“I think we’re going to have some cold ham for supper, Noah, if that’s alright with you and Mr. McQuade. It’s just too darn hot to cook today.”
Callie sat beside Noah on the buckboard seat as he easily guided the horse and wagon toward home. Not able to wear her Stetson with a dress and her hair up, the widow had succumbed to holding a parasol, frippery she usually didn’t bother to use. She tilted the yellow and white confection so that it would shade the youth’s face as well. He glanced at her under his hat, smiling.
“Ma’am, that sounds right heavenly. A heck of a lot better than what I make. You shoulda seen Mr. McQuade’s face, eatin’ my sorry oatmeal this morning! Looked like he was chewin’ a bushel full of lemons, the way his mouth was screwed up!” Noah laughed uproariously at the memory, causing Miz West to join in at just imagining what the usually stoic gunfighter looked like swallowing his lumpy breakfast.
When she was through with the giggles, Callie sobered enough to comment innocently, “I was so surprised to see Mr. McQuade in church today. He doesn’t seem like the type to revere God.” No way could she mention their late-night tete-a-tete. It hadn’t been proper for the two of them to be together last night on the porch, with her in her nightgown and him in an obvious state of undress. But the gunfighter’s attitude had needed her care; she wouldn’t change her behavior one whit. The youth just didn’t need to know.
“Well, Ma’am, I did kinda nudge him into going this morning. He looked sorta lonely, sitting at the breakfast table eatin’ that slop.” The boy grinned again at the thought of the gunfighter ingesting the lumpy oatmeal.
“I’m glad you did, Noah. That man needs some divine intervention. No one realizes what a kind soul Mr. McQuade really is.”
Noah canted a disbelieving, sideways look at the widow. Kind? That wouldn’t be how he would describe the gunslinger! Patient, smart, quiet, and fast; those were words he equated with McQuade. But, kind?—
And then the companionable atmosphere was shattered; shattered by a single gunshot from somewhere behind their wagon. It echoed down the trail toward them, startling a flock of birds out of the brush and fading immediately, interrupting all conscious thoughts.
Noah pulled up the horse instantly, tying the reins around the brake and yanking out the rifle he’d stowed down beside his left leg. Callie West did the same, grabbing her shotgun and turning in her seat to look the way they’d come.
“Get down, Miz West! Now!”
Although Callie hunched over, she still pointed her shotgun over the seat back, eyes darting left and right, the discarded parasol rolling lazily in the bed of the wagon.
“Miz Callie, I can’t protect you if you don’t listen!”
“Hush, Noah! There’re no more shots.”
Both youth and woman remained motionless, listening for sounds of hoof beats, shouts, or more shots. Nothing.
After several tense minutes, Callie and Noah looked at each other, thinking the same thing.
“Do you think it was Mr. McQuade?” The boy asked, looking back down the dirt trail as if trying to conjure the gunfighter.
Callie glanced at Noah.
“Who else could it be? Maybe he shot a rabbit, or a, a rattlesnake.”
They both knew they didn’t believe either scenario.
“That was a rifle shot, Ma’am. Mr. McQuade doesn’t carry a rifle.”
Callie nodded, and then nudged the boy.
“Turn the wagon around, Noah. We won’t know till we get there.”
Noah sat still, his opinion warring with his boss’s. Finally he spoke.
“I think I should take you home and come back myself, Ma’am. Mr. McQuade asked me to take care of you, Miz Ca—“
Of course Callie rounded on him like a spitting cat.
“He is not in charge of my well-being, Noah Lawson! Now, turn this wagon around or I’ll just jump out and walk!”
“Yes, Ma’am!” Glad to have the decision-making taken out of his hands, though still puffed up with responsibility, Noah gee’d the horse around and whipped it into a trot. They covered ground quickly and silently, neither person wanting to hazard a guess as to what they might find over the next hillock. But already buzzards had gathered in the sky ahead, wheeling and circling. Callie shivered, even in the midday heat. Everyone knew what buzzards meant.
“Hurry up, Noah,” she urged, though the boy didn’t need encouragement to do so. He clucked to the horse to speed it up.
And then they topped the rise and there was no more guesswork involved. At the bottom of the hill, in the middle of the road, stood Sonny McQuade’s horse, placidly chewing scrub grass next to a lump in the dirt. A body-size lump.
“Oh, my Lord! It’s him!” Callie gasped, trying to rise from the bouncing seat to see better, holding onto the side of the wagon as she did so.
“Stay put, Ma’am!” Noah barked, leaning forward to coax more speed from the gelding in the traces. He pulled the horse up sharply in the road, close enough that McQuade’s mount snorted and tossed its head, though it remained by its fallen master.
