One Bright Morning

by Duncan, Alice

  Jubal actually smiled a little bit when Maggie shrugged off her wrinkled frock. He had a nice view of her slim body in its camisole and drawers. Maggie wore no corset or chemise, a fact that fact might have shocked a more conventional gentleman than Jubal Green.

  But Jubal didn’t mind at all. In fact his smile broadened in appreciation of Maggie’s feminine form displayed so pleasantly before his interested eyes. He was disappointed when she whisked the clean dress on over her head. Maggie was a little on the thin side, he noted, but she still looked pretty good. Soft. Womanly. He liked that.

  Jubal nearly chuckled out loud at the realization that he was finding a woman appealing. As if he could do anything about his attraction in his present condition. His eyes slid shut on the thought and he dozed again.

  Maggie straightened up her pallet and laid her wrinkled dress aside. It was clean; she just needed to iron it. Maggie always did the ironing on Fridays. She stopped for a moment when she realized she had completely lost track of time and didn’t even know when Friday was. Maybe it had come and gone already, behind her back, when she’d been busy with other things. That would throw her schedule all to flinders.

  “Maybe Mr. Blue Gully can tell me,” she murmured.

  Then she went over to Jubal’s bedside to check on her patient’s condition.

  “You look much better, Mr. Green,” she whispered with real gratitude when she peered down at him. “Why, you even have a little smile on your face this morning.”

  She couldn’t stop her hand from reaching out to caress his forehead—to check for fever, she told herself.

  When Jubal’s eyelids suddenly opened and his deep green eyes blinked up at her, she was embarrassed and whipped her hand away from his face, tucked it behind her back, and blushed.

  It was the angel again. Jubal still wasn’t able to sort things out very quickly, but as soon as that thought crossed his mind, he knew it was wrong. He was annoyed that who- or whatever this vision was, she had removed her soothing hand from his brow.

  “You’re not an angel,” he announced in a raspy whisper, frowning slightly at the effort it took.

  Maggie thought she had misunderstood his words. She just said, “Good morning, Mr. Green.”

  Jubal was peeved that this being wouldn’t clarify her place in the universe, and his brow furrowed.

  That furrow worried Maggie and she thought to soothe him. She said, pleasantly, “You look better today, Mr. Green. Are you feeling any better?”

  “I feel like hell,” he told her, too confused at the moment to lie politely.

  Maggie stared at him in distress. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said, her voice breathy and soft.

  Jubal could tell she meant it and that made him feel a little better, although his irritation at the general state of affairs and his inability to arrange them coherently still rankled. He decided to try another tack with Maggie since she wouldn’t tell him if she was an angel or not.

  “Are you the bright lady?” he asked, still frowning.

  Maggie misunderstood him, but it turned out all right. “I’m Maggie Bright, yes. That’s right, Mr. Green. You rode up to my house the other day, gunshot, and now you’re staying here for a while.”

  “Maggie Bright,” Jubal repeated, glad for that clarification at least. The name appealed to him, for some reason, so he said it again. “Maggie Bright.”

  Shadowy flickers of recollection assailed him once more, and he wondered if Maggie Bright was the same angel who had been sleeping in his bed at night—some night—he couldn’t remember. His concentration on the subject was so intense that he wore himself out and his eyes drifted shut again.

  Once Maggie was fairly certain that he was sleeping, she caressed his brow again. Jubal smiled in his sleep.

  When she guessed she’d had enough of petting Jubal Green’s face, Maggie went out to the kitchen. Jubal frowned when she left him, but Maggie didn’t notice.

  Four Toes Smith again accompanied her out to the privy.

  “Mr. Green seems to be a little bit better today,” Maggie ventured experimentally when she got back to the kitchen in one piece.

  “Yeah. He’s resting better and don’t seem as addled,” said Dan.

  “Addled,” Maggie murmured, pleased with the word. He had seemed a little addled, at that.

  “Is there anything you’d like me to pay special attention to when you go get my baby, Mr. Blue Gully?” Maggie asked Dan deferentially since she considered him to be Jubal Green’s doctor. She was just the nurse, she guessed.

