Chapter Five
The mule had its own opinions, and none of them involved moving forward.
Evelyn sat on the buckboard bench with snow driving into her face, her shawl soaked through, and her fingers so numb she couldn't tell where they ended and her gloves began.
She watched Sam standing ankle-deep in a drift and arguing with an animal that had clearly won the argument before it started.
"Hyah! Get on, you stubborn…"
He pulled the reins. The mule stood there. He pulled harder.
Evelyn leaned over the side of the buckboard and looked down. "We need to dig out the wheels."
Snow had packed up around the front axle and both rear wheels had sunk into a drift that came up past the hubs.
Sam came around to the back, squinting against the wind. "I know what we need to do."
"Then why are you still arguing with the mule?"
He gave her a look. The kind of look that said he'd heard her, he'd noted her comment, and he'd be filing it away for a time when he had the energy to address it, which would not be now.
He crouched behind the rear wheel and started clearing snow with his hands, scooping it away from the hub and the axle in big, rough sweeps.
"Get down here and push when I tell you."
Evelyn climbed down from the bench. Did he have to be that condescending when he talked?
Her boots hit the snow and sank past her ankles, and the cold went straight through the leather and into her stockings.
She scoffed, hoping he would notice, and waded through to the back of the buckboard and braced her hands against the tailboard.
"When I say, push hard as you can. I'll work the mule from the front."
"That won't work."
Sam stopped digging and looked up at her. "Beg pardon?"
"If you're pulling from the front and I'm pushing from the back, we're splitting the effort. The wheels are sunk too deep. We need to rock it."
She'd seen a wagon stuck in mud once, back in Springfield, outside the feed mill after a heavy rain. The drayman had rocked it forward and back, forward and back, working it loose an inch at a time until the wheels found purchase. Same principle.
"Push it forward a few inches, then let it roll back, then push again. Build the momentum."
"I ain't interested in rocking it. I want it out."
"And I'm telling you how to get it out."
"Miss Granger, I been unsticking wagons since before you could—"
"Stop imitating the mule and just trust me."
Sam stared at her. She stared back. Her teeth chattered, and she clamped her jaw against it because she would not give him the satisfaction of looking like she couldn't handle this.
"Fine." He spat the word out like it tasted bad. "We'll try your way. But if this buckboard don't move in five minutes, we do it mine."
"Agreed."
They got into position. Sam at the front with the mule's bridle in one hand, Evelyn braced against the tailboard. She pushed. The buckboard rocked forward maybe two inches. She let it roll back. Pushed again. Three inches. Back. The wheels groaned in the packed snow, fighting for grip.
"Again!"
She pushed. Sam pulled the mule at the same time, and the animal lurched forward, more from surprise than cooperation. The left rear wheel caught on something solid under the snow—a frozen rut, maybe, or a rock—and the buckboard heaved forward a full foot.
"Keep goin'! Don't stop!"
She pushed again, driving her shoulder into the tailboard now, her boots sliding in the snow, her legs burning from the effort.
The buckboard lurched. Rocked. Lurched again.
And then the wheels found the track, or something close enough to the track, and the whole thing rolled forward with a groan that sounded like the wood itself resenting the effort.
Sam got the mule moving, pulling it forward step by step, and the buckboard scraped along behind, slow and stubborn but moving. Actually moving.
Evelyn stood in the road, breathing hard, her shoulders aching and her hands on fire inside her frozen gloves. Snow had gotten down the back of her collar and melted against her skin, and she wanted very badly to be indoors. Any indoors. An outhouse would do at this point.
Sam brought the mule around so the buckboard faced homeward. He didn't look at her. He adjusted the harness and checked the traces.
"I, uh… I guess your way worked."
"I know it did."
He still didn't look at her. But something around his jaw shifted, just a fraction, and Evelyn chose to read it as the closest thing to an apology Sam Cooper could produce right now.
"Get on up. We ain't out of this yet."
She climbed back onto the bench. He climbed up beside her. The mule, apparently having decided that cooperation might get it to a warm barn faster than stubbornness, pulled forward into the storm.
***
They made it. Barely. The homestead appeared through the white like something half-imagined, the barn and the house and the corral all blurred together under a layer of snow so thick the whole place looked like it had been draped in a bedsheet.
The mule trudged the last hundred yards on pure habit, following a path it knew by heart.
Sam pulled the buckboard up alongside the porch and set the brake. Evelyn's body had gone stiff from the cold, and when she stood up from the bench, her legs protested from ankle to hip.
She reached for the porch rail to steady herself coming down.
Her boot hit the step. The step, packed with ice under a skim of fresh snow, did what ice had been doing to her since she'd arrived in this territory; it went out from under her.