Callie was out of the wagon like a shot, clambering down and darting over to the gunfighter’s body where it lay so still. A spreading bloom of blood covered his shirt front, causing the widow to cry out in alarm as she dropped to her knees beside the man.
“Oh, no! No, no, no! Please Lord, don’t do this to him! Not him; not after the changes he’s tried to make! He deserves a second chance!” On her knees in the dirt, with the noonday sun glaring down on them, Callie reached out a shaking hand to touch Sonny’s face oh, so gently. All the while she prayed aloud to a God who’d ignored her pleas during her marriage, but who had seen fit to release her from the monster she’d married in a very final way. For that reason alone, Callie had made her peace with the good Lord some time ago. But she found herself calling on His intervention once again, in the middle of this south Texas dirt road, at the behest of one of His lowliest: a killer by trade.
Sonny’s face was hot to the touch, tilted up to the sun as it was and his hat tumbled beside him, but he did not move. Callie couldn’t tell if he was alive or not. Apparently the vultures were hopeful he wasn’t, for they continued to circle and wheel above, with more in their midst. Noah knelt beside Callie, bending over the gunfighter’s face and putting an ear close to the fallen man’s lips. He and the widow each held their breath. Seconds ticked by. At last Noah looked up at Callie, eyes bright.
“He’s breathing, Ma’am! He’s alive!”
They hugged each other briefly over the unconscious McQuade, and then Callie reached for the gunfighter’s shirt, intent on seeing the bloody wound. As she attempted to pull it away from his body, the gunslinger’s hand rose from the dirt swiftly and manacled itself around her wrist, grasping tight enough to cause Callie to cry out in surprise. Her first reaction was to pull back, but common sense warned the widow not to do anything that might harm McQuade, so she remained in his grip. As Callie stared down into the gunfighter’s face, with Noah waiting in shock as well, they both noticed when Sonny slowly raised his eyelids, revealing pain-filled, glassy eyes. Those hypnotizing eyes, now foggy with torment, latched onto Callie’s countenance, as his parched lips begin to move in a whisper. The widow leaned in closer in order to hear.
“It’s still there,” he muttered, his surprisingly alert gaze following Callie’s every movement. She frowned.
“What’s still there?” She shot a querying look to Noah, who shrugged and shook his head. The gunfighter became more adamant, shaking Callie’s wrist.
“The…bullet. It’s still in me. Gotta…get it out.”
Callie looked in horror at McQuade’s chest, where blood still oozed steadily. The bullet hadn’t gone straight through? She raised her eyes to Noah, who mouthed the word “Doc” at her. Quickly she nodded, and then leaned back over Sonny, saying in as calm a voice as she could muster, “Then we’ll get it out, Mr. McQuade. We’ll take you to town and get Doc and—“
Sonny pulled forcefully on Callie’s wrist, yanking her closer to him as he rasped out, “No time! You gotta dig it out. I’ve been sick before from the lead. The last doc told me I may not survive another shot.”
With the gunfighter’s grasp surprisingly strong and imprisoning, Callie met Noah’s disbelieving stare. McQuade was asking her to cut through his skin, to fish the bullet out, to possibly fatally harm him? She frantically wanted to shake her head “No!” But what was her alternative? Take him to town against his will, and perhaps kill him in the process? Either way she had a good chance of killing him. It was really just a matter of choosing between neglecting him or attempting to save him. And with those two choices before her, Callie knew which one she would select.
Pulling her wrist from McQuade’s weakening grasp, she stood abruptly, flashing a glance at the boy.
“We’ll take him home, and I’ll do my best.” Looking back down at the gunfighter as he fought to remain conscious, Callie said decisively, “I hope you can help us stand you up, Mr. McQuade. I’d rather not work on you in the middle of the road.”
With an audible sigh of relief, Sonny nodded his head in the sand, while Noah jumped up and retrieved the gunslinger’s hat, and tied his horse to the back of the wagon. And then he joined Callie beside Sonny. Together they placed their hands under his shoulders and pushed him upright.
Oh, it was like being shot all over again! Sonny thought as the pain plowed through him, strong enough that nausea rose from his stomach, threatening to lower him to vomiting in the road. He actually dry heaved as he sat up, turning swiftly to the side so as not to foul the widow’s Sunday best. Both Callie and Noah paused, waiting for him to recover his composure, the widow worried enough that she began stroking his shoulder, one hand smoothing in a circular motion in an effort to calm him. The gunfighter could have kissed her. Her touch burned through his shirt, unless that was the heat from the sun, and Sonny fought to suppress a groan of relief from her caress.