  Dan looked a little surprised that she would be asking him what to do. He shook his head.

  “No. Just do what you been doing. Whatever it is you do, it works. Keep him as comfortable as possible, I guess. Don’t know what else you can do. If he has to—”Dan stopped, embarrassed, as he struggled to find a polite word for it. He finally decided on, “If he has to relieve himself, Four Toes can help you.”

  “Thank you,” Maggie said. Then she thought to ask, “Will you be all right, Mr. Blue Gully? Will that French Jack fellow try to hurt you and my baby?”

  “Naw,” Dan said. He didn’t sound at all concerned. “He don’t bother me none, ma’am. I know how to fool him.”

  Maggie pondered that for a second. “Too bad Mr. Green didn’t know how to fool him, too.”

  Dan looked vaguely irritated and Maggie hoped she hadn’t said something wrong.

  “That was just bad luck, ma’am. Jubal Green’s the best there is. We was tired, was what done it. That’s never happened before and it won’t never happen again.”

  “Oh,” said Maggie. “Well, I sure hope it doesn’t. It would be a shame.”

  Then Dan said, “I’ll go fetch your little girl now, Mrs. Bright. Do you expect she’ll be scared of me?”

  Maggie laughed. Hers was a pleasant, sweet laugh, and it made the two men in the room with her laugh, too.

  “Annie?” she said, still amazed. “Lord no, Mr. Blue Gully. Annie loves everybody. She’s just like her daddy. But I’d better write a note for Sadie. Now she’ll be scared to death. Sadie’s a shrieker.”

  Dan remembered the shriek that Sadie Phillips had greeted him with and nodded.

  The thought of her friend screaming at the kindly Dan Blue Gully tickled Maggie and she continued to giggle a bit as she wrote the note to Sadie.

  Four Toes had made a breakfast of biscuits and coffee, so Maggie gratefully sat at her kitchen table and ate after Dan left. It was the second meal in as many days that she had not had to prepare herself, a luxury she couldn’t remember ever experiencing before. She actually began to wonder if being under siege was really so bad after.

  Then Four Toes went out to the privy and she heard a shot ring out and slam into the thick log side of the house, and she decided that being under siege was, too, bad. A second or two later a barrage of gunfire shattered both the early-morning stillness and her back-door window.

  “Damn,” Maggie grumbled. “Kenny brought that window all the way from El Paso.”

  Then she heard another volley of shots and what sounded like a commotion in the woods.

  Four Toes Smith’s voice sailed to her on the tail end of the gunfire. “Mrs. Bright! Open the door quick!”

  Maggie heard somebody running madly across the hard-packed dirt, and she did as he had hollered.

  When Four Toes stumbled into the house, his momentum propelled him clean across the floor to bump into the wall on the other side of the kitchen before he could stop himself.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he panted. “Didn’t dare slow down.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Smith,” Maggie assured him. “I heard shots. Are you hurt?”

  Four Toes grinned a tight grin. “I’m not hurt, ma’am.”

  Maggie recognized his expression as one of satisfaction. “Did you shoot Mr. Jack?” she asked with a hopeful lilt to her voice.

  “Naw,” said Four Toes. “But I scared the hell out of him.” He looked instantly abashed at his bad l
anguage. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “That’s all right, Mr. Smith.”

  It suddenly occurred to her that she was saying those words about a whole lot of things she never would have anticipated being all right with her. She guessed that’s just the way life worked. You never knew what was going to happen next. At least, she decided, this episode was nominally exciting, if she didn’t get shot to death.

  “I guess they saw Dan leaving,” Four Toes continued. “They was sneaking up to the back porch. They probably won’t do that again.”

  “The porch?” Maggie was aghast. That was her worst fear, that their besiegers would sneak in through the screen.

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. We won’t let them hurt you.”

  Although Maggie didn’t say anything, she did wonder about that. So far, it looked to her as if they had a stand-off going, and she wondered if Dan and Four Toes were ever going to try to get rid of French Jack, or if they were planning to merely hold him at bay for the rest of their natural lives. The awful thought crossed her mind that the two Indians were waiting for Jubal Green to get better before they tried to rout the villains.

