Buch lesen: «An Outlaw's Christmas»

CHAPTER 1

December, 1915

All but hidden behind a rapidly thickening veil of snow that cold afternoon, Blue River, Texas, looked more like a faint pencil sketch against a gray-and-white background than a real town, constructed of beams and mortar and weathered wood and occupied by flesh-and-blood folks. Squinting against the dense flurries, Sawyer McKettrick could just make out the pitch of a roof or two, the mounded lines of hitching rails and horse troughs, the crooked jut of the occasional chimney. Here and there, the light of a lamp or lantern glowed through the gloom, but as far as Sawyer could tell, nobody was stirring along the sidewalks or traveling the single wide street curving away from the tiny railroad depot.

Beside him, his buckskin gelding, Cherokee, nickered and tossed his big head, no doubt relieved to finally plant four sturdy hooves on solid ground after long hours spent rattling over the rails in a livestock car. Sawyer’s own journey, sitting bolt upright on a hard and sooty seat in the near-empty passenger section, had been so dull and so uncomfortable that he probably would have been happier riding with the horse.

Naturally, Cherokee didn’t hold up his end of a conversation, but he was a fine listener and a trustworthy companion.

Now, the engineer’s whistle sounded a long, plaintive hoot of fare-thee-well behind them, and the train clanked slowly out of the station, iron screeching against iron, steam hissing into the freezing air.

They waited, man and horse, until the sounds grew muffled and distant, though for what, Sawyer couldn’t have said. He hadn’t expected to be met at the depot—Clay McKettrick, his cousin and closest friend, lived on a ranch several miles outside of Blue River and, given the weather, the trail winding between there and town must be nigh on impassable—but just the same, a momentary sense of loneliness howled through him like a wind scouring the walls of a canyon.

With a glance back at the station, where he’d left his trunk of belongings behind, meaning to fetch it later, Sawyer swung up into the saddle and spoke a gruff, soothing word of encouragement to the horse.

There was a hotel in Blue River—he’d stayed there on his last visit—but he wanted to let Cherokee walk off some stiffness before settling him in over at the livery stable with plenty of hay and a ration of grain, and then making his way back to rent a room. Once he’d secured a bed for the night, he’d send somebody for his trunk, consume a steak dinner in the hotel dining room, and, later on, take a bath and shave.

In the meantime, though, he wanted to attend to his horse. Sawyer gave the animal his head, let him forge his own way, at his own pace, through the deep snow and the unnerving silence.

The buildings on either side of the street were visible as they passed, though only partially, dark at the windows, with their doors shut tight. Most folks were where they ought to be, Sawyer supposed, gathered around stoves and fireplaces in their various homes, with coffee brewed and supper smells all around them.

Again, that bleak feeling of aloneness rose up inside him, but he quelled it quickly. He did not subscribe to melancholy moods—it wasn’t the McKettrick way. In his family, a man—or a woman, for that matter—played the cards they were dealt, kept on going no matter what, and tended, to the best of their ability, to whatever task was presently at hand.

Still, there was a prickle at his nape, and Cherokee, rarely skittish, pranced sideways in agitation, tossing his head and neighing.

Sawyer had barely pushed back his long coat to uncover his Colt .45, just in case, when he heard the gunshot, swaddled in the snowy silence to a muted pop, saw the flash of orange fire and felt the bullet sear its way into his left shoulder. All of this transpired in the course of a second or so, but even as he slumped forward over Cherokee’s neck, dazed by the hot-poker thrust of the pain, spaces wedged themselves between moments, stretching time, distorting it. Sawyer was at once a wounded man, alone on a snow-blind street except for his panicked horse, and a dispassionate observer, nearby but oddly detached from the scene.

He didn’t see the shooter or his horse, but the calm, watching part of him sized up the situation, sensed there had been a rider. If anybody had seen anything, or heard the muffled gunshot, they weren’t fixing to rush to his rescue, and he didn’t have the strength to draw his .45, even if he could have seen beyond Cherokee’s laid-back ears.