Once his stomach stopped its mutiny, he gave a curt nod and braced himself for the next move. Noah hunkered himself under McQuade’s opposite arm and said, looking at the beleaguered man’s profile, “Here goes, Sir. Don’t get mad at us,” and then he and Callie surged to their feet, raising the tall gunfighter to near his full height.
“Goddammit!” Sonny bit out the first expletive either one of them had ever heard him utter, and his body nearly collapsed between them. Black spots swam before his eyes, and nausea truly threatened to overtake him. He could practically feel the blood pumping out of the wound, and swayed precariously between his two props.
From a distance he heard the angelic voice of Miz Callie West urging him to stay awake.
“Don’t you dare fall unconscious on us, Mr. McQuade! We can’t hold you up without your help. Do you hear me?”
He tried to nod his head, to allay the lovely widow’s fears, but he couldn’t bring himself to move more than twitch his booted feet forward, inch by inch. The pain in his shoulder was excruciating; he wished he would pass out, but not until they made it to the wagon, which seemed a hundred miles away.
“A little farther, Mr. McQuade. Just a little bit more.” This time it was the boy’s voice that pulled Sonny back from the abyss of eternal darkness, just in time to feel the edge of the wagon bump his behind. His whole body sagged, but before he could settle they were pushing him backwards, and he bit off vile curse words.
“We’re laying you down, Mr. McQuade. There you go. Your legs will have to dangle over the side, unless you want to scooch up?”
Scooch? What the hell was ‘scooch?’ Sonny’s bleary, pain-burdened mind turned Miz West’s phrase over and over like a five-step arithmetic problem, looking for a clue to its meaning as the fog of oblivion threatened to overtake him once more. As if from far away he heard running footsteps, clambering boots, a murmur of voices, and the creak of the wagon. The sun beat down on Sonny’s face, and the idea of him being beet-red from the neck up seemed highly humorous to the gunfighter, enough that he started laughing through his parched throat, sounding like the village idiot.
“He’s going into shock, Ma’am. Hurry up!”
Having watched his pa die a slow, painful death when he was just a boy, Noah could identify the stages of suffering and trauma a body went through. They needed to get home now!
While Sonny smiled stupidly up at the sun, grinning wider as he imagined sunburned eyelids puffing up till he looked fish-eyed, a dusting of fabric brushed along his lax hand, and then he heard rustling up by his ear. Someone raised his head, and glory to God Almighty! He felt the widow’s hands gently place the back of his head in her lap, and her cool, cool fingers began stroking his face, over his forehead, down his cheeks…
The ride back to the ranch house was a blur to Sonny, who swam in and out of consciousness, though some part of him remained cognizant of the widow West petting his hair and his face, over and over, while she whispered calming words that he struggled to remember and hold close to his bleeding heart…
He jolted awake when his two saving graces propped him upright, and he swore like a soldier as they half-carried, half-dragged him up the steps of the widow’s house, after a brief altercation over where they should place him.
“The bunkhouse would be easiest, Ma’am,” Noah argued, while Sonny’s body swung between them like a drunken pendulum.
“I can take care of him better in the house, Noah Lawson. He’ll be closer to me there. My virtue is safe with him. Does he look in any condition to attack me?” Callie scoffed at the notion, even as her heart raced at the thought of having the gunfighter in her house, under her roof, for days at a time. No man, wounded or otherwise, had spent more than fifteen minutes in her home since her husband died, and that had suited Callie just fine. But Mr. McQuade needed constant care if he was to pull through. At least, that’s what she conned herself into believing.
Noah glanced into the shadowed, sweaty face of the gunfighter between them and had to agree: if the man even survived, it would be a long time before he would be lifting any petticoats!
“You win, Ma’am. Let’s go.”
“To the kitchen table first. If I’m gonna dig out a bullet, I don’t want his blood all over my bed.”
Sonny heard this exchange, and demurred drunkenly.
“No’ where you, eat, Ma’am,” he slurred, but Callie snapped back at him.
“You’ll do as I say, Mr. McQuade. You can build me a new one when you’re well.”
“Deal,” he replied, than bit off more curses as they dragged him up onto the verandah, and then into the kitchen, bouncing him off door frames as if to hear him curse more loudly. Sonny passingly thought he might owe the widow a lot of apologies for his filthy mouth, and tried to make amends as they laid him back on what he assumed was her kitchen table.
“Sorry, Ma’am, for my foul mouth—sonuvabitch!”
