Chapter Twenty-One
Evelyn paced the length of the doctor's front room until she lost count of the laps.
Door to window, window to door, her boots wore a track in the plank floor while the door at the back stayed closed, the sounds behind it stayed muffled, and the minutes stretched out long enough to drive a sane woman to the edge of her faculties.
She'd gotten good at waiting during her years at the orphanage.
Good at sitting on benches while adults decided things behind closed doors.
But this particular brand of waiting, the brand where a man she'd kissed two hours ago lay on a table while a doctor did things to a bullet wound, made the orphanage variety look restful by comparison.
She'd ridden to town in the back of a stranger's wagon, somebody whose name she'd already forgotten.
Her brain had stopped recording nonessential information the moment she'd pushed through the crowd at the fairground and found Sam Cooper on one knee in the dirt with blood running between his fingers.
She'd knelt beside him. She'd taken his hand—the one on the wound—and pressed her own over it because she didn't know what else to do and because doing nothing would have killed her faster than any bullet.
The door opened.
The doctor stepped into the front room, wiping his hands on a cloth, his rolled sleeves showing forearms flecked with dried blood. Sam's blood.
"Miss Granger?"
"How is he? Is he all right? How bad is it?"
"He's gonna be just fine. The bullet grazed him along the left side, hip to the lower rib.
Tore up a fair amount of skin and some muscle underneath.
It bled considerable, but it didn't hit nothin' vital.
I cleaned it out with carbolic, stitched the worst of it, and packed the rest with clean cotton.
He'll be sore as blazes for a week or two, but he'll mend. "
Evelyn's knees went soft. She put her hand on the back of the nearest chair because the alternative involved sitting on the floor.
"Can I see him?"
"You can. But I'll warn you, he's already tryin' to leave. I told him he needs rest. He told me, and I'm quotin' the man direct, that ‘he'd rest when he was good and dead and not a minute before.’"
She pushed past the doctor and through the door.
Sam sat on the edge of the examination table, shirtless.
A wide strip of bandage was wrapped around his midsection from hip to rib.
Blood had soaked through in one spot near the bottom.
He had his shirt in one hand, trying to pull it on with the other, and every time he raised his left arm, the movement pulled at the bandage, and his jaw clenched so hard the muscle jumped.
"We got to go." He worked the shirt over his head, sucking air through his teeth. "Wilkes is out there. He's runnin' and every minute I sit in this here office is another minute he puts between us. I need my horse, I need my rifle, I need to—"
"You need to sit still and let your body catch up with your fool head, is what you need." Evelyn crossed to the table and put her hand flat on his chest. "You just got shot, Sam."
"I got grazed."
"You got shot. The doctor pulled thread through your hide not five minutes ago. You ain't goin' nowheres except home."
"Evelyn—"
"Home, Sam Cooper. Home. You can chase Amos Wilkes to perdition and back once you can raise your left arm above your waist without turnin' the color of old milk.
Right now you're comin' home with me, you're gonna lie down in that bed, and you're gonna let somebody take care of you for once in your stubborn, pig-headed, contrary life. "
He looked at her hand on his chest, then at her face. Whatever argument he'd been constructing behind those gray eyes collapsed. Sam Cooper could outfight and outshoot most men, but he could not—as two weeks of evidence had conclusively proven—outlast Evelyn Granger when she planted her feet.
"Fine. But I ain't stayin' in that bed more'n a day. You hear me?"
"I hear you. Now hush up and let me help you with that shirt."
She guided the fabric over the bandage without pulling, then buttoned the front because his left hand shook too bad to manage it himself. She pretended she didn't notice the shaking. He pretended he didn't notice her pretending.
***
The ride home took forever. Sam sat beside her on the buckboard bench because she'd refused to let him ride the mare, which had produced a five-minute argument she'd won by climbing onto the bench first and taking up the reins before he could get to them.
She drove the mule.
At the homestead, she got him inside to his room, got his boots off, and got him into the bed. He protested with each step—a muttered objection per boot; the ongoing commentary of a man who lacked the physical capacity to override the woman steering him toward rest.
She pulled the quilt over him, tucking the edges the way he'd tucked her quilt when he'd carried her to bed.
She brought him water, then willow bark tea for the pain, which Sam drank with the expression of a man swallowing turpentine.
She checked the bandage, pressing lightly along the edge.
The dark stain held its borders instead of spreading.
"I'll be right outside if you need anything. Just holler."
"I ain't gonna holler."
"Then suffer in silence, Mr. Cooper. But I'll be right outside all the same."
***
Foster arrived about two hours later. Evelyn met him at the door because Sam had fallen into a fitful doze that she intended to protect the way she'd protect a newborn lamb from a wolf.
"He's restin'. You can come in, but keep it quiet."
Foster took the chair Evelyn offered beside Sam's open bedroom door. Sam woke when Foster's chair creaked, because of course he did, because Sam Cooper slept with one ear aimed at the world and the other aimed at trouble.
"Sheriff."
"Sam. How you feelin'?"
"I been better. I been worse. What'd you find?"
Foster leaned forward, turning his hat between his hands. "Wilkes slipped out through the north exit durin' the commotion. My deputies picked up his trail heading east into the timber, but they lost it about a mile past the tree line. He knows this here country, Sam. He's been studyin' on it."
"I could've told you that much."
"You could've told me a sight of things instead of chargin' into a fistfight at a crowded fair, but here we sit." Foster's voice carried a measured edge. "I asked you to come to me first, Sam. You gave me your word."
