Anita Mills (29 page)

“Did you use all of them?”

“If I had the ingredients handy. And whether you believe it or not, they all worked. And some of her medicines were a lot like ones in your formulary—when she dosed a body up, he knew he was dosed. She just couldn’t do anything with consumption, though, and she sure tried. Mama wanted to live to see me and Danny grow up more than anything.”

“Yeah. She would’ve been proud of you, Laura.”

“I hope so—I’d like to think so, anyway.”

“She would.”

“I still miss her. I’d give anything if she could be here now, if you could know her.”

“I’ll get to know her through those journals.”

“You really want to read them?”

“Very much. I don’t know too many remarkable people—most of them just think they are.”

“Well, you are.”

“No. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I spent years learning to do something I came to hate, so it was pretty much a waste of my time and Thad Bingham’s money. When I showed up at your tent over by Kearny, I was going to San Francisco to kill Ross—maybe Lydia, too—then. I was planning to take Josh up to Canada and hide out someplace the law wouldn’t find me. I didn’t even know what I was going to do after that.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know what I’ll do to Ross when I see him. A lot depends on what he’s done with Josh.”

“But you’re not going to kill him.”

“No, but I may horsewhip him within an inch of his life. Since I’ve got a wife and family to look after, I’m not going to do anything that’ll get me hanged.”

“It still hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly.

“I haven’t thought about it in a while, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Not even about Lydia?”

“Just as Josh’s mother. She’s not part of me like you are, and she never was. If I’d had the time to get to know her, I’d have spared myself a lot of grief. She wasn’t anything like I thought she was, and she obviously thought I was somebody else. I don’t even know why she wanted to marry me—maybe because we both had black hair and she thought we’d look like a matched pair.”

“You’re a handsome man, Spencer Hardin.”

“I don’t know. I just know if she hadn’t left me, living with her would’ve been hell for both of us. I had all those dreams about coming home to her loving arms, and that’s all they were—dreams, delusions. Separation made it easier to pretend we had something—I could look at the picture of her and Josh, and it would take my mind off the hell I was in then without having to give much thought about what she was really like.”

“You’re still bitter, Spence.”

“No, the bitter part’s over—life’s downright sweet now. I’ve got you and Jessie to love, and the only thing that’s missing is Josh.”

“We’re going to find him. He’s been in my prayers every night, and I know we’re going to find him.”

“If he’s not dead. If he and Ross both came down with cholera, there wouldn’t have been anyone to put up markers for them. A year later, anybody coming through would never find the graves, even if they’d been buried. Hell,
for all I know, the wolves could’ve eaten the bodies, and left nothing but a few bones.”

Laying aside the journal, she turned to him. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that—it’s faith that carries a person through, not pessimism. You’ve got to believe, or you can’t make it happen.”

“I’m in this wagon, Laurie. If I didn’t think there was a chance, I’d be going east not west. Unless we have a child, he’s the last of my blood, and that means everything to a man. He may be the only one to carry on my name. As much as I love Jessie, she can’t do that for me—she’ll have her husband’s name, not mine. And until then, she’ll grow up a Taylor, not a Hardin.”

“I don’t guess she has to,” Laura murmured.

“It wouldn’t be right to take that away from Jesse. He wanted that baby,”

“Like every other man, he wanted a
son,
Spence. When we lost the other baby, it was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wanted that boy so bad.”

“He nearly lost you, Laura.”

“That made him mad—it was his son he wept over.”

“It’s the name I’d feel bad about—it’s all he had to leave her. I’ll have the joy of raising her, of watching her grow up. I’ll be the one some totally unworthy boy asks for her hand in marriage. I’ll be the one not wanting to give her away to him. Jesse won’t be here to see it, but I will. Besides, her middle name’s Spencer, so she’ll know I wanted her to have it. I just don’t want to take Jesse from her.”

“I have to believe he knows we’re in good hands,” she said softly. “I have to believe he’d be pleased.”

“You don’t think about him much, do you?”

“I do when I look at her—she’ll hold her head in just such a way sometimes that I can see him in her. And there’s an emptiness, a sadness that doesn’t completely go away. But it’s tempered with happiness, because I’ve got you. We’ve got something that he and I never had—we talk, we share, we show our love to each other. Maybe he wanted to, but he couldn’t do those things. I know he loved me, and I know I loved him, but in a lot of ways, the depth just wasn’t there. He made up his mind about things, and that’s the way they were. He never asked, he just told me what I wanted, Spence. I had to follow him to Nebraska because he wanted to go.”