The table came up to meet his back quickly, and the pain overtook his good sense once more as the gunfighter finished the apology with a string of inventive curses that had the widow staring at him and Noah fighting to control his laughter, even as he stirred up the stove fire and set some water on to boil. The gunslinger subsided, as Callie and Noah readied for the “surgery.”
After tearing up some clean underskirts for bandages, and taking a slim knife and running it through a flame to disinfect it, Callie gently began trimming away McQuade’s bloody shirt, apologizing quietly whenever she pulled it from the wound and heard Sonny’s hiss of pain. His chest was covered in blood, and the wound grinned up at them, oozing a steady stream of blood like Satan’s own saliva. Soon they could no longer delay the inevitable. It was time for Callie West to cut into the body of Sonny McQuade.
“Do you have any whiskey, Ma’am?” Sonny asked, hoping to drink himself insensible. He’d been awake before when the doc had cut out a musket ball and told him of his body’s reaction to lead, and the gunfighter didn’t cotton to replaying the event. But the widow shook her head.
“I used all the bottles as target practice after Obadiah died.” Her eyes spoke her sorrow.
Sonny heaved a sigh. Nothing was simple where he was concerned.
“I’ll get a piece of wood,” suggested Noah, spying the wedge Callie used to prop the kitchen door open during the summer, and picked it up. He half-heartedly wiped it on his shirt, and held it out to the gunfighter, who nodded resignedly.
Sonny felt his muscles tighten in anticipation of the coming pain, and heard himself ask Callie West, “How’s your sewing?”
Understanding bloomed across her face.
“I stitch great pillowcases,” she quipped, even as Noah snorted on the other side of the table, lifting the homemade bandages with shaking fingers. He’d come to the aid of wounded animals, and tidied minor injuries before. But, cutting a bullet out of a man? While that man was awake? Hell, no! The youth didn’t know how the widow was even stomaching this, but if she could, so could he.
The teen watched Callie pick up the knife with an unsteady hand as she glanced once more into Sonny’s eyes.
“Last chance, Mr. McQuade. Are you sure you want me to do this? I don’t know where anything is internally. What if I pierce your heart?”
The gunfighter stared up into Callie’s swimming green eyes, and felt himself start to float as he replied, “That, Ma’am, I’m afraid you’ve already done.”
##
The kerosene lamp glowed low in Callie’s bedroom that same evening, where the injured gunfighter’s body now fought off possible lead infection. Callie West sat beside her own four poster bed, hands folded in her lap as she simply studied Sonny McQuade while he slept and pondered the last words he’d uttered before she began the life or death procedure. How cognizant had the gunfighter been when he’d said the words that still reverberated through her memory? Would she ever know?
The “surgery” had been a success. Well, a success in regards that the patient hadn’t died on the table, under her knife. But, Callie thought sourly, it wasn’t for lack of her trying. She’d hated making that first slice, bringing fresh blood and pain to an already suffering Sonny McQuade. She’d stopped at his first hiss of indrawn breath around the wooden doorstop, but Sonny had shaken his head against the table violently, insisting she continue. So she had.
Now he slept fitfully, feverish, groaning slightly every once in a while. God had not been merciful enough for the gunfighter to pass out during the procedure. McQuade had been awake the entire time, suppressing as much of his torturous sounds as he could. It had nearly killed Callie to cause pain to the man to whom she was quickly becoming emotionally tied, but she realized at the same time that she was attempting to save his life.
At the moment he rested on a clean bed, wrapped in clean bandages, wearing only the bottoms of his long underwear, since the top half they’d had to cut from his body and discard.
Thinking of that moment when she had revealed the gunfighter’s torso, Callie felt herself blush all over again. The only man she had ever seen partially dressed was Obadiah, and he’d been middle-aged. Sonny McQuade was far from that.
Callie looked at the man whose life she’d saved; really looked at him. There was no harm in doing so, was there? Under downcast lashes she studied Sonny McQuade, from his mussed, sandy hair, whiskered chin, closed eyes with long, half-moons of sandy eyelashes, and the straightest nose she’d seen on a face. But she didn’t stop there. After glancing about the bedroom, even though she already knew they were alone, Callie considered that flat wall of a chest that she had just sliced into mere hours ago, and sighed. Where Obadiah had been flabby and pale, the gunfighter was all smooth, tanned skin and firm muscles, with just a hint of hair growing down the center of his chest and disappearing below his long underwear. Callie’s face grew hotter.
With the sheet riding at McQuade’s hips, and the bandage high on the left side of his chest, Callie found her gaze drawn back to the man’s taut stomach, where six indentations exhibited muscles the man had honed over the years. They were so clearly marked, Callie wanted to reach out and trace the depressions with a finger, but she resisted the urge. What if the gunfighter woke up while she doodled on his skin?
