modest and proper. This isn’t like him at all. I expect he’s getting even with you for taking his clothes away and making him stay in bed. He’s doing it for you – staying in bed like that. He wouldn’t do it for me. If it’d do any good, I’d go right up there and shake some sense into him, but I raised that boy. Wouldn’t work. You’ll see. He’ll win. One way or another, he always wins.”
“Not this time,” Emily snarled. Tight-lipped, she trudged upstairs. Outside the door to his room, she huffed in several deep breaths, pumping herself into the proper frame of mind to deal with one infuriating, bossy cowboy. Shoulders back, she threw the door to his room open.
“I’m ready,” Luke said, his back to her.
She poured witch hazel into her hand. The first time she put her hands on his back, Luke jumped as if she’d stuck him with a pin. After that, he lay dead still, his muscles so rigid it was like rubbing rock. He stared at the wall.
He managed to get her up to three of those rubs a day, until her hands had memorized every contour and curve of flesh and bone that made up the muscular torso of one Luke Sullivan. She went to bed at night thinking of them, and when she managed to fall asleep, she dreamed about them. In desperation one afternoon, she snatched up a can of rose-scented talcum on the dresser and shook a blizzard of the perfumed powder all over his skin. The curly dark hair on his chest went instantly gray.
She stroked the satiny, sweet-smelling talcum across his chest and back, smoothing the silky stuff up and down his arms – and Luke sneezed until his eyes watered.
“If this powder doesn’t agree with you, I’ll stop,” she said.
Shaking his head, Luke grabbed his bruised stomach with both hands. “Aaah-choo! No, it’s just fine. I feel – AAH -choo! – better already.”
“How nice,” she murmured, and socked the bottom of the can with her fist.
“AAAH -CHOO !”
Doc Maxwell shut the door to Luke’s room and stood still in the hall outside, his bushy brown eyebrows knitted together. Mentally, he ticked off the injuries Luke had sustained and wondered if he’d overlooked something. Outwardly, Sullivan showed no signs of skull injury, but something had certainly scrambled the man’s brains. Imagine, in there around Molly and Emily, wearing only his underwear bottoms.
Doc pulled out a kerchief and mopped his face and the back of his neck. He’d never been in a room so hot in all his life, yet Miss McCarthy kept pitching wood into the fireplace as if it were the boiler on the
Robert E. Lee
.
Luke refused to get dressed, she said sweetly, and she was concerned he’d catch cold, especially since he was red-eyed and sneezing. Then Sullivan, shiny and slick with perspiration, allowed – kinda smuglike – that he preferred a warm room. Miss McCarthy got all red in the face at that and threw a piece of wood as big as a wagon tongue into the fireplace.
Feeling positively light-headed from the heat, Doc had to leave. By that time, even his patient was panting like a lizard.
Doc picked up his bag and started downstairs, shaking his head. From his neck to his navel, Sullivan looked like a ghost. Funny. He’d never acted like one of them sissy city fellas who liked perfume and powder, but there he was, floured up like a chicken and smelling like a bride’s bouquet. Doc clucked his tongue. Never could tell about some people.
Shame. Big strapping man like that.
“Sure did a job on you, didn’t they, boy?” Jupiter Jackson leaned forward and spit into the fireplace again.
Luke nodded, in no mood for company. Though he felt almost normal, he was still a little shaky on his feet. The swelling had gone down and the bruises faded from his face. Greenish yellow traces were all that remained of the black eyes.
He hadn’t seen Jupiter in nearly three years. Today the old man had just come by to say hello. The day Doc Maxwell allowed Luke downstairs, visitors started dropping in – men on their way to Repton or passing by, they said, or who flat-out admitted they came to see him because they didn’t like what had happened. Luke and Jupiter sat in the dining room, chairs pulled up to the fireplace.
Weathered and wrinkled, Jupiter’s face furrowed into a grin. No one knew how old he was. It seemed he’d always been there, as long as anyone could remember. In his seventy- or eighty- or ninety-odd years, Jupiter had hired on at one time or another at nearly every farm and ranch in the area.
From time to time, the old man rocked forward and spat. “Axel told the sheriff it was a personal quarrel, said you got smart with his men out on the range,” he said, in his high, reedy voice. Tobacco juice sizzled in the fire.
“That’s his story,” Luke said. “Mine’s a little different. I was hunting cows; they were hunting me.”
“Ain’t like the old days. Then, you’d a gone over there, shot ’em, and that would’ve been the end of it. Now there’s all this messing round with the law.”