“You’re following me to California.”

“Maybe that’s the difference—I don’t want to be without you. I got used to being without Jesse.”

The late afternoon sun haloed her brown hair with gold and lit those light brown eyes, filling him with pride, not only in her beauty, but her artlessness. Everything about her was the genuine article.

“You’re always honest, aren’t you?” he said softly.

She cocked her head at that, and the corners of her mouth lifted into a elfin smile. “Well, not quite always,” she murmured. “I told you to go when I didn’t want you to leave. When I told you to pack your clothes and take them with you on the rep track, I had to figure out some way to make you come back.”

“Oh?” ‘

“The morning you left, I told you I couldn’t get all your clothes ready, that you’d need to stop back by for them, but since I’d already ironed the shirts, I had to stick them in the washtub so they wouldn’t be done. I wasn’t going to chance never seeing you again.”

“But you weren’t going to let me live there. You’d already told me I’d have to find another place to
stay.”

“That part of it wasn’t a lie. I just wanted you to have to come by for a visit. I thought maybe if you’d had time to clear your head some, you might rethink your proposal.”

“As I recall it, it was you who turned me down,” he reminded her.

“Well, there wasn’t any enthusiasm in it. You thought you were obliged to marry me, but you didn’t want to do it. If I didn’t mean anything to you, that proposal wasn’t worth anything to me either. I may be practical, but I’ve got my pride, Spence.”

“I know. I must’ve heard the charity speech a dozen times.”

“Some people take a while to learn.” Changing the subject abruptly, she noted, “We ought to be stopping before long, so I’ve got to figure out what I can fix that will have enough leftovers to feed Abby and her family.”

“Food for six people isn’t leftovers, Laurie. It’s the whole meal.”

“I know, but she’s got her pride, too. If she thought I’d made something up just for them, she wouldn’t want to take it, and those boys of hers are beginning to look kind of scrawny. Here she’s got a baby teething, another one on the way, and four more under the age of six. If I ever cross Matt Daniels’s path again, I’ll horsewhip him. Spence, that’s a baby a year!”

“So much for your mother’s theory about nursing.”

Ignoring that, she went on. “And day before yesterday, Jimmy tore a hole in his leg when he fell out of the wagon. He caught it on an old nail sticking out the side.”

“Which one’s Jimmy?”

“He’s four. I think you ought to take a look at it, Spence. She says it’s beginning to fester.” As he took on a pained expression, she shook her head. “I’m not asking you to practice medicine—I’m asking you to look. Maybe you can tell her what to do for it.”

“That
is
practicing medicine.”

“You’re a surgeon. I’m not asking you to cut it off. Besides, I told her you’d give her some advice when they
come
to supper.”

He suppressed a groan. “I don’t mind feeding them, Laurie, but I’d rather not eat with six little heathens. I’m tired, and they’ll be crawling over everything,”

“It’d be better if they weren’t all boys,” she conceded. “But there’s only five—it’ll be a couple of months before there’s six.”

“They’re like a litter of mongrel puppies, fighting and yipping all the time.”

“You don’t even know them. All you see is them running around when we make camp.”

“Everywhere. If they were mine, I’d tie ‘em down.”

“There’s no room in that supply wagon. How does ham and greens with bread and jam sound?”

“Meager for nine people.”

“Nine?”

“I can eat at least enough for two.”

“Well, there’s enough ham for that,” she said. “I’ll have to boil it before I fry it to get some of the salt out, and that’ll make it swell up some. You don’t mind, do you, Spence?”

“I guess not. I just hope they don’t get Jessie tuned up for the night.”

“They’re more apt to tucker her out. After I feed her, she’ll probably sleep like the dead until morning. And as cozy as it is back there, that’s not exactly a bad thing, is it?” A slow, seductive smile curved her mouth as she added huskily, “I’ll make the inconvenience of company up to you later.”

“You’re shameless—you know that, don’t you?”

“But you love me.”

“Very much. Heart, body, and soul.”