Callie had never thought of a man’s body as beautiful; Obadiah’s certainly hadn’t been. He’d used his as a weapon. But looking now upon McQuade’s sculpted chest, with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow, well-defined waist, the widow could see why women might just be attracted to a man’s form as much as men lusted after women’s bodies. Being as tired as she felt right now, Callie could imagine herself curling up alongside that hard body of the gunfighter’s, resting her head on that molded chest that housed his still-beating heart, feeling those corded arms carved with muscles honed from honest, hard work clasp her close against his side. Perhaps he would bend that chiseled face down and kiss the top of her head, or tilt it up to his with one long finger and sear her with warm, supple lips that would leave a heated trail wherever they touched…
Lordy, but it was getting hot in this room! Callie fanned her suddenly flushed face and rose jerkily from the chair beside the bed. She moved to the open window and poked her head out in order to catch any little hint of breeze the night afforded. A light glowed in the bunkhouse window below. Noah was probably readying himself for bed after their trying day. He’d helped her clean up after they’d settled McQuade in the bedroom. Together they’d moved the bloodied-beyond-repair table out to the yard, where the boy said he’d work on chopping it into firewood, a little at a time. The youth had been indispensible today; talking her through the procedure, lightening the atmosphere with McQuade by asking why he didn’t bleed blue blood, like the uppity folk in Austin or Houston. She would sorely miss young Lawson when he went out on his own, which he would soon enough. His maturing was nearly done; his behavior today was a good example of the man he was becoming, and Callie was proud that she might have been a little bit responsible for the way he was turning out.
“No!”
Callie swung about at McQuade’s unconscious outburst, and returned to his side, feeling his forehead for a fever. The gunfighter’s head was warm, and clammy. His skin glistened. Callie went to the basin Noah had readied with cool water and immersed a clean cloth in the liquid before wiping at McQuade’s face and neck. She doused the rag and hesitantly, self-consciously swiped down his chest and stomach with the cool cloth. Oh, dear God, how his skin glowed when it was wet, inviting a touch!
Callie turned back to the basin and doused the rag roughly, out of sorts with her lustful thoughts. Why, the man had just survived an attempted murder, and an amateur surgery, and here she was salivating over him like a—like a slice of peach pie! She really needed to control her emotions…
“Stop! I won’t do it!”
Turning from the pitcher and wash basin, Callie watched the tortured gunfighter rock his head back and forth on the pillow, fighting inner demons with a frown creasing his handsome visage. The fever had him in its grip, causing this turmoil within McQuade, forcing him to act out. Callie had heard recuperation could not begin until the fever was eradicated, so she continued to wipe down the gunslinger’s face and body with the cool water, avoiding his flailing about as much as possible.
“Sshh, Mr. McQuade. It’s alright. You’re safe now. No one here will make you do anything you don’t want. Sshh,” Callie cooed, bending low over the bed in hopes the gunfighter would hear her calm voice and subside. For a moment it seemed as though his edginess might have abated; the touch of the cloth to his heated skin seemed to have soothed McQuade. Callie sat back down in her chair on a sigh.
Just as she closed her eyes for a single second, the bed creaked, and suddenly McQuade sat up straight, eyes wild and unseeing. Out of his mouth spewed a rapid, foreign language, the words jumbling together, but then thinning out into possible phrases as Callie stared at the gunfighter, listening. With the wet cloth dripping, forgotten, in her lap, Callie tried to make sense of the strange words, the feeling of having heard them before getting stronger and stronger.
And then she remembered; stared in shocked disbelief at the gunfighter as his eyes darted blankly around the room, the words he’d said fading everywhere but in Callie’s horrified memory. For the widow now remembered the language McQuade had just fluently spewed, recollected when she’d last heard it. And she wondered why an American ex-cavalry officer would speak it like a native. For the language was Arapaho, the language of the Indians who had attacked Round Rock and killed many of its people several years earlier. The language of the natives who had killed her parents.
Callie stood abruptly, watching McQuade as his unseeing gaze settled on her. She knew he was not in the here and now; knew he was reliving his past, still in the grip of the fever. But his knowledge of the Arapaho language scared Callie. How had he learned to speak it so fluently? How had he spent that much time with those murdering, thieving—
McQuade’s hand darted out and grabbed Callie’s wrist, pulling her down into his face, though he still did not recognize her, or where he was. This became apparent as his eyes flew unseeing over her face, as he asked her roughly in English, shaking her slightly, “Nitika? Nitika? You came back to me?”