Fortunately, the horse knew that—in cases like this anyway—discretion was the better part of valor. Cherokee bolted for safer territory, leapfrogging through the powdery snow, and Sawyer, hurting bad and only half-conscious, simply lay over the pommel, with the saddle horn jabbing into his middle like a fist, and held on to reins and mane for all he was worth.

Maybe the gunman lost sight of them in the storm, or maybe he just slipped back through the edges of Sawyer’s awareness, into the pulsing darkness that surrounded him, but the second shot, the one that would have finished him off for sure, never came.

His mind slowed, and then slowed some more. He was aware of the thud-thud-thud of his heart, the raspy scratch of his breath, clawing its way into his lungs and then out again, and the familiar smell of wet horsehide, but his vision dimmed to a gray haze.

Cherokee kept moving. Sawyer’s consciousness seemed to retreat into the far corners of his mind, but growing up on the Triple M Ranch, in Arizona, he’d practically been raised on the back of a horse, and the muscles in his arms and legs must have drawn on some capacity for recollection beyond the grasp of the waking mind, because he managed to stay in the saddle.

It was only when the horse came to a sudden stop in a spill of buttery light on glistening snow that Sawyer pitched sideways with a sickening lurch, jarred his wounded shoulder when he struck the snow-padded ground, and passed out from the pain.

* * *

PIPER ST. JAMES, seated at the desk in her empty schoolroom and glumly surveying the scrawny, undecorated pine tree leaning against the far wall, wished heartily, and not for the first time, that she’d never left Maine to strike out for a life of adventure in the still-wild West.

Her cousin Dara Rose, in love with her handsome rancher husband, had painted a fine picture of Blue River in her letters, telling Piper what a wonderful place it was, full of good people and wide open to newcomers.

Piper sighed. Of course Dara Rose would see things that way—she was so happy in her new marriage and, being a generous soul, she wanted Piper to be happy, too. Life had been hard for her cousin and her two little girls, but Clay McKettrick had changed all that.

Piper’s pupils—all thirteen of them—were safe at home, where they belonged, and that was a considerable comfort to her. She’d spent the entire day alone, though, shut up in the schoolhouse, feeding the potbellied stove from an ever-dwindling store of firewood, keeping herself occupied as best she could. Tomorrow was likely to bring more of the same, since the storm showed no signs of letting up—it might even get worse.

Piper shuddered at the thought. She had plenty of food, thanks to the good people of Blue River, but her supply of well water was running out fast, like the wood. Soon, she’d have no choice but to pull on a pair of oversize boots, bundle up in both her everyday shawls and her heavy woolen cloak, raise the hood to protect her ears from the stinging chill, and slog her way across the schoolyard, once to the woodshed, and once to the well. To make matters worse, she was getting low on kerosene for the one lamp she’d allowed herself to light.

She told herself that Clay, Dara Rose’s husband, would come by to check on her soon, but there was no telling when or if he’d be able to get there, given the distance and the state of the roads. For now, Piper had to do for herself.

The wind howled around the clapboard walls of that small, unpainted schoolhouse, sorrowful as a whole band of banshees searching for a way in, making her want to burrow under the quilts on her bed, which took up most of the tiny room in back set aside for teacher’s quarters, and hide there until the weather turned.

She might freeze if she did that, of course, and that was if she didn’t die of thirst beforehand.

So she put on the ungainly boots, left behind by Miss Krenshaw, the last teacher, wrapped herself in wool, drew a deep breath and opened the schoolhouse door to step out onto the little porch.

The cold buffeted her, hard as a slap, trapping the breath in her lungs and nearly knocking her backward, over the threshold.

Resolute, she drew the shawls and the cloak more tightly around her and tried again. The sooner she went out, the sooner she could come back in, she reasoned.