  Good Lord, that could take months, Maggie thought unhappily.

  She decided to ask Dan Blue Gully about it when he got back. Right now, she figured she’d better check up on Jubal. Those gunshots had been loud enough to wake the dead. They might even have awakened poor, addled, Jubal Green.

  They had.

  When Maggie went back into her bedroom, Jubal was glaring at her. That made her stop dead in her tracks momentarily, because he had a powerfully ferocious glare. Then she decided that it was most probably an impersonal glare and not one directed specifically at her. After all, he couldn’t have known it would be she who would walk through the door just then. Could he?

  She took a deep breath and approached the bed. Jubal’s scowl didn’t leave his face.

  “I’m sorry for the noise, Mr. Green. There’s some trouble outside.” Maggie decided to spare him the details since she didn’t want him to waste energy worrying about French Jack.

  The gun battle had awakened Jubal with a start that set his wounds and inflamed muscles to throbbing viciously. He was furious that he should be lying in this bed, helpless, and not know what was going on or be able to help, whatever it was.

  He hadn’t meant to frown at Maggie, really. It’s only that he had been staring at the door when she walked in and got trapped by his scowl. Then, when he saw her, his frown changed from one of anger into one of concentration as he tried to figure out who she was.

  Maggie couldn’t tell the difference between his various frowns, however. He just looked mean mad to her.

  “Did the gunfire startle you, Mr. Green?” she asked gently.

  Jubal decided that was too foolish a question to answer. His brow wrinkled up as he looked at Maggie, his eyes registering angry bewilderment.

  What he remembered from the last few foggy days was that he’d been shot all to hell and was now in the home of a lady named Maggie and his friend Dan Blue Gully. When he added to that the snippet of memory which told him that Maggie was a bright angel who slept with him, nothing made any sense at all.

  If Maggie were with Dan, she sure as hell wouldn’t be sleeping with him, and if she was an angel, she wouldn’t be here on earth. If this was earth. Besides, if Dan had got himself a woman, wouldn’t he, Jubal Green, know about it? He and Dan were like brothers, for God’s sake He couldn’t have been sick for that long, could he?

  There was also something about gentle, peaceful hands, but he couldn’t sort that one out at all, so he gave up.

  “Who the hell are you?” he snarled weakly.

  Maggie blinked down at him, distressed at his tone. She hoped he wasn’t a touchy sort of man.

  Well, she thought, I guess getting shot up might make a saint cranky, so she decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  She dipped a cloth in the bowl full of water that rested on the bedside table and began to wipe his brow.

  “My name is Maggie Bright, Mr. Green,” she said. “I told you that last night, but I guess you don’t remember.”

  Suddenly Jubal did recollect having been told that before.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said with a bare hint of surliness in his voice.

  What she was doing with that cloth felt really good to him. He looked up at her suspiciously.

  “You’re not an angel?” he asked, fearing the answer.

  Maggie laughed softly. She had a very pretty laugh, and that worried Jubal, too.

  “No, Mr. Green, I’m not an angel. Just a widow lady on a farm in New Mexico Territory trying to get you healthy again.”

  But Jubal didn’t seem to be paying attention after the first part of her explanation. “Then I’m not dead?” he asked. There was just the faintest touch of fear icing the edges of his words.

  Maggie smiled at him tenderly. Jubal Green touched her, for some reason. She guessed it was because he was obviously a strong man and mad as hell at his present helplessness. She supposed he wasn’t a man who allowed himself to be taken care of any too often. If his size and strength were any indication, he probably did most of the taking care. That thought started an unsettling series of warm ripples flickering through her insides, so she stopped thinking it immediately.

  “No, Mr. Green,” she said softly. “You’re not dead, thank the Lord.”

  He sighed weakly and looked relieved. Then he nodded just a little bit.

  “You don’t look like an angel,” he said. That was true. Maggie looked entirely too earthy to be an angel in Jubal Green’s opinion. Not that that was a bad thing.