Jupiter rocked back again, quiet for several few minutes, chewing and spitting. “You know, seems to me that range of yours has always been trouble. When I worked here back in the thirties, we had problems with trappers. Frenchies, they were. Wolfers. Came in here by the dozens every year, hunting and laying traps any old place, just like they owned it.”
Luke tipped back in his chair and stretched his arms wide. He got stiff if he sat too long. “Guess they figured they did, as much as anyone else.”
“They knew better,” Jupiter snorted. “Everything from White Dog River to Billings were New Hope’s. They knew, all right – just didn’t figure to get caught. We fixed ’em, though.” He cackled, the weathered face crinkling with humor. “Every spring, we busted their traps and let the critters go. After three years, they got the hint and stopped coming on New Hope land.”
“What did Molly do?”
Jupiter shook his head. “That was long before Molly. Preacher name of Sampson here then. Parted his hair in the middle. Molly’s twice the man he ever was.”
Luke stared at the fire, seeing a map of the area in his mind. Jupiter had his rivers mixed up. “You can’t mean all the way to the Yellowstone River. You mean White Dog to Pryor Creek, don’t you? The Yellowstone and Billings are ten miles west of the Pryor. Ten miles – you’re talking about one big piece of land.”
“I can figure. When I say the Yellowstone, I mean the Yellowstone. Close to thirty square miles altogether is what it is. I ought to know,” the old man said. “My backside stayed sore for weeks riding those lines. Main reason I quit.”
“Jupiter,” Luke said patiently, “everything from Pryor Creek to Billings and the Yellowstone is open range.”
“You ain’t listening, boy. That ain’t open range, never was.”
“Axel says it is.”
“Well, is that a fact?” Jupiter drawled. “Dunno as I believe him if he says it’s daylight and the sun’s out. Everybody wanted a piece of New Hope.”
Deciding to talk to Molly later about the rivers in question, Luke stifled a yawn and got to his feet, his back muscles knotting again. Putting both hands on his hips, he bent his torso backward until his spine gave a satisfactory crack. If the old man would leave, maybe he could talk Emily into a back rub.
Jupiter sniffed, ignoring Luke leaning against the mantel. “Something smells good.”
Luke hid a smile. The old man hadn’t changed a bit. It was close to suppertime, and Jupiter was known to hang around until someone had to ask him to stay. “I think I’ll just mosey out to the barn and see Scully,” he said, looking toward the kitchen. “You still look a little peaked, son. Maybe you ought to lie back down awhile.”
Jupiter climbed to his feet and shuffled straight for the kitchen.
Within minutes his voice floated back. “Why, that’s mighty nice of you, Miz Molly. I sure would like to stay, yes, indeedy, ma’am.”
Luke chuckled. Worked every time. He flexed his shoulders and called, “Emily, you busy?”
As he’d done every morning since he’d been allowed up, Luke hooked a boot heel over the fence rail and watched Scully exercising Bugle in the paddock. The big gray pranced and tossed his head, looking over at Luke. Molly had put her foot down, egged on, he was sure, by Emily McCarthy: no riding or roping for another two weeks.
“Ease up, Bugle. Be nice,” he called as Scully sawed on the reins to pull the horse around. Bugle flicked his ears at Luke, swung his head around, and blew his lips at Scully, who burst out laughing. Then, obediently, the horse dropped into a canter.
Lined up alongside the corral fence with Luke, five boys from the school watched impatiently. The youngest, a freckle-faced seven-year-old in patched knickers, fidgeted and scuffed his foot against the post.
Luke nudged his hat back and grinned to the others. “Let’s go before Timothy here kicks the fence down. He’s the fancy artist in this group, but even they need to be able to shoot, right, Tim-bo?”
A big white grin answered him.
Emily floated across his mind. She knew her kids, and this one needed stroking, she’d said.
“They don’t have older brothers or fathers for examples – good or bad.”
Then she’d folded her arms and added in a prissy little voice,
“Like it or not, Luke Sullivan, you’re it. They idolize you and want to be like you when they grow up.”
He wished for the hundredth time she hadn’t told him that.
He waved to Scully, then picked up the old Springfield rifle he’d brought from the house and started off. The little group trailed after him down the grassy slope behind the smithy and into an open field beyond.
He’d been taught to handle guns when he was there, had spent a part of every day practicing, with bullets and without. And he probably was alive because of it.