She stopped on the schoolhouse porch, peering through the goose-feather flakes coming down solid as a wall in front of her. Was that a horse, there in the thin light her one lamp cast through the front window?

Piper caught her breath, her heart thudding with sudden hope. There was a horse, and a horse meant a rider, and a rider meant company, if not practical help. Perhaps Clay had braved the tempest to pay her a visit—

She trudged down the steps and across the yard, every step an effort, and got a clearer look at the horse. A sturdy buckskin, the animal was real, all right. The creature was saddled, reins dangling, and she saw its eyes roll upward, glaring white.

But there was no rider on its back.

Although Piper had little experience with horses, she felt an instant affinity for the poor thing, evidently lost in the storm. It must have wandered off from somewhere nearby.

She moved toward it slowly, carefully, partly because of the bitter wind and partly because of her own rising trepidation. She didn’t recognize the horse, which meant that Clay hadn’t come to look in on her, nor had any of the other men—fathers, brothers or uncles of her students—who might have been concerned about the schoolmarm’s welfare.

The buckskin whinnied wildly as she approached, backing up awkwardly, nearly falling onto its great, heaving haunches, lathered despite the chill.

“There, now,” Piper said, reaching for the critter’s bridle strap. There was a shed behind the schoolhouse—some of the students rode in from the country when class was in session and tethered their mounts there for the day, so there was some hay, and the plank walls offered a modicum of shelter—but just then, that shack seemed as far away as darkest Africa.

Before she could take hold of the horse’s bridle, Piper tripped over something solid, half buried in the snow, fell to her hands and knees, and felt the sticky warmth of blood seeping through her mittens.

She saw him then, the rider, sprawled on his back, hat lying a few feet away, staining the snow to crimson.

Sitting on her haunches, Piper stared down at the unfortunate wayfarer for a few long moments, snowflakes slicing at her face like razors, confounded and afraid.

Bile surged into the back of her throat, scalding there, and she willed herself not to turn aside and retch. Something had to be done—and quickly.

“Mister?” she called, gripping the lapels of his long gunslinger’s coat and bending close to his face. “Mister, are you alive?”

He groaned, and she saw one of his eyelids twitch.

The horse, close enough to step on one or both of them, whinnied again, a desperate sound.

“You’ll be all right,” Piper told both the horse and the man, on her knees in the snow, her mittens and cloak damp with blood, but she wasn’t at all sure that was the truth.

The man was around six feet tall—there was no way she could lift him, and it was clear that he couldn’t stand, let alone walk.

Piper deliberated briefly, then stumbled and struggled back into the schoolhouse, through to her room, and wrenched the patchwork quilt—she’d done the piecework herself and the task had been arduous—off the bed.

Warmer now, from the exertions of the past few minutes, Piper rushed outside again and somehow managed to get the quilt underneath the bleeding stranger. He opened his eyes once—even in the dim light she could see that they were a startling shade of greenish azure—and a little smile crooked the corner of his mouth before he passed into unconsciousness again.

In a frenzy of strength, she dragged man and quilt as far as the steps, but there was no getting him up them. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been lying in the schoolyard, injured, and frostbite was a serious possibility, as was hypothermia.

She gripped him by his shoulders—they were broad under her hands, and hard with muscle—and shook him firmly. “Mister!” she yelled, through the raging wind. “You’ve got to rally yourself enough to get up these steps—I can’t do this without some assistance, and there’s no one else around!”

Miraculously, the stranger came to and gathered enough strength to half crawl up the steps, with a lot of help from Piper. From there, she was able to pull him over the threshold onto the rough-plank floor, where he lay facedown, bleeding copiously and only semiconscious.

“My horse,” he rasped.

“Bother your horse,” Piper replied, but she didn’t mean it. The stranger, being a human being, was her first concern, but she was almost as worried about that frightened animal standing outside in the weather, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to ignore it.