“She’s definitely going to sleep tonight,” Laurie said. “Even if I have to wool her around a little myself.”

As Spence washed up after tending to the mules for the night, he heard the shrieks and laughter that told him the Daniels’ brood had found his wagon, and he wondered why the woman couldn’t make them behave. Every night, two of them ran wild in camp while their mother hid out in a supply wagon with no thought to anybody else, and the collective sympathy was shrinking daily.

“Spence, you haven’t actually met Abby, have you?” Laura said as he came around the side of the Conestoga. “Mrs. Daniels, this is my husband, Spencer Hardin.”

“Right pleased,” the woman murmured.

He was stunned. While he’d seen her around, he hadn’t paid much attention, but she looked worse up close. The only real curve in her body was her big belly. Everything else just hung from her bony frame. And the thin, stringy hair didn’t help the overall gauntness at all. Her nose had obviously been broken more than once, and when she smiled, two front teeth were missing. She walked slowly, obviously with pain. She was a young woman made old by poverty, too many children, and a brutal, loutish husband.

“Mrs. Daniels,”

“She didn’t bring Jimmy, Spence.”

“He wasn’t feelin’ up to it, bless his soul—said he wasn’t hungry,” the woman explained apologetically.

“Maybe you ought to go take a look,” Laura told Spence.

“Oh, no—he’ll be all right. He ain’t felt really good since his pa left. Maybe he’s missin’ him—I don’t know. But you know how kids is, always under the weather with something.”

“Laura says he hurt his leg,”

“He did. Fell out o’ the wagon day before yesterday mornin’. Got hisself cut up on a nail stickin’ out,”

“What did you treat it with? Turpentine?”

“Didn’t have nuthin’—we just tied it up t’ stop the bleedin’, that’s all. It ain’t the first time he’s hurt hisself, and it ain’t going t’ be the last. You get boys, you expect ‘em to get all scarred up, you know. If it ain’t him, it’s one of the others—always something.”

“But you washed it?” Laura asked quickly.

“I was goin’ to, but I wanted to keep the blood from gettin’ over ever’thing in the wagon, since most of it ain’t mine, so I just covered the hole. Washed it this mornin’, though, in the river, and it was festerin’ some, so I put a piece of pork over it. That’ll draw it out, you know.”

“My husband’s a doctor, Abby.”

“That so? Then I reckon he knows that’s about all t’ do for something like that.”

“Spence—”

The warning tone of his wife’s voice kept him from saying what he really thought. “It depends on how deep the wound is,” he explained diplomatically. “If he starts running a fever, or if the area feels hot and has red streaks, it could be serious. If it’s swollen or discolored, I’d be worried, too. There are several things that can happen to a puncture wound—tetanus, blood poisoning, gangrene, cholera, to name a few—and they’re all serious. You can wash with river water if you boil it, but otherwise with the dirt and animal dung in it, you’ll run the risk of introducing infectious material into the body.”

“He ain’t drinkin’ it,” Abigail Daniels hastened to assure him. “We just been washin’ with it.”

“Spence will look at Jimmy’s leg,” Laura volunteered.

“Ain’t no need—it’s just a hole. And I ain’t got no money for a doctor, anyways.”

“There’s no charge, Mrs. Daniels,” Spence found himself telling her. “When you go back after supper, I’ll send you some medicine to put on the wound, but it’s a little late now—there’s already been close to sixty hours for anything to incubate.”

“It ain’t got that—it’s just a little pussy, that’s all.”

“Anyway, I want you to wash the area thoroughly with boiled water as hot as he can stand it, then put two teaspoons of salt into a cup of hot water and make a compress with it. Keep it hot, and keep it on the wound at least half an hour, and it’ll help draw the pus out better than pork. And burn that piece of meat before you throw it out, or somebody’s dog’s apt to get sick from eating it.”

“That hole’s just got to bust open, then it’ll heal,” the woman insisted.

“Not if a deep infection is present. When you get back, I want you to light a lantern and hold it close enough to get a good look at the wound. If any of those conditions I mentioned—in dry gangrene, the area will be dark and without feeling, and the skin above it will be red; in the wet form, it will look the same, but there will be blisters on it, and it’ll stink to high heaven; in blood poisoning, there’ll be red streaks down the limb, and it will feel hot.”