Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The sharp report of a rifle in the distance drew Doc Burnett’s gaze to the window. It echoed off a distant ridge, coming back before either he or Lucas moved.
Doc stood and instinctively moved to his patient’s side.
He realized he couldn’t do much to protect her, if needed.
Still, she was his responsibility. At the same time, Lucas was on his feet and bounding to the doorway, where he peered out into the golden, late-afternoon sun. His cocked six-shooter was in his hand.
“What was that?” he yelled out.
“Dunno. Jeb’s up watching the trail.”
Lucas turned to Doc and shot a warning glare at him. “You stay here. Don’t move, and don’t make no noise. You hear?”
The young outlaw didn’t wait to get an answer and slipped out the door.
Doc took a step closer to the door, listening.
A spark of hope flared inside him. Perhaps Wendell and Dodger had been captured when they went to his house in Elkhorn.
Perhaps the judge had forced them to tell him where they’d taken Doc.
Or perhaps they’d had to make a run for it and a posse had pursued them back to the outlaws’ camp.
He was the only doctor in the area, and miners and townsfolk called on him day in and day out.
He must have been missed, having been gone for five days.
They had to be on the lookout. He could very well imagine the judge directing the sheriff to have someone watch the house.
And even if the town officials had done nothing, he believed his friend Caleb Marlowe would be concerned about him.
The thought raised his spirits tremendously, but the next one sent them plummeting.
What if Sheila had actually come out here, as she’d hinted in her letters? No, that was impossible. He would have gotten word.
But what if she had come out to Colorado?
What if she had reached Elkhorn and found him gone? She would certainly be worried.
But no. Doc tried to brush aside the thought. He was simply tormenting himself. Surely, she was still in New York.
But he couldn’t completely shake off the thought. The idea of his daughter possibly waiting in that house, not knowing whether he was alive or dead, pressed harder on his heart than any fear for himself.
He didn’t have much more time to think about it.
Gunfire erupted, and two shots struck the shack, one piercing the wall on the far side of the doorframe with an explosion of splinters. For a half minute, the shooting continued, with shots being returned from right outside. When it halted, Doc heard muttered curses not far from the open door.
In his mind’s eye, Doc envisioned an army of men surrounding the camp. Their sole intention was to rescue him and the wounded passenger.
“What…what is it?”
He turned to his patient and found her eyes open. Her lips were dry, her brow covered with sweat. He sat beside her. The fever was worsening.
“Were those gunshots?” she asked. “Tell me. What’s happening?”
“I think we’re being rescued.”
Doc reached under the cot and pulled out the surgical tools he’d stored there. Choosing a scalpel, he slid it into his jacket pocket. He’d do whatever he had to do to help the men coming to free them.
“Rescued?” Her voice was breathless and seemed to border on panic. “Who?”
“I’m hoping it’s a posse from Elkhorn.”
He moved to the edge of the doorway and peeked out.
Lucas had taken shelter behind a cart with a broken wheel that sat akilter beyond a cooking fire.
Another outlaw with a rifle was sprawled with his back to a water trough closer to the shack.
Both were reloading their weapons, anticipating the next move of the attackers.
“Though I don’t have great faith in the town sheriff—the man could kill us by accident—I’d be happy to see a troop of one-armed monkeys out there if they rescued us.”
No more shooting. For the moment, all was quiet, but surely the storm was about to break.
Doc glanced around the shack to see if there was anything they could use to protect themselves from stray shots. He fully expected a hail of bullets to perforate the wood walls any second now. There was very little that could be useful.
The cot groaned, and Doc looked over his shoulder. His patient was trying to sit up.
“No…no! You can’t be doing that.” He hurried to her side and gently pushed her back down. “You’re not well enough.”
The fever was causing her to act irrationally. He needed to calm her somehow. She needed to feel a sense of confidence that help had arrived. That they were about to be saved.
He only prayed that was true. If he didn’t operate on her soon, however, none of this would matter.
“Even if it’s the sheriff, he’ll recognize me. But it might not be him at all. It could be a friend of mine, Caleb Marlowe. The man is one of the best trackers in the West. He could have organized a posse of his own to come after us. He’s a good man. The best shot in the…”
Doc realized he was talking too much in his excitement of them being rescued. His words were not doing anything to reassure her. The woman had a death grip on his hand. Her eyes were wide open and wild. And she was obviously trying to get his attention.
“What is it?”
“Where is Lucas?”
He was surprised, but only for an instant, that she would know the outlaw’s name. She’d been drifting in an out of consciousness for days. While they had been imprisoned here, Lucas’s name had been mentioned a number of times.
“Outside, trying to get himself killed, I’d say.”
“No!”
She tried to sit up again, but he stopped her.
“I know this is distressing, but you need to lie quiet. There’s nothing we can do right now. The fight is between them. We’re safe here.” Well, reasonably safe, he thought.
Gunfire started up again. A barrage of bullets was exchanged, and the shooting kept up for a long while.
It was relentless. The front wall of the shack was hit a half dozen times with holes opening with a spray of dust and splinters.
Doc huddled over his patient, all the while knowing that if he were killed, her chances of survival were nil.
Even so, his protective instincts were driving him.