“Horse,” the man repeated.

“I’ll see to him,” Piper promised, having no real choice in the matter. She collected another blanket from her quarters, covered the man, and steeled herself to hurry back outside.

Ever after, she’d wonder how she’d managed such an impossible feat, but at the time, Piper worked from a sense of expediency. She got hold the horse’s reins and somehow led him around back, through what seemed like miles of snow, and into the dark shed. There, she removed his saddle, the blanket beneath it, and the bridle. She spread out some hay for him and found a bucket, which she filled with snow—that being the best she could do for now. When the snow melted, the creature would have drinking water.

The horse was jumpy at first, and Piper took a few precious moments to speak softly to him, rubbing him down as best she could with an old burlap sack and making the same promise as before—he would be all right, and so would his master, because she wouldn’t have it any other way.

On the way back to the schoolhouse, she fought her way into the woodshed and filled her arms with sticks of pitch-scented pine.

The stranger was still on the floor, upon her return, lying just over the threshold, either dead or sleeping.

Hastily, murmuring a prayer under her breath, Piper dumped the firewood into the box beside the stove, went back to the man, pulled off one ruined mitten and felt for a pulse at the base of his throat. His skin was cold, a shade of grayish-blue, but there was a heartbeat, thank heaven, faint but steady.

There was still water to fetch—why hadn’t she done this chore earlier, in the daylight, as she’d intended, instead of starting a pot of pinto beans and reading one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels?—and Piper didn’t allow herself to think beyond getting to the well, filling a couple of buckets, and bringing them inside.

She marched outside again, moving like a woman floundering in a bad dream, taking the water buckets with her. Just getting to the well took most of her strength and, once there, she had to lower the vessels, one by one, by a length of rope.

She’d discarded her mittens by then, and the rough hemp burned like fire against her palms and the undersides of her fingers, but she lowered and filled one bucket, and then the other. Her hands ached ferociously as she carried those heavy pails toward the schoolhouse, up the steps, and once inside, she set them both down an instant before she would surely have spilled them all over the man lying in a swoon on her floor.

There was no time to spare—if there had been, Piper might have had the luxury of succumbing to helplessness and giving herself up to a fit of useless weeping—so she filled a kettle and put it on the stove to heat, right next to the simmering beans.

With one eye on the inert visitor the whole time, she peeled off her bloody cloak and shawls and stepped out of the boots. Her hands were numb, and she shook them hard, hoping to restore the circulation, which only made them hurt again. When the water was warm enough, she poured some into a basin and scrubbed sticky streaks of crimson from her skin.

The stranger didn’t stir, even once, and he might very well be dead, but Piper talked to him anyway, in the same brisk, take-charge tone she used when her students balked at staying behind their desks, where they belonged. “You can stop fretting over your horse,” she said. “He’s safe in the shed, with hay and water aplenty.”

There was no response, and Piper made herself walk over to the man, stoop, and, once again, feel for a pulse.

It was there, and it seemed the bleeding had slowed, if not stopped altogether.

She was thankful for small favors.

Noticing the ominous-looking gun jutting from a holster on his right hip, she shivered, extracted the thing gingerly, by two fingers. It was heavy, and the handle was intricately carved, as well as blood-speckled. She made out the initials S.M. as she held the dreadful weapon in shaking hands, carried it into the cloakroom and set it carefully on a high shelf.

Heat surged audibly into the water kettle, causing it to rattle cheerfully on the stovetop. Piper moved, with quiet diligence, from one effort to another, emptying the basin in which she’d washed her hands through a wide crack in the floorboards, wiping it out with a rag, settling it aside. She had cloth strips to use as bandages, since one or the other of her pupils were always getting hurt during recess, and there was a bottle of iodine, too, so she fetched these from their customary places in the cabinet behind her desk.

Her mind kept going back to that dreadful pistol. No one carried guns these days—it was the twentieth century, after all—except for lawmen, like Clay, who was the marshal of Blue River, and, well, outlaws.