  Maggie wasn’t sure if she had just been insulted or not, but she decided to let it pass if it was an insult. “Would you like some water, Mr. Green?” she asked instead.

  Jubal thought about it. His tongue felt as though it had been replaced by cotton wadding, and the inside of his mouth felt like flannel. He guessed water sounded like a good idea.

  “Yes.”

  Then he was horrified when Maggie stopped bathing his forehead and looked like she was going to go away. Although it took an incredible amount of effort and hurt like fire, he reached up and grabbed her by the wrist.

  “Don’t go,” he whispered. He would have yelled, but it had taken all of his energy to grab her.

  Maggie was shocked.

  “I’ll be right back, Mr. Green. I won’t leave you. I’m just going to get you some water.”

  Jubal stared at her in disbelief for a second or two. Then his hand began to shake from pain and weakness, and he let go of Maggie, although he didn’t want to. His hand flopped back onto the bed, and he experienced a feeling of incredible, terrible loss as he watched Maggie walk out of the room. He shut his eyes and felt gloomier than he could remember feeling since his brother died.

  When Maggie came back to his bed a minute later, carrying a glass of water, his eyes were still closed.

  “Mr. Green?” Maggie ventured softly, wondering if he had gone back to sleep.

  But his eyes opened immediately, at the first sound of her voice. “You came back,” he whispered incredulously.

  Maggie smiled. “Why, of course, I came back, Mr. Green. Why did you think I wouldn’t come back? I was just getting you some water.”

  As he listened to her explanation, Jubal decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell her the truth. He had believed her to be a figment. He was really glad to know that she wasn’t a figment, but was instead a real, live, peaceful woman named Maggie who had brought him water. He struggled painfully for a second or two, in a vain effort to sit up.

  Maggie was appalled. “Mr. Green, stop that right now. You just lie back there and don’t move. For heaven’s sake, Mr. Green, you nearly died. You can’t sit up yet. Here, let me hold your head and I’ll help you drink.”

  Jubal frowned at her for a second. Then, when her arm slipped behind him to cradle his head and she held him close against her soft bosom and leaned
over to bring the glass to his lips, he decided this wasn’t such a bad idea after all. His eyes never left Maggie’s face, which was lost in concentration as she tried to help him drink without jostling his poor wounds. When she withdrew the water glass, he smiled.

  He was still smiling when he fell asleep again.

  Chapter Five

  Maggie was nervous until she had Annie in her arms again. Then, once her daughter was back to her in one piece, she actually began to relax and enjoy life for the first time since before Kenny had died.

  Dan Blue Gully and Four Toes Smith worked like a couple of Trojans around the place. In two days, they had the farm looking better and running more smoothly than it had even before Kenny’s encounter with the wrong end of that horse. They also replaced the shattered back-door window. Each one of them did more work in an hour than Ozzie Plumb had done in a week, and although Maggie felt a little bit guilty and disloyal to admit it, she was glad for the change. In fact, once Dan had taken Ozzie’s body to town for storage until it could be buried, it was almost as though poor Ozzie had never existed.

  “You know, Mr. Blue Gully,” she said early one morning as she fixed breakfast, “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s sort of nice having you men around the place.”

  She was embarrassed at her confession and blushed rosily as she stirred the morning’s cornmeal mush. Dan didn’t seem to find anything odd about her words, however.

  He nodded. “There’s too much work for you to do here alone,” he observed.

  Maggie eyed him over her pot. “I guess so.”

  She sighed when she resumed stirring, and wondered how she’d get along when Jubal Green got well and she’d lose the services of Dan and Four Toes. Four Toes had taken Ozzie’s body into Lincoln the day after Annie got home, and Maggie wouldn’t even have Ozzie’s questionable services to draw upon after these men left her. She wasn’t quite sure how to go about hiring another person to take his place even if there was one, which she doubted.

  The really strange part of this whole situation was that she liked these men. Dan Blue Gully was pleasant and friendly and considerate. He could also cure her headaches, a feat Maggie held right up there along with the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel as miraculous accomplishments. And Four Toes Smith was polite to a fault. In fact, he was bashful and he blushed, and Maggie thought that was sweet.