by Moonwitch
"But why Kit Lobrutto?" she asked, genuinely curious. The man was not someone she would have chosen herself for a task like this.
"He volunteered. "
Her eyes widened. "He . . . what? You mean .
Alex nodded and grinned. "That's right, Mother. We put it to all of them-well, most of them, anyway-and Bob and Kit were the first ones to say yes. Tonight, though, I think they're going to regret it for the first time. Neither one of them is much for waiting around in the snow. "
There was nothing more she could think of to say. She could only feign her annoyance for just a few moments more before her lips cracked into a broad loving smile, just as Fae marched through with a dinner tray in her hands. The next two hours, then, were spent at the table, fielding questions about Alex's plan, trying to keep Bess from reading aloud what she thought was a fascinating story by a San Francisco man named Bierce that she insisted wasn't really bloody at all, and-behind the brittle laughter and the too-bright smiles--trying not to listen to the wind outside or the pellets of snow that found their way under the porch roof to shatter against the front panes.
They could have been the only people left in the world, Amanda thought when she had pushed away from the table and rose to return to the hearth. No one else left save the people under this roof, safe, intact, and with nothing to look forward to but the uncertain future.
She was about to turn back to say something of the kind to Hope, then, when the front door suddenly slammed open. And before she could think about what she was doing, she accepted into her arms the unconscious form of a snow-covered Doug Mitchell.
THIRTY-ONE
The confusion that exploded in the room was compounded by the screaming that came from Hope, who thought, as did Alex, that Amanda had been attacked. The wind, too, soared into the house and brought with it waves of fresh snow and whiplashes of cold. Amanda was stunned. She sat on the floor oblivious to everything except the man she held to her breast, rocking slowly back and forth while the others raced to shut the door and bring wet towels in case there were wounds.
Doug, she thought-and could think no further.
Finally Alex carried the unconscious man to the sofa where his boots and coat were stripped from him, his shirt opened to the waist, his buckle loosened. As far as anyone could tell, there were no injuries, only an obvious case of prolonged exposure. When Abe ran in from the kitchen, he was ordered outside to see if there was a horse, and Fae was dispatched to fetch as much hot water as she could carry.
Amanda knelt on the floor beside Doug's head and stroked his wet, matted hair, crooning deep in her throat. And when she could no longer stand Bess hovering by her shoulder and weeping, she sent the girl to her room in a voice that momentarily stopped everyone in his tracks.
Within minutes, then, Doug's hands and feet were wrapped in warm towels, and a blanket was thrown over him when Alex decided to strip him to the bone. And once that was done, there was little more they could do but wait, every few moments bringing a glass of brandy to the pale lips and forcing a few drops at a time down his throat.
"Maitland, " Alex muttered as he stood anxiously by the mantel, and no one argued with him.
Amanda, meanwhile, was trying to stop the storm that raged through her mind, contradicting everything she had come to believe. He was alive-barely, but alive. He was here, now, in her arms and breathing-barely. And his flesh was so cold she could scarcely bring herself to touch it, could not keep her hands away because the idea that it was a dream had to be banished.
Thirty minutes passed, then an hour.
Finally, with a low and echoing groan, he choked on an overlarge dose of liquor and tried to sit up.
He lay propped in a comer of the sofa, his arm draped around Amanda's shoulders, his free hand holding a tall glass of amber whiskey from which he sipped frequently. Every few seconds a violent shudder racked his lean frame, but he would not succumb. He would grit his teeth and wait for it to pass, swallowing heavily and grinning weakly to prove, vainly, that he was perfectly all right.
He shook his head slowly, his gaze drifting over everyone in the room. "I don't believe it, " he said in complete wonderment. "I don't believe it. "
No one questioned him. Amanda had stifled the interrogation before it began, despite the fact that she wanted to know more than anyone what had happened, and why.
Fae brought him a steaming bowl of broth and stood with arms folded until he ate half.
Abe returned to say there was no horse outside and no tracks that he could find to indicate pursuit, or company.
"I don't believe it," Doug said again, and before anyone realized it, he had closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
"My room," Amanda ordered.
Bert lifted him as though he were a child and carried him without speaking down the long hall, eased him onto the bed, and covered him with the quilt. Then he stoked the fire and, with a broad smile to Amanda, left and closed the door behind him.
"You're dead," Amanda whispered as she pulled up a chair and sat as close to him as she could get. Her hand combed through his hair, gently found its way down his cheek to his jaw. "You're supposed to be dead." The eyelids flickered, and she snatched her hand away, waited, then returned to caressing him again.
She did not know when she had begun to weep, thought it might have been the moment she recognized his snow-encrusted face as it fell into her lap. But it did not matter. For the first time in years the weeping felt right, felt good, bringing her to a sense of completion that she had thought she would never be able to achieve again.