He thought suddenly of Sheila as a little girl, feverish and stubborn, refusing to stay beneath the covers while Anne laughed softly and told him their daughter had inherited every ounce of his mulishness. The memory struck with such force that, for one breath, the shack and the gunfire fell away.
Luckily, none of the bullets struck either of them, but the outlaws were not so fortunate. Over the crackle of gunfire, he heard one of them yelp in pain and curse aloud after being shot.
Doc realized that very few shots were being returned by the road agents. But they were not giving up.
“I have to stop him,” she said thickly.
“Stop who?”
“Lucas. Let me go. I have to go out there.”
Doc looked into the woman’s face and saw tears in her eyes. They filled and then ran off across her temple, disappearing into her hairline.
“Please.” She tried to sit up again, but she wasn’t strong enough. “Help me up.”
“Why are you worried about Lucas?” he asked, unable to comprehend her concern.
“He’s my son,” she whispered raggedly.
Bits of information began to arrange themselves like chess pieces in his mind.
Lucas staying here in the shack constantly.
The obvious discomfort as he watched Doc digging the bullet out of her shoulder.
The anger over her pain and the insistence on giving her something to relieve it.
His blistering words to the two road agents when he sent them off to Elkhorn for the medicine and surgical instruments.
Not guilt alone, then. Love. Fierce, frightened, desperate love.
“They’ve come for me,” she said. “Me. And I can’t let my boy die.”
“For you?” He felt like a simpleton, babbling and repeating her words.
“I’m…I’m Mrs. Fields.”
Doc stared at her. The name meant nothing to him.
“These men…they work for me. I’m the one responsible. I plan the Wells Fargo robberies. I’m the one…the one they want. Not him. Not my son. I have to save him.”
Doc found himself standing beside the cot. He wasn’t aware that he’d risen. His brain was filled with mud. He was slogging through a bog, trying to keep up with what she was telling him. It didn’t make sense. How could she be…?
Comprehension dawned in his mind. And with it, every mistaken assumption regarding road agents and outlaws evaporated like morning mist on a woodland lake.
She wasn’t kidnapped. She wasn’t a victim.
In barely a moment, this woman—Mrs. Fields—destroyed every image he had regarding what a band of stagecoach robbers looked like.
And still, beneath all of it, she was a mother afraid for her child. Doc understood that, perhaps more than he wished to.
The gunfight was continuing, but suddenly the sound of pained cursing reached them. Still, shots were being returned by the outlaws.
Hearing it, his patient cried out weakly.
She was not about to be held down any longer.
She sat up and, with what was clearly a monumental effort, pushed her legs off the cot.
The stockinged feet thumped to the floor.
She was sitting, but she could go no farther.
She hadn’t the strength to push up to her feet.
“Wait,” he ordered, recovering his bearings. “You wait right there. I’ll see what I can do.”
Doc tried to think of what he possibly could do. He had no idea how he could help this woman’s son.
Perhaps if he could communicate with the men who’d laid siege to the camp. Perhaps if he could convince Lucas to drop his weapon and hand himself in.
“You haven’t been out of that bed in five days. You’re weak and feverish. If you try to get up, you’ll just fall and make things worse.”
As if they could get worse, he thought.
“You stay put,” he ordered again before moving cautiously toward the door.
How could he do anything while bullets continued to fly?
He peered around the doorjamb just as one of the rescuers’ shots found its mark. The road agent by the water trough sat back and then stretched out flat on the ground. Doc glanced quickly at Lucas, who was staring at the body of his partner.
“Throw your weapons down, Lucas,” he shouted out at him over the sound of gunfire. “Surrender before it’s too late.”
The young man’s gaze slid to the door of the shack. As he began to shake his head, a bullet struck him, sending him spinning forward to the ground. He writhed in the dirt, clutching his arm, and then shoved himself back up against the cart. Doc saw blood flowing through his fingers.
“Stop shooting,” he shouted, waving his hand in the doorway. “I’m Doc Burnett. Stop shooting.”
The gunfire slowed and then stopped completely.
“He’ll surrender.”
A short period of silence followed, and then a voice rang out.
“Stand up, Lucas. And throw your gun out.”
Doc was shocked to recognize Dodger’s voice. Why the killer was attacking his own gang, he couldn’t fathom.
Hope turned to doubt. All the trust he had of being rescued faded. He shrank back from the door.
“Throw your guns out now,” Dodger repeated.
Lucas was staring at the shack, his eyes filled with worry. Doc understood this boy so much more clearly now.
“Don’t get yourself killed,” he murmured to himself, “for her sake.”
Lucas sat thinking, his gaze moving from the door to his arm. Finally, he threw the pistols away from the cart.
“Where is Lucas?”
Doc glanced back at his patient and nodded. “He’s alive.”
She closed her eyes and started crying quietly.
From where he stood, in the shadow of the shack’s interior, he watched Dodger, Sheriff Horner, and three armed deputies striding toward them.
Dodger and Sheriff Horner. The last shred of hope that remained in Doc’s mind faded.
Of all these outlaws, Dodger had struck him as the most vicious. He was the one who shot the miner outside of town. He was the one who killed the man who wandered into their camp. And here he was, walking with Horner like they were old friends.
And if there was a more ruthless cur than Gant Horner wearing a sheriff’s badge, Doc had yet to meet him.
Whatever was coming through that door, it was not rescue.