"I gave you the best I had that night. It wasn't enough. I know that."
"It damn sure wasn't." Foster straightened in the chair.
"Now listen here, because I ain't fixin' to say this but once.
Wilkes meant for that fight to happen. He wanted it.
He's been circlin' your property for days, showin' hisself just enough to keep you riled.
He wanted you hot-headed and sloppy, Sam.
He wanted you to charge him in a crowd where he could make you look like the aggressor and hisself like the party bein' set upon. "
"He pulled a gun on me."
"He pulled a gun after you threw the first punch.
After you pinned him to a stall post in front of a hundred people.
You handed him exactly what he was after, which amounted to justification.
" Foster's hat stopped turning. "If he'd killed you, he'd have had fifty witnesses swear you came at him first. Self-defense.
Clean as a new whistle. That's what he was playin' at the whole time.
He wanted to draw you out, get you to swing first, then put you down and walk away a free man. "
Sam stared at the ceiling while the information rearranged the story he'd been telling himself about the fight.
"He knows the Cooper property." Foster picked up again, quieter now. "He's been campin' in the timber east of your fence line. We found sign of a cold camp about two miles in. He's got eyes on your place, Sam. He knows your routines, your habits. He likely knows about Miss Granger here, too."
Evelyn's hands tightened on the door frame.
"I'm puttin' a deputy on your road, startin' tonight.
I'll have men patrollin' the timber. But you gotta understand that Wilkes ain't gonna come at you head-on.
He'll pick his moment. He'll wait till you're tired or careless or cut off from help, then he'll make his play.
" Foster stood up. "Keep your doors locked.
Keep your guns loaded. Keep Miss Granger close.
If you see him, you send for me before you do a single blessed thing. We clear?"
"We're clear, Sheriff."
"I surely hope so. Because next time I might not get there in time to scrape you off the ground."
Foster left. Evelyn stood in Sam's doorway for a moment, then went to the stove, heated water, tore a fresh strip of cotton from the dwindling supply of Sarah's dish towels, and brought it back on a tray.
"I need to change your bandage."
He unbuttoned his shirt without argument this time, pulling it open to expose the wrapped midsection. Blood had seeped through in two places now.
She unwound the old bandage slowly, soaking the sections where dried blood had stuck the cotton to his skin. The wound ran along his left side, a furrow of raw red flesh about eight inches long, stitched in three places with black thread, the skin bruised purple and yellow around it.
She cleaned around the stitches with the warm cloth, dabbing rather than wiping, keeping her hands steady even when his muscles twitched under her fingers. She wrapped the fresh bandage around his torso, pulling it firm but not tight, tucked the end, and smoothed it flat against his skin.
"There. That'll hold till mornin'."
"Much obliged."
She wrung out the cloth. She should leave. She should go to the kitchen, start supper, do any of the dozen useful things that needed doing.
"I'll be leavin' the day after tomorrow." She rinsed the cloth again, though it didn't need rinsing. "Sarah'll be back by then, accordin' to her letter. I'll take the mornin' stage to Helena and catch the train east."
Sam looked at the wall. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the quilt bunched around his waist. He didn't look at her.
She waited. She gave him space the way she'd given him space by the fire when he'd told her about his parents. She waited for a word, a grunt, a syllable that acknowledged what she'd just put in front of him.
He adjusted the quilt with his right hand and settled back against the headboard.
The quiet stretched past comfortable into the territory where quiet stopped being the absence of words and started being the presence of all the words neither person would say. The kiss at the fair sat in that quiet; it was enormous and untouched. Neither of them acknowledged it.
She should bring it up. She should say: You kissed me, Sam Cooper—two hours before you got yourself shot—and I need to know what it meant because I'm leaving in two days, and I'll carry the question all the way back to Springfield if you don't answer it here.
She didn't bring it up because a man who'd burned Sam's parents alive and shot him at a fairground still walked free somewhere in the timber, and parsing the meaning of a kiss, while Amos Wilkes planned his next move, ranked about as high on the list of useful activities as sweeping a floor during an earthquake.
The kiss could wait. Right now, what mattered involved bandages, locked doors, loaded guns, and keeping Sam Cooper alive long enough to heal.
That covered the practical reason for leaving it alone.
The other reason held up less well. Bringing it up also meant hearing the answer, and the answer might go something like: It didn't mean anything; I got caught up in the moment.
And hearing that, right now, sitting on his bed with his blood drying in the basin beside her, would break something in her that she'd spent twenty-three years building and couldn't afford to lose.
So she let the quiet stretch. She rinsed the cloth a third time, which she'd lost all pretense of needing to do.
"You need anything else before I go start supper?"
"I'm all right."
"I'll bring you a plate when it's ready."
"All right."
She picked up the basin and carried it to the door, stopping in the doorway with her back to him.
Forty-eight hours. Two days. Then a stagecoach and a train. Then Springfield and the sewing shop, and a life that had suited her well enough before Montana and would have to suit her again after.
She walked to the kitchen, set the basin on the counter, and started supper because supper needed starting. Her hands needed a task, and the alternative to cooking involved standing in Sam Cooper's doorway waiting for a man who couldn't look at her to say the thing they both needed him to say.
The carved horse sat in her coat pocket by the door. The blue silk ribbon sat beside it. They proved the afternoon had happened. They proved that before the gun and the blood and the silence, Sam Cooper had kissed her at the edge of a fairground while the light went gold over the mountains.
She cooked. Between them, the quiet held.
Two days.