She did not think of Maitland; as soon as the name had been spoken by her son, she had dismissed it. It made no difference now. If Maitland had anything to do with this-and there was no doubt in her mind that there was some connection-he would have to wait until she was sure Doug would recover. As it was, his forehead was dripping with perspiration and the shuddering continued. He coughed, and she could hear the sick sound of moisture in his lungs; he moaned, and she peeled back the quilt, seeing dark welts and yellow-black bruises pocked across his chest.
He sighed, and his sleep grew deeper.
He woke once, shortly after midnight, and Amanda quickly pinned his arms to his side while he struggled with whatever demons possessed him, struggled and subsided and soon slept again.
At dawn she could stand it no longer. She stumbled out of the room and fell into bed beside Bess. Her daughter rolled over, murmuring in her sleep, but Amanda could not hear her.
The sky was still blood-red, and the eagle and the cougar still battled over the valley, but this time Simon Maitland was little more than an animated skeleton; and when, at last in a long, slow turn, he tipped his hat, she picked up a boulder and she threw it at him .
Bess woke her just before noon, scurried after her as she leaped to her feet and raced into her bedroom. Doug was still asleep. Grace had taken the chair and was bathing his face with a cool wet cloth. She shrugged when Amanda looked at her, picked up a towel, and dried his face gently.
The wind and the snow died simultaneously in the middle of the afternoon. Amanda, wrapped in a thick woolen coat, stood with Bess on the front porch and stared at the unbroken expanse of burning white that stretched before them. The trees seemed darker now, and the needles a deeper green. The sun had found a gap in the clouds and was pale, its light seeking out and finding diamonds hanging from the eaves.
It was absolutely quiet.
"Will he be all right?" Bess asked, one arm snug around her mother's waist.
"I think so, dear, " she said, feeling her fingers cross in her pocket. "I think so. There was no frostbite that we could find. And he wasn't . . . hurt badly. "
"It looks like he fell from someplace. "
" I know."
"I thought he was dead."
Amanda looked down at her, shocked to realize it was like looking in a mirror, seeing herself as she had been on those short winter days skating across the Hudson. The only difference was
the braids that she wore, braids that dangled down her back almost below her waist. That, and her eyes; they were not green.
"You'd best get inside, girl. Fae will want to look at your lessons. "
"Mother!" She stamped one foot in agitated disappointment.
Amanda couldn't help but smile. "This is not a holiday, Elizabeth. I'll let you know when Mr. Mitchell is better. "
"Sure," the girl said, heading for the door. "By that time all the fun will be over."
There was no use reprimanding her, and Amanda only sighed and turned her attention back to the snow. An edge to the air told her the storm was not done, that it was only regrouping on the other side of the mountains and would be back, probably after nightfall. She thought about getting some of the men to go to work with the shovels and changed her mind. By the time they had even begun to make a dent, the snow would be flying again and all their work would be for nothing. Tomorrow would be soon enough.
And when tomorrow dawned ahead of a sea-blue sky, Bob Booth and a dozen others were grumbling their way down the drive toward the road, snow billowing over their shoulders while a table on the porch waited for them with hot coffee laced with rum. Amanda watched them for nearly an hour, sighed, and turned back to the house. It was, despite the working, far more quiet than she would have liked it. The wind had come up just at twilight the day before, but she had been wrong about the snow. Nothing blew but the drifts on the roof and those precarious clumps that clung to pine boughs. Deer tracks marred the glass-smooth surface, and Bess had cajoled Alex into taking her for a walk.
She supposed, then, she should look in on Douglas. Not that it seemed to make any difference in his condition. In fact, it served only to keep brakes on the time, and it wasn't long before she considered going for a walk herself. Glancing at the house, then, she started to make her way around the side toward the back when the door opened and Fae poked out her head.
"Missus!"
She needed nothing more.
"I heard everything Tom was telling me," Doug said as he wolfed down a muffin and grabbed for the pot of coffee. Amanda sat beside him, Harley had come over to stand at the foot of the bed, and Olivia, after listening to the first part of his story, wrapped her shawl tightly around her chest and left for the kitchen with a visible, frightened shudder.
"I mean, I knew about changing courts and judges and all that, but I still couldn't help thinking something was going to go wrong. Then Eagleton came in for me, and I knew it. Don't ask me how, but I knew something was wrong. So I waited. He sat me on the train, those damned cuffs on, and I waited. He wasn't having the best time of his life, I could tell that. He was furious about something, but whenever I tried to talk to him, he told me to shut up or he'd scalp me for sure. " He grinned around a bite of fresh beef. "Boy, did he ever have the wrong man to say that to."
An hour outside of Cheyenne, they had to change trains. Eagleton turned him over to the marshall's office there and stood on the platform until the train pulled away. Doug had watched him until the station had dropped out of sight and tried to engage his guard in conversation. This time this man was more than willing, and it was not very long before Doug's suspicions had proved out unquestionably. The overweight and tobacco-chewing man on his right was no more a lawman than Nate Kurtz was a saint. And he realized that it did not matter how bad it may look-he had to get away. Eagleton had set him up to be killed, and the only way he was going to be able to prove his innocence was to escape.