Her ankle turned hard to the left. Something in it stretched past where it should have stretched, and her whole leg went hot from the foot up. Wrong hot. Injury hot.
She grabbed the porch rail but her fingers, numb and clumsy from the cold, slipped off the frozen wood. She went down on the step, landing hard on her hip and her twisted ankle both, and the pain doubled over on itself. Her vision went white at the edges.
"Tarnation— !"
"For the love of… What'd I tell you about watchin' where you step?" Sam came around the back of the buckboard in three strides. "Every blasted time you set foot on ice, you—"
"Don't you dare scold me right now, Sam Cooper. Don't you dare. I just spent the last hour freezing half to death pushing your buckboard out of a snowdrift, and I'll not be scolded about ice by a man who ain't got the good sense to—"
"You fell, didn’t you? Now I gotta come rescuin’ you."
"I can manage on my own well enough."
"Like hell you can."
She tried. She got one hand on the porch rail and one foot under her and pushed, and her ankle screamed at her so hard the yard went sideways. She sat back down hard on the step.
Sam crouched in front of her. "You done bein' stubborn, or you want to try one more time and really hurt yourself?"
"I ain't bein'—"
He scooped her up. Just… scooped her, one arm under her knees and one behind her back, and stood up with her like she weighed about as much as the supply crate. The ground left. The porch step left. The world tilted, and suddenly she had no say in where she went or how she got there.
"You put me down!"
"No, ma'am."
"Sam Cooper, you set me down this very instant, I am perfectly well able to—"
"Of what? Fallin' on your other ankle? Quit fightin' me, woman."
She fought him. She pushed against his chest with both hands, tried to twist free, and succeeded only in making him tighten his grip and shift her weight closer.
This put her face about four inches from his neck, and she could smell woodsmoke and cold leather and sweat, and she stopped fighting.
Not because she'd decided to. Her body just quit on her.
She went still against him before her brain could weigh in on the matter.
He carried her through the front door, across the main room, and lowered her into the chair by the cookstove.
He made sure her back rested against the chair.
Positioned her leg so her ankle hung free.
And he did it steadily and deliberately.
The hands that had just hauled her off a porch step against her will now eased her down like she might be made of something chipped. It didn't match. None of it matched.
Then he knelt in front of her and took her boot off.
His hands, the same hands that had grabbed shingles away from her and pulled a Colt on her and taken her wrists in the kitchen that morning, moved over her ankle with a care that she had to look away from. Pressing along the bone with his thumbs. He turned her foot slowly to the left.
She hissed.
He looked at her. "That hurt?"
"What do you think?"
He turned it to the right. Less pain. He pressed along the outside of the ankle, then the inside, then along the top of her foot toward her toes.
His hands had warmed against her skin, or she'd stopped noticing the cold, because what she noticed instead, what she could not stop noticing no matter how much she told herself to stop, had to do with the fact that this man's hands moved with a patience she hadn't seen from him in any other circumstance. Just here. Just this.
"It ain't broke. Just a sprain, and not a bad one at that." He sat back on his heels. "But you'd best stay off it a day or two. Keep it propped up. I'll wrap it for you."
He went to the shelf and came back with a strip of clean cotton—probably one of Sarah's dish towels torn into bandage width.
He wrapped her ankle firmly but not tightly, working the cloth in a figure-eight around her heel and the arch of her foot, and his fingers moved with a steadiness that suggested he'd bandaged plenty of things in his life that had gone worse than this.
He tucked the end of the cloth and sat back again.
"Don't go walkin' on it tonight. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"I mean it. Stay in that chair."
"I said I hear you, Mr. Cooper."
He stood up, went to the cookstove, and built the fire up until the room started warming, feeding in split kindling and then a bigger log that popped and hissed with sap.
He filled the kettle and set it on the stove.
Then he went to the supply crate and pulled out the canned peaches they'd bought at Harlow's, opened the tin with his knife, and set it on the table beside her with a fork.
Afterward, he went out to deal with the mule and the supplies.
Evelyn sat in the chair with her ankle wrapped, her hip aching, and a tin of canned peaches in front of her, as the fire ticked in the stove.
She ate a peach. It was sweet and soft and so different from everything she'd tasted in the last week—the hardtack, jerky, bitter coffee and cold biscuits—that she closed her eyes and just sat with it a second.
And she also sat there trying to square the man who'd just scolded her on the porch with the man who'd just knelt on a cold floor and wrapped her ankle with those hands.
She struggled to fit them together into one person.
A man who told you to quit fighting him and then set you down in a chair like you might break if he went too fast…
those things shouldn't go together. They shouldn't live in the same body.
But they did. In him, apparently, they did.
She ate another peach.