by Linda Hilton
*
“Ja, he iss a very good horse,” the gnarled Swede agreed with Thaddeus Burton when the big man had paid the bill and taken possession of his strawberry roan again. “I had one man offer me three hundred dollars for him, and almost I took it, but Dr. Morgan he tell me to keep horse for you.”
Burton patted the animal’s shoulder affectionately.
“Berry ‘n’ me’s been through a lot, ain’t we, old boy. Looks like you took good care of him for me, too. I figger that’s worth at least fifty bucks to me.”
Gus’s old eyes brightened and his well-wrinkled face split with a wide, toothless grin.
“Ja, I figger so, too!” he laughed.
“Now, I’d be happy to take him off your hands right now, but I heard from the boy down at the depot that the Doc’s in some kind o’ trouble. You got any idea what’s going’ on? I can’t b’lieve Doc Morgan’d do anything to anybody.”
Gus rubbed his chin.
“No, it don’t seem right. He iss a good man, yust like your horse.”
“Then what’re they sayin’ he done?”
“That fella who works at the telegraph, you know, with the daughter that’s the doctor’s nurse? Well, that fella, he says the doctor raped the daughter.”
“Miss Julie? No, you gotta be kiddin’ me. He wouldn’t do nothin’ like that, not to her.”
He paused a moment, letting the severity of the situation sink in, for Gus quite plainly was not kidding.
“Okay, look. You keep Berry here for me for a while longer.” Burton slid a well cared for rifle from the scabbard on the saddle that hadn’t been cinched tightly yet. He took one look at the weapon and grinned again. “I see you took care of more’n just my horse.”
Gus shrugged. “No sense letting it get ruined.”
Burton laughed out loud and dug a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket. When he flipped it, Gus stretched out a leathery hand and caught the coin easily.
“Thanks,” Burton then said quietly. “I may just need this little popgun. Now, tell me where I kin find this kangaroo court.”
*
Julie’s lunch sat like a lump of misery in her stomach. She had eaten it mechanically because she was famished and because she could not bear the stares of her father and of Hans through the meal, but she felt no better for it. Katharine, she had noticed, seemed to feel the same way.
The only bright spot of the afternoon, if it could be called that, was that she no longer had Hans behind her. She had no idea where he was, and though that worried her, she knew he could not harm anyone in the courtroom. Lucas and Skip, the latter recovered completely from his horseshoe branding, kept a tight guard over all the firearms. Only Ted Phillips and the deputies themselves wore guns.
Morgan himself seemed little concerned. He held that same bundle of little pieces of paper as he walked slowly toward Wilhelm. Julie wasted no time wondering what might be written on those notes; she could only pray this whole drama played itself out quickly and that there were no encores.
“If I may,” Morgan began, addressing the entire court, not just Wilhelm, “I’d like to answer the question Judge Booth posed just before lunch. I think he’ll agree that this whole thing has come down to a matter of which witness is going to be believed. Truth, unfortunately, is not going to make much difference. Since both Mr. Hollstrom and I have said rather opposite things, one of us must, apparently, be lying. He, and his daughter before him, were sworn to tell the truth, but that doesn’t mean a tinker’s dam if you don’t believe them.”
He riffled the papers in his hand slowly and stared at them for a moment or two. The courtroom lapsed into anxious silence, disturbed only by the fluttering of fans and the rustle of drapes at the open windows where a slight breeze had finally come up.
“Mr. Hollstrom, you told the court this morning that you had made a deal with Hans Wallenmund regarding a financial settlement in exchange for your daughter marrying Hans. I’ve already told you that Mr. Wallenmund had nothing to offer you. Perhaps he misrepresented himself, perhaps he didn’t, but that is not an issue today. What is important, however, is your end of the bargain. You did say that you agreed to give him cash as a dowry for your daughter, correct?”
“I did. This is customary.”
Morgan expected an outburst to follow, but Hollstrom seemed confused, or afraid, and so the physician went on quickly, before his accuser had time to think.