Luckily for him, the fat man was too busy ogling the women in the car to pay him much attention. It took Doug almost the entire ride to Cheyenne, but he was able to ease his hand over to the false deputy's belt and then ease it back with the keys in his fingers. Again a stroke of luck in the shape of a redhead bound for the East fell in his lap. She, too, liked to talk, and since there did not seem to be any unattached men on the train this trip, she kept the fat man's attention long enough for Doug to unlock the cuffs that bound his right wrist with the fat man's left. The jouncing of the train over the rails aided him, enabling him to fall frequently against the man's side with a ready excuse.
Then he worked a stiff piece of horsehair out of the seat by his leg.
He waited until the train had reached a downward sloping curve just five miles outside the city and jabbed the horsehair into the man's side. He yelled and scrambled to his feet. And Doug shoved the fat man to the aisle, at the same time slipping his revolver out of his holster. He wasted no time in orders or threats. He dashed for the end of the car, flung open the door, and leaped into the gully that bordered the tracks. He rolled to the bottom without incident, and started running.
North, and east. Right, he thought, where a posse wouldn't think of searching for him.
"Before I knew it," he said, the tray gone and the pillows made more comfortable behind his back, "I was in the Black Hills. Couple of days, maybe m??re, I don't know. It's been a long time since I lived off the land, and I was hungry as hell and so thirsty I would have drunk . . . well, I was damned thirsty. I tried traveling only at night, and I managed it for a while until it got damned cold. I was thinking about circling around and coming back here, but then my luck ran out. Some riders caught my trail and they chased me into the hills. I found a cave and hid out while they were beating the bushes, but when I tried to get away that night, I fell.
"Damnedest thing you ever saw, Amanda. Big brave Indian stepped right off the edge of a cliff. "
He laughed at himself, though there was the pain of a dark memory still in his eyes. Then he took her hand and squeezed it tightly.
"I woke up I don't know when, found myself in this shack. An old man and two old women were with me. Sioux, he was. The rest of his people had left him there to die because he'd been sick, only he fooled them and got better. Got to liking the place and stayed on. His medicine wasn't all that powerful, and by the time my legs healed-they were both broken, and my shoulder and head burned something fierce-by the time I could stand up without falling on my face, winter had come in.
"Now, the old man he didn't have any horses, and I wasn't about to leave him without trying to pay him back. So I stayed and did some hunting for him, some skinning, and whenever somebody rode by, he hid me under the floorboards. I tell you, Amanda, I nearly went crazy out there, but there was no way I could cross those damned mountains on foot, no way at all. And all I kept thinking about was you and Eagleton and . . . well, that and the stories the old man told about the old days, when there were no whites and the buffalo were so thick they spread from one horizon to the other, kept me going.
"Come spring, I left him and started west.
"I didn't know how far north I'd gotten myself, though, until I started running into batches of army patrols. For a while I thought they were hunting me, and I kept low. Then I found out I was way the hell up in Montana near that place where Custer got his, and I figured no one would be looking for me there. So I found this fort and I walked right in. I thought I could either steal a horse or get a job and buy one eventually.
"Trouble was," he said with a wry grin, "all Indians look alike to the pony soldiers. They thought I'd jumped the reservation."
"Damn," said Harley. "I'll be damned. "
" I almost was, old friend," h e said. "The stockades they have in those places would hold a hundred mad bulls, believe me. But pretty soon, I think it was about a month or so, they got tired of feeding me. Same time, the other reds in the stockade kept telling them I wasn't a Sioux or an Arapaho and they wanted me the hell out so I wouldn't witch them.
"There was this Captain Whitelaw there, and he finally decided I was telling the truth. 'Son,' he tells me, 'you're too educated to be one of these scum, and I'm truly sorry this wasn't brought to my attention before. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?' So I told him I really could use a decent horse and something decent to eat.
"Bang, " he said, snapping his fingers. "Just like that . "
"Amazing, " Amanda said, knowing she h
adn't stopped grinning since he began, and not caring at all for the sly looks Harley kept giving her.
"Not really," Doug said. "I also kept making noises about lawyers and promotions. He got the picture soon enough. "
"But I don't understand," Harley interrupted. "If you got yourself a horse and all, what took you so long to get back here?"
"I'm a wanted man, Harley, or have you forgotten already? I just couldn't ride into town bold as brass and smile at everyone like nothing had happened. Besides, I had those damned mountains to cross, and that wasn't the easiest thing in the world. There was still snow on the peaks, runoffs made every creek look like a river, and I was going fairly blind most of the way."
He stopped, and took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment.
"Do you want to sleep?" Amanda asked him softly.