Had the stranger used that long-barreled weapon to hold up banks, rob trains, accost law-abiding citizens on the road? She’d seen no sign of a badge, so he probably wasn’t a constable of any sort, but he might have identification of some kind, in his pockets, perhaps, or the saddlebags, left behind in the shed with the horse and its attendant gear.

Put it out of your mind, she ordered herself. There was no sense in pandering to her imagination.

Since she couldn’t quite face searching the fellow’s pockets—it seemed too intimate an undertaking—she turned her thoughts to other things. After collecting a pair of scissors from the drawer of her battered oak desk, Piper undertook the task she would rather have avoided, kneeling beside the man’s prone form and gently rolling him onto his back.

The singular odors of gunpowder and blood rose like smoke, one acrid, one metallic, to fill her nostrils, then her lungs, then her fretful stomach. She gagged again, swallowed hard, and forced her trembling hands to pick up the scissors and begin snipping away at the front of the man’s once-fine coat.

The bullet had torn its way through the dark, costly fabric, through the shirt—probably white once—and the flesh beneath.

When Piper finally uncovered the wound, she was horrified all over again. She slapped one hand over her mouth, though whether to hold back a scream or a spate of sickness she couldn’t have said.

The deep, jagged hole in the flesh of the stranger’s shoulder began to seep again.

Piper shifted her gaze to the supplies she’d gathered, now resting beside her on the floor—a basin full of steaming water, strands of clean cloth, iodine—and was struck by their inadequacy, and her own.

This man needed a surgeon, not the bumbling first aid of a schoolmarm.

She raised her eyes to the night-darkened window and the huge flakes of falling snow beyond, and mentally calculated the distance to Dr. Howard’s house, on the far side of Blue River.

At most a ten-minute walk away, in daylight and decent weather, Doc’s place might as well have been on another continent, for all the chance she had of reaching it safely. Furthermore, the man wasn’t a physician, but a dentist, albeit a very competent one who would definitely know what do to in such an emergency.

Since she had no means of summoning him, she would have to do what she could, and hope the Good Lord would lend a hand.

Piper spent the next half hour or so cleaning that wound, treating it with iodine, binding it closed with the strips of cloth. Stitches were needed, she knew, but threading a needle and sewing flesh together, the way she might stitch up a patchwork quilt, was entirely beyond her. If she made the attempt, she’d get sick, faint dead away, or both, thereby making bad matters considerably worse.

Mercifully, the stranger did not wake during the long, careful process of applying the bandages. When she’d finished, Piper covered him again, brought a pillow and eased it under his head, and, rising to her feet, looked down at the front of her dress.

Like the cloak and the mittens, it was badly stained.

Piper rinsed the basin, filled it with clean water, and retreated into the little room at the back of the schoolhouse. She stripped to her petticoat and camisole, shivering all the while, and gave herself a quick sponge bath. After that, she donned a calico dress—a little scant for the season, but she’d need her gray woolen one for some time yet and wanted to keep it clean. Once properly clad again, she took her dark hair down from its pins and combs, brushed it vigorously, and secured it into a loose chignon at her nape.

Needing to keep herself occupied, Piper burned her knitted mittens in the stove—there was no use trying to get them clean—and then assessed the damage to her cloak. It was dire.

Resigned, and keeping one eye on the unmoving victim, Piper took up her scissors again and cut away the stained parts of her only cloak, consigned the pieces to the stove, and folded what remained to be used for other purposes.

Waste not, want not. She and Dara Rose, growing up together in a household of genteel poverty, had learned that lesson early and well.

She ate supper at her desk—a bowl of the beans she’d been simmering on the stove all afternoon—and wondered what to do next.

