Pathways (9780307822208) (17 page)

“His leg? Why do you think it’s broken?” She directed her question to the crew boss, still a little ashen and wide-eyed over her quick movement. “George!” Bryn shouted.

“Uh, he couldn’t put weight on it. Said it hurt like all get-out.”

They were probably right in their assessment, but without an x-ray, a broken tibia was tough to tell. She rummaged for her other splint and wrapped his leg too. The man moaned. She drew up a hundred milligrams of Demerol and gave the man a shot in the rear to ease his agony.

Turning to her last patient, she said, “Looks like your eye’s in a bad way.” The man remained silent while Bryn fashioned a disk out
of a plastic foam cup and taped it over his seeping eye. She was in no position to extract anything inside and then close the wound in the middle of the Lone Gulch mining camp. It was better to send him to the hospital. As she wrapped gauze around his head, she gently probed his zygomatic arch. He winced, even with the Demerol in his system.

“That bone could be broken. Tell the doc when you get there. They’ll x-ray it. You’ll be fine.”

“Am I gonna be blind in that eye forever?” he finally said.

“I hope not. They do amazing things these days. We’ll say a prayer for you. For all of you.” She rubbed his arm in encouragement, and then they moved the patients out to the plane.

They were at the Cessna before Bryn realized there would be no room for her to go, not if Leon wanted to get off that slender band of water. He had already taken the two backseats all the way out of the fuselage to make room for the other two on stretchers and to reduce his total cargo weight.

“Guess I’ll have to come back for ya, Doc,” Leon said, helping the man with the wounded eye in first, to sit beside him up front, in the cockpit. “Won’t scare him so much since he can’t see that approaching bank,” he whispered to Bryn.

She half laughed and shook her head, turning to get out of the way as the men brought the other victims aboard. Leon led her off to a small stand of spruce and pushed a gun of cold metal into her hands. “It’s loaded. You know how to use it?”

In shock, Bryn turned over the Colt and studied it. Her dad had taught her to use firearms as a girl, hoping she might one day be a hunter as he was. “Yeah. I can use it.” She supposed it might come in handy here, in a mining camp.

“Good,” was all Leon said, returning to the plane. Bryn tucked the gun into her waistband, underneath the back hem of her coat.

If Leon could just manage to get off safely and over the mountains to Willow in time, they all might make it. Again Bryn cast her eyes to the gray sky.

“Hey, at least you packed,” Leon said, eyes twinkling as he dumped at her feet the bag she had intended for Summit. “I’ll be back when I get these guys situated and the weather clears.”

Bryn licked her lips again, staring at the grizzled old pilot, suddenly fully aware that she was in a mining camp full of perhaps twenty female-starved men, miles from civilization.

“You’ll be all right, Doc. Have you got any money to gamble with?”

Bryn thought about it, remembered the twenty she always carried in her shoe. “Twenty bucks.”

“That’ll get you into the game!” a miner yelled behind her as Leon shut the fuselage door and grinned even more widely. Leon gave her the thumbs-up sign and tentatively made his way over the injured to sit beside his one-eyed copilot. In minutes he was revving up the engine for a short-field takeoff and then was rushing the far bank like a high-school hockey player dead-set on getting the puck. He cleared the trees by a matter of eighteen inches, and a miner at her side let out a long, low whistle. “Don’t make flyboys like that anymore.”

“Come on, Doc,” George said, coming to her side. “We’re a hospitable lot when we put a mind to it. Come in and we’ll have ourselves some supper and then a game of cards. You play poker?”

“You
left
her there?”

“Doc’s own mind to do it too. She could plainly see that she couldn’t come. You know that bog. Can barely get two people in and out, let alone five,” Leon defended. “She’s a grown woman. Can take care of herself. Besides, I left her my .357 in case she comes up to any trouble.”

“You gave her your gun,” he said flatly.

“Told me she knows how to use it.” Admiration shone in the older man’s silver-blue eyes.

Eli sat back, thinking that one over. Bryn Bailey with a gun. Since when? Maybe the streets of Boston had proven harder or scarier than she had anticipated. Maybe she’d had a brush with a mugger or … “I can’t believe you left her there,” Eli said again, as angry at this feeling of insecurity and helplessness as he was at Leon. He knew he would’ve done the same thing, had the situation been reversed.

“Now look, Eli, I—”

“Who’s the mine boss out there now?”

“Fella named George Schwender.”

Eli stalked over to the radio. “Think I’ll call up there now, ask to talk to her.”

Leon went to the window. “There’s no gettin’ her out. Not till this storm blows over. She’s fine, Eli. George’ll look after her.” He paused. “You worried ’cause she’s a woman or ’cause she’s Bryn Bailey?”

Eli ignored him and bent to turn the dials on the radio when footsteps on the front porch caught his attention. It was Sara, with a jar full of wildflowers and a bright smile on her face. “Thought you could use a little color on what promises to be a gray—” She sobered
at Eli’s look. “Eli, what’s wrong?” she asked, abruptly setting the bouquet down and coming to him.