“And just where did you plan to get the money, Mr. Hollstrom? It seems you don’t even have enough to pay the local merchants. Or did you plan to stall them until you could get enough money from your investment in Mr. Wallenmund’s farm?”
Wilhelm’s face turned an angry red, and the way he gripped the arms of the chair was enough to make Ted Phillips lower his hand a few inches toward the Colt revolver on his hip.
“I do not know what you are talking about,” Wilhelm said in a voice quaking with fury.
“I am talking about these,” Morgan answered, waving the fistful of papers. “When Simon McCrory mentioned to me that you had a sizeable account at his store, I wondered if you owed anyone else in Plato. I found out that you did.”
One by one he laid the slips on the table in front of the judge, who could see that each was written in a different hand and signed by the proprietors of nearly every retail business in Plato.
“To Ezra Farnum you owe eight dollars and forty cents. To Gus’s livery, five dollars even. To Taft’s Butcher Shop, six dollars twenty-five cents. To McCrory’s General Store, forty-two dollars and eighty-seven cents, and you haven’t even paid them for the dress material Julie bought and which she then repaid you for. In fact, Mr. Hollstrom, you never paid for the telegram to bring the judge here.”
Booth resorted to the gavel once more, but the crowd was more interested in hearing what else Morgan had to say, and what explanation Hollstrom would come up with. Silence returned almost instantly.
But Hollstrom said nothing.
“You’re a miser, aren’t you?” Morgan accused quietly. “You never part with a cent. You didn’t leave Minnesota because of your daughter’s reputation; you left because you owed everybody money. That’s why you embezzled from the bank in Rinton, Indiana.” It was a guess, a wild yet calculated guess, but when Wilhelm’s face went from red to purple and he made no reply, Morgan knew he had hit upon the truth. Even a denial at this point would be too incriminating.
“Thank you, Mr. Hollstrom, I have no other questions.”
“But you don’t understand!” Wilhelm wailed as Morgan turned his back to walk away. “I had no choice.”
“No choice?” Morgan echoed. He spun on the balls of his feet and glared once more at the man he hated so much he could almost wish to kill him. “You were ready to sell your daughter! You would have sent me to prison, or worse, just so she would marry the man who had promised you part of his fortune. Ha! Both of you trying to defraud the other. How appropriate, how just, except that she got caught in the middle.”
Every eye, every ear, was trained on Morgan. He had their complete attention. Realizing somehow that his acquittal was practically guaranteed, Julie let the tears that welled up in her eyes overflow.
Perhaps it was a trick of the light filtered through those tears that made her notice the shadow at the window. Or perhaps when she raised her hand to wipe them away she turned just enough and caught sight of the gun barrel resting on the windowsill. She never had enough time to wonder what brought that horrible image into her line of vision; she only had time to react.
She screamed and leaped from her chair, ignoring Katharine’s hand on her arm to restrain her. Julie could not even think of a coherent warning, knew only that she had to draw someone’s attention to the man at the window who leveled the barrel of his rifle on the sill.
“Julie, for God’s sake—” Morgan gasped, and if he said any more, it was lost in the explosion of the gun.
Other women screamed as a second shot, more distant, echoed through the room,
but Julie heard nothing at all. Deafened by her own cry, she now saw only one man, and the red that stained the front of his faded blue shirt.
Pandemonium reigned all around them. Ted Phillips shouted orders above the general hysteria.
“Nobody leaves this here courtroom!” the marshal bellowed, brandishing his revolver. Then, calling to his deputies, “Lucas, you see nobody gets out, hear? Skip, get out there and find out who the hell was in that alley. Where in tarnation is Clark?”
A ruddy-faced man in white shirt and grey trousers held up with plaid suspenders pushed his way to the front of the crowd.
“I’m here, Marshal. What can I do?”
“Go get a room ready for Del,” Phillips ordered the owner of the Olympia House. “And find some…some stuff to make bandages out of, I guess.”
He looked at Julie, who had helped Morgan, despite his protests, to the nearest chair, the one she herself had left.
“It’s only a flesh wound,” he was telling her.