She was exhausted, and every muscle ached from the strain of dragging a full-grown man halfway across the schoolyard and inside, tending to the horse as well as its master, fetching the wood and the water. She didn’t dare close her eyes to sleep, though—the stranger might be incapacitated, but he was still a stranger, and he was accustomed to carrying a gun. Suppose he came to and did—well—something?

From a safe distance, Piper assessed him again, cataloging his features in her mind. Caramel-colored hair, a lean, muscular frame, expensive clothes and boots. And then there was the horse, obviously a sturdy creature, well-bred. This man was probably a person of means, she concluded, but that certainly didn’t mean he wasn’t a rascal and a rounder, too.

He might actually be dangerous, a drifter or an unscrupulous opportunist.

Again, she considered braving the weather once more, making her way to the nearest house to ask for help, since Doc’s place was too distant, but she knew she’d never make it even that far. She had no cloak, and in that blizzard, she didn’t dare trust her sense of direction. She might head the wrong way, wander off into the countryside somewhere and perish from exposure.

She shuddered again, rose from her chair, and carried her empty bowl and soup spoon back to the washstand in her quarters, where she left them to be dealt with later.

Still giving the stranger a fairly wide berth, she perched on one of the students’ benches and watched him, thinking hard. She supposed she could peel that overcoat off him, put it on, and tramp to the neighbors’ house, nearly a quarter of a mile away, but the effort might do him further injury and, besides, the mere thought of wearing that bloody garment made her ill.

Even if she’d been able to bear that, the problem of the weather remained.

She was stuck.

She retrieved her knitting—a scarf she’d intended to give to Dara Rose as a Christmas gift—and sat working stitches and waiting for the man to move, or speak.

Or die.

“Water,” he said, after a long time. “I need—water.”

New energy rushed through Piper’s small body; she filled a ladle from one of the buckets she’d hauled in earlier, carried it carefully to his side, and knelt to slip one hand under his head and raise him up high enough to drink.

He took a few sips and his eyes searched her face as she lowered him back to the floor.

“Where—? Who—?” he muttered, the words as rough as sandpaper.

“You’re in the Blue River schoolhouse,” she answered. “I’m Miss St. James, the teacher. Who are you?”

“Is…my horse—?”

Piper managed a thin smile. She didn’t know whether to be glad because he’d regained consciousness or worried by the problems that might present. “Your horse is fine. In out of the storm, fed and watered.”

A corner of his mouth quirked upward, ever so slightly, and his eyes seemed clearer than when he’d opened them before, as though he were more present somehow, and centered squarely within the confines of his own skin and bones. “That’s…good,” he said, with effort.

“Who are you?” Piper asked. She still hadn’t searched his pockets, since just binding up his wound had taken all the courage and fortitude she could muster.

He didn’t answer, but gestured for more water, lifting his head without her help this time, and when he’d swallowed most of the ladle’s contents, he lapsed into another faint. His skin was ghastly pale, and his lips had a bluish tinge.

He belonged in a bed, not on the floor, but moving him any farther was out of the question, given their difference in size. All she could do was cover him, keep the fire going—and pray for a miraculous recovery.

The night passed slowly, with the man groaning hoarsely in his sleep now and then, and muttering a woman’s name—Josie—often. At times, he seemed almost desperate for a response.

Oddly stricken by these murmured cries, Piper left her chair several times to kneel beside him, holding his hand.

“I’m here,” she’d say, hoping he’d think she was this Josie person.

Whoever she was.

He’d smile in his sleep then, and rest peacefully for a while, and Piper would go back to her chair and her knitting. At some point, she unraveled the scarf and cast on new stitches; she’d make mittens instead, she decided, to replace the ones she’d had to burn. With so much of the winter still to come, she’d need them, and heaven only knew what she’d do for a cloak; since her salary was barely enough to keep body and soul together. Such a purchase was close to impossible.

She wasn’t normally the fretful sort—like Dara Rose, she was hardworking and practical and used to squeezing pennies—but, then, this was hardly a normal situation.