“Well, Leon just …” Eli stared at her for a long moment, then at the mike in his hand, then back to her. Quietly he set it down. “Nothing’s wrong. Storm’s blowing in. Want to go grab some dinner before it lets loose?”

“Sounds good,” Sara said, her tentative smile returning. She looped an arm around Eli’s waist, and he slipped his around her shoulders. Together they went to his desk where he grabbed his keys and cell phone.

Before exiting, Eli turned and looked at Leon with what he hoped was a meaningful glance. “Leon, check on that client for me, will ya? Just to make sure, I have this with me,” he added, holding up his cell phone. “In case there’s anything to report.”

“Won’t be nothin’ to report, boss,” Leon returned, “until that storm passes by and we can see for ourselves.”

“Check on it anyway,” Eli said, then turned away, knowing he had revealed how hung up he still was on Bryn. And the knowledge that he was being somehow unfaithful to Sara burned deep inside him.

The miners proved to be harmless, as appealing and problematic as a den of wolf puppies. They obviously longed for a feminine gesture, a word spoken in a soft voice, a flip of her long hair—lapping it up like milk. And after several shots of Jack Daniel’s, the men were laughing and having a great time, their bellies full of caribou and whiskey, a fire burning brightly in the wood stove, and twenty
almost-clean bodies shoved into the mess hall for a game of cards.

They had been careful to teach her the intricacies of poker—five-card stud, high-low Jacks, lowball, and other versions of the game. And then they proceeded to lose all their money to her, a fact that alternately aggravated and delighted them all. Bryn tried to ignore the choking cigarette smoke that filled the room and tried not to wrinkle her nose in distaste at the foul language tossed about. This, after all, was where Jesus would be if he were walking on earth today. Among his people who were desperate for the Word, a knowledge of their Creator, and their place in his world.

She sighed after raking in the last round, her wager unsurpassed by any around the table, and her pitiful hand—a pair of sevens—unchecked. “It’s late, boys,” she called, like a jovial bartender to brothers and dear friends. “I’ve taken your money and your gold nuggets. I think I had better call it a night. Are there any free bunks?”

“C’mon, Doc!” cried one across the table from her. “You can’t quit now. Double or nothing. Give us a chance to win it back.”

“That or go to strip poker,” another said, leering at Bryn.

“That I will not do,” she said, trying to keep her tone light. She stretched, as much to feel for the Colt in her waistband as to relieve tension, and mulled over their call for another hand. “Here’s my bet,” she said. “I’m wagering all this cash, other than my twenty that will go back to my shoe”—several men chuckled at that—“and these gold nuggets, that will go to Housecalls as a donation from a grateful group of miners for saving their comrades in arms. That leaves, let’s see, six, seven hundred dollars that you can win back.”

She studied the remaining men around the table, bent to unzip her bag, and pulled out her Bible, purchased the fall she left Alaska last. “If one of you wins, you take the money and run. If I win,” she
said, staring around the loop again, “you each read the book of Romans from beginning to end.”

“Hey, now, you a doc or a preacher?” one complained at the end of the table. He had the rounded features of an Eskimo, like several others in the crowd.

“A doc,” she said with her most winning smile. “A doc on a mission.”

The table erupted in laughter. “The way I figure it,” said a slim man of perhaps forty years across from her, “it’s a pretty safe bet. Any one of us wins, we get all our cash back. The nuggets we can donate,” he enunciated slowly, lowering his gaze to make sure she knew she was forcing that decision. “Chances are six-to-one that we won’t even have to read that book of Romans.”

“So you would think,” Bryn said with another teasing smile. She reached for the deck and shuffled quickly. “But you’re about to see, boys,” she said cockily, “that the Lord’s on my side, and he’s not very fond of drinking too much or losing your hard-won money in a hand of poker.”

“Most effective missionary I’ve encountered,” said another. “What happens to the cash if you win?”

“Yeah. Didn’t tell us what would happen to the cash,” said the leering man down the way.

“I’ll give your share back to each of you. Just as soon as you can answer three key questions from the book of Romans.” She picked up her cards and fanned them out, delighted with the royalty in her hand and the King of kings who could make such things happen. Who would have thought? Who would have ever guessed that Bryn Bailey would be witnessing to a house full of miners in the middle of nowhere by playing a night’s worth of poker?

“Okay, out with it,” Sara said, reaching across the table to take Eli’s hand. Rain pounded on the roof of Alice’s restaurant and bar, where they had dined on fresh salmon. “You’re scaring me, Eli.”

“Scaring you?” Eli asked, puzzlement knitting his brow.

“It’s not like you, not talking, not telling me about your day.”

Eli took a sip of water, spent undue time staring at the rivulets of sweat running down the glass’s beaded sides. His grandmother had had a beaded lampshade like this glass once. How old were these glasses anyway?

“Eli.”

He forced his attention back to Sara, his mind not on the blonde across from him but on a beautiful brunette stuck in a mining camp, armed or not …

“
Eli …
”

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head as if water had dripped on him. A chill ran down his neck.