She had already torn the sleeve off to reveal the single jagged wound from which bright blood gushed in a steady river down his arm. Remembering the night Thaddeus Burton had been brought to the surgery, she quickly wrapped the bloody cloth around Del’s arm just above the wound and tied it as tightly as she could. She had to keep him from bleeding to death first.
“The…the bullet didn’t come out,” she stammered, her teeth chattering even though sweat dripped down her forehead and into her eyes, to mix with the tears that wouldn’t stop. “I…I’ve got to…to get it out.”
Clark Garroway had run from the room and now returned with a chambermaid and an armload of hotel towels. The girl immediately dropped the towels and fled, her face pale, but Julie paid her no attention. She grabbed a towel and began to clean away as much of the blood as she could.
“When I saw you,” she whispered to Morgan, “all I saw was the blood on the front of your shirt. I thought you’d been shot in the chest and were dead.”
He lifted his good right arm and touched her cheek, wet with her tears.
“I almost thought so, too,” he managed to laugh, though the pain, dulled by the first shock, was becoming almost more than he could bear. “Pull that tourniquet tighter,” he ordered. “Let’s get this damn trial over with first, and then you can worry about digging the bullet out, all right?”
“You can’t be serious! Del, this isn’t a splinter in your thumb or an eyelash in your eye.”
“No, I know it isn’t. But it won’t take more than a few minutes to wind this up, and I’d just as soon finish what I’ve started.”
Grace Fulton shouldered her way through the crowd with a basin of water and set it on the chair beside Morgan.
“I figgered no one’d think to get any water,” the midwife said, “so I went to the kitchen.”
Julie nodded her thanks and dipped another towel in the water. Once again she tried to talk Morgan into letting her, with Grace Fulton’s assistance, take decent care of the injury, but he adamantly refused. Pushing both women aside, he got to his feet and started toward a white-faced Wilhelm Hollstrom, who hadn’t budged from the witness stand.
He could feel the warm blood seeping through the towel wrapped around the wound and knew that the blood loss was making him dizzy. He didn’t know how much longer he could stay on his feet with the pain washing over him like the Ohio River in spring flood, but he had to end this whole mess once and for all, bullet or no bullet.
“Dr. Morgan, let me explain,” Wilhelm begged, his face as pale as though he had been the one shot.
But before Morgan could begin the oration that he hoped would bring Wilhelm Hollstrom to his knees, an enormous voice interrupted from the rear of the courtroom.
“Hey, kin somebody help me? I got a guy here with a couple fingers shot off.”
Julie recognized Thaddeus Burton at once. And the man draped over his shoulder had to be Hans.
*
Judge Booth took advantage of what he knew was only a temporary calm to order the courtroom cleared. Almost as fast as people left the hotel, they gathered outside in little knots and the more curious scurried down the alley to peer in the windows until Garroway drew the curtains. When the onlookers protested, he closed the windows, too, to shut out their squawks.
In the gloomy ballroom, an eerie silence descended. Ted Phillips went to Burton’s aid and the two of them carried the unconscious Hans to the front of the room, where they laid him out on the floor. His nose as well as his hand was bloodied.
“Did I interrupt somethin’?” Burton asked softly, or as softly as he could.
“Yes, thank God,” Morgan laughed. “A murder, I think.”
“Well, I was comin’ to find out what this here trial was all about, and I seen him pointin’ that rifle in the window. I didn’t figger that was quite the thing to be doin’, so I hollered at him.”
“Please, Mr. Burton,” Julie interrupted. “Let Dr. Morgan finish his speech and you can give us your explanation later.”
She tossed another of the towels to Grace Fulton, who knelt beside Hans and lifted the mangled hand.
Morgan turned to the judge, but it was Ard Hammond who spoke first.
“I don’t think Del needs to say another word,” the mortician intoned. He turned to his fellow jurors and asked, “Any o’ you gentlemen have any objections to a verdict of not guilty?”
Eleven heads shook the unanimous answer.
“Then, Your Honor, we find the defendant innocent.”