Patiently, Luke showed them how to reload, to lift the trapdoor quickly, and shove in the big lead-tipped shells. He spent the morning pitching bottles and cans into the air. Deliberate shooting would teach them to shoot the wrong way, he told them, because if they needed to use a gun, most likely it would be at a moving target.
“My arms are tired. It’s too heavy. I ain’t big enough to hold it up,” Timothy said. Disappointment spread across his face when the old Springfield’s long barrel nosed out of his arms and down to the dirt again. The other boys laughed.
“It’s heavy for me, too,” Luke said. The laughter trailed off. “But if you need it and you’re scared enough, I guarantee you’ll find a way. Aim is what counts, Tim, not size, not strength. What makes a man is what’s in here and here.” He tapped Tim’s forehead, then the boy’s chest with the words.
Taking him by the shoulder, Luke led him to a fence a few yards away and rested the barrel on a rail to take some of the weight. He had Tim hold the gun and picked up a can to throw again. “Now shoot.”
An hour later, Luke laid the rifle aside and pulled the Colt from his holster. Instantly five pairs of young male eyes gleamed.
All week he’d debated with himself about whether or not to show them how to draw. He decided he had to. No point in knowing how to use a gun at all, he thought, if you couldn’t use it in a hurry. He showed them how to load and to punch out the hulls, then drummed it into them to carry it with the hammer on an empty chamber. “Remember, when you load: five chambers can have shells; one stays empty. Check it every time you load. Otherwise, if you stumble or bang into something, you’ll shoot yourself in the leg.”
Luke pointed. “John, get that board over there and pound it in the ground.” He unbuckled his holster and passed it around, letting each boy put it on and take it off several times. “Most men wear a gun high. I wear mine low, almost on my leg, but that’s a personal thing. You’ve got to find what’s best for you. A lot depends on how long your arms are.” He reclaimed the Colt, loaded it, and buckled it back on his hip.
Spinning around, he fired in rapid succession, his left hand fanning the hammer back, blasting the board to splinters. Five small jaws dropped. An instant’s silence, then a chorus of voices.
Wide-eyed, John breathed, “Why, I never even saw you draw.”
“Who taught you?”
“How’d you do that?”
Luke smiled. “Practice. Any man can shoot one of these things. Getting it out before the other man does is what makes the difference. I used to practice for hours with an empty gun.” He didn’t tell them he still did – every morning of his life, up in his room.
On the way back to the house, Timothy sidled closer and looked up at him, the small face filled with open admiration. “You ever been in a gunfight, Mr. Luke?” he asked, his eyes bright. “I mean a real one?”
“He wants to be like you when he grows up,”
Emily had said.
Luke tweaked the freckled little nose. In this case, truth was definitely not needed. “Nope. Never have, never want to be.”
While one of the children said grace at dinner that night, Luke gazed over at Emily’s bowed head. From where he sat, he could see the umber fringe of eyelashes brushing her cheeks and five small freckles across the bridge of her nose. Sunlight streaming through the window behind her caught her hair, shimmering it from dark copper to pale gold. If this feud with Axel turned into a full-blown range war, what would happen to her if he wasn’t around?
His concern for her grew all through dinner. She couldn’t defend herself. Axel would drag her back to his ranch, whether she wanted to go or not.
As soon as they finished eating, Luke took his plate and followed her into the kitchen. Emily stood at a table by a window, scraping and slipping plates into a dishpan. Her small hands flew competently in and out of the water as dainty as a butter-fly. And pretty enough for three women, with some left over, he thought.
Leaning against the oversized black iron stove, Luke folded his arms and looked at her. “Can you shoot a gun?”
Emily slung water off her hands and turned to face him. “I’ve never held one in my life, and I don’t plan to, either. Guns are for men.” She dunked a washed plate into a pan of rinse water and stacked it for drying. Without a word she nodded at the pile of wet dishes and tossed a dish towel to him.
He threw it back to her. “Doing dishes is for women. When you learn to shoot, I’ll dry dishes. Finish up in here and come outside with me. It’s time you learned.”
Eyes flashing, she looked up from the cup she was washing. “Is that an order?”
“No, ma’am, just consider it a stern request.”
Face pinched, she smacked the cup down so hard the handle broke off. He pressed his lips together and decided to leave before she threw the rest of it at him.
As he strolled through the back door, she called out, “And any man who walks like that wears his pants too tight.”
Shoulders shaking with laughter, he pulled the door closed. This butterfly had teeth!