There was no rejoicing. Morgan had already succumbed enough that he did not protest when Ard Hammond slipped a supporting arm around his waist. With Phillips’ help, the undertaker steered Morgan toward the table in front of the judge. Booth, seemingly unperturbed by this highly unorthodox turn of events, cleared his own papers out of the way. Clark Garroway brought two lamps and lit them to dispel the shadows.
“Wouldn’t it be better to take him to the surgery?” Julie asked of no one in particular.
Morgan answered her, “No, just send someone for my bag. I’m afraid I’ll pass out if you try to get me that far.”
He was weak and in considerable pain, his eyes tightly closed against it. He sat down on the table and then lay back slowly with a soft gasping cry of agony that he couldn’t halt. Julie took the hand he reached up to her and squeezed it reassuringly.
“You can do it, Firefly. I know you can.”
Grace Fulton, anticipating correctly, had already gone to the doctor’s office and brought back the satchel with his instruments—and a full bottle of scotch.
“You know what you’re doin’?” she asked Julie.
“I think so.”
She started to pull the cork from the bottle, only to have Morgan snatch it away from her.
“No anaesthesia, Julie,” he commanded. “I gotta be awake in case you need me.”
“But I can’t—”
“You have to. Grace will help, won’t you, Grace?”
The grey head nodded solemnly, though Morgan’s eyes stayed closed and he didn’t see.
“All right, then, ladies, get the rest of these spectators out of here and let’s get to work. Is Hans gonna be all right?”
The jurors filed out with Booth behind them like a shepherd guiding his flock, and then Ted Phillips quietly hustled Wilhelm and Katharine out the door as well. Only Thaddeus Burton remained, and his size told the marshal not to waste time trying to evict him.
While Grace laid out the instruments on a towel within Julie’s reach, Morgan kept up a steady stream of instructions and conversation in an effort to hold onto consciousness.
“The bullet must have ricocheted,” he said, “Even a twenty-two should have done more damage fired at that close range.” He tried to open his eyes but couldn’t. Or maybe he did and everything was black anyway. “See if you can find the bullet first with your fingers. If it isn’t lodged in the bone, maybe you can just pull it out. I don’t think there’s any nerve damage; I can still move my f
ingers. If it did stick in the bone, check for a break.”
Swallowing a rising nausea, Julie took a deep breath and then ventured to examine the wound while he continued to talk. When she probed with a slender finger for the bullet, he winced and jerked convulsively, his back arching off the table, and sweat poured from him. Julie withdrew and wiped her own forehead on her sleeve.
“I found it,” she whispered. “The bone’s not broken, and I didn’t feel any chips.”
“Good job, love. Can you get it out with your fingers?”
“No, I don’t think so. I tried, but it’s—”
“Too slippery,” he finished for her. “Damn little buggers usually are. But that’s all right. Just use the forceps. Go ahead; I’m ready.”
But I’m not, Julie wanted to scream. God, help me. Help him.
She was grateful for Grace Fulton’s strength to hold Morgan still while Julie did what she had watched him do to Thaddeus Burton. The long body thrashed against the screeching agony, and Julie knew that without Grace to restrain him, Morgan would have fought free of Julie’s awkward fumbling. Twice she got the blades of the forceps into the hole in his arm only to have his body react and escape. The third time, she managed to grasp the bullet but couldn’t remove it. She was crying now, with the awful confusion of frustration and anger and fear and relief.
“Oh, Del, I can’t get it out!” she cried. “And I can’t leave the tourniquet on much longer. Your arm’s turning blue.”
“It’ll be all right. One more try,” he ordered, his voice softer now, or perhaps just weaker. “I’m sorry, love. I’ve been so damn much trouble to you.”
“No, you haven’t.” She gritted her teeth and slipped her fingers back into the handle of the instrument. “I’ll get it this time.”
Her hand trembled, and the perspiration she couldn’t wipe away stung her eyes. Grace had to stretch her body across Morgan’s to hold him still, but finally Julie withdrew the forceps and dropped them to the table. The bullet was clenched between the blades.