Two Brothers

by Linda Lael Miller

  The cowboy who’d been dragging him lay bleeding in the street a dozen yards away, and Tristan sat behind Kyle, on the old man’s horse, the barrel of his pistol dug in deep at the base of the rancher’s skull. Kyle looked to be reconsidering the whole situation, while everybody else gaped, now at Tristan, now at Shay. Eugenie, as fascinated as anybody there, nonetheless joined Shay and Aislinn and Dorrie in the middle of the street, still holding her fabled shotgun in both hands.

  Shay might have grinned, if he hadn’t been so mortified. Eugenie had fired one of the decisive shots, Tristan the other.

  “Land sakes,” said his female rescuer, “you look a sorry sight, Marshal.” She spared him a pitying glance, then turned her attention to Tristan again. “If it weren’t for all them bruises and all that dirt, I believe I’d think you’d done split yourself in two. Who the devil is that?”

  Having caught his breath at last, Shay loosened the noose around his chest and arms and shrugged out of it. A couple of the Powder Creek riders were strapping the dead across their saddles, but everyone else was holding real still. If it weren’t for the fidgeting of the horses and the rolling, shifting cloud of dust raised in the ruckus, the scene would have looked like some eastern painter’s rendition of the wild and lawless West.

  Tristan cocked the pistol at Kyle’s head, his other arm wrapped around the rancher’s middle. “Ride out, all of you,” he said clearly, addressing the Powder Creek crew. “Now. If you don’t, there’ll be nobody left to count out your wages come payday.”

  “He won’t shoot me,” Kyle barked, his face and bearing hard as flint. “He’s bluffing. Get Billy!”

  Two or three men took the boss at his word and reached for their guns; Eugenie took one of them out of the saddle with a single shot, while Tristan blew off a hunk of the old man’s ear. Blood flowed down over that custom-made suit like a river, but Kyle was no coward, you had to give him that. He was pale as curdled milk, and his head had to be ringing like a church bell in Boston, but he didn’t acknowledge the pain, didn’t even reach up to touch the wound.

  Shay wrenched the shotgun out of Eugenie’s hands and stalked through the center of the fray. Reaching the rancher’s horse, he looked up at Tristan and his captive. “Mr. Kyle, sir,” he said, hurting in every bone and joint, every muscle and pore, “it gives me genuine pleasure to arrest you. Your boy’s been missing you something awful, but now you’ll be right there to keep him company.” With that, he reached up and jerked the man out of the saddle. Kyle, awash in blood, landed on his knees and immediately got back to his feet, under his own power. His eyes settled on Shay and snapped with fury.

  “This isn’t over,” he warned.

  Shay grinned. He felt light-headed and queasy, and saw everything through a sort of murky veil, but he was still kicking. That was cause enough to celebrate. He was alive, and once this mess was settled, there was Aislinn to be courted and won. “Sure it is,” he replied, shoving Kyle toward the jailhouse.

  The doctor came out of the crowd, bag in hand. “You all right, Shay?” he asked, falling into step with the marshal and his prisoner. Behind them, the Powder Creek men hesitated, then wheeled their mounts around and rode out, but with none of the fanfare of their arrival.

  “I’ll be fine,” Shay said, more out of habit than conviction. If anybody was going to be wiping his brow and dabbing at his wounds, he wanted it to be Aislinn, not the doc. “Mr. Kyle here, though, he seems to have lost a fair portion of his ear.”

  Inside the office, the doctor sat Kyle down in a chair, inspected his wound, stanched the copious bleeding as best he could, and applied a bandage. The patient refused the offered dose of laudanum and walked to the cell like some heroic king being escorted to the scaffold by traitors. “I’ll see you lynched for this,” Kyle vowed, looking straight at Shay.

  O’Sullivan cowered in a corner of the cubicle, while Billy hovered, flapping his gums. “They shot my pa,” he raved, over and over, like he couldn’t believe what he’d seen, until Tristan finally carried over a bucket of water and doused him with it.

  After that, things got hectic.

  * * *

  “He’s hurt, Cornelia,” Dorrie said, in response to her sister’s protests, as Tristan and a deputy half dragged, half carried Shay between them, into the entryway of the McQuillan house. Aislinn was right behind.

  “Look at him. He’s—he’s filthy,” Cornelia sputtered, attempting to bar their way, “and he’s bleeding! Must I remind you that these rugs are Persian?”

  Dorrie ignored her sister, addressing her words to Tristan and the deputy. “His room is up these stairs—I’ll show you the way. Gently, now. Don’t make matters worse by jostling him around like a sack of onions—”

  Aislinn followed them to the base of the steps, a moving, breathing specter of herself, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her heart spinning and skittering like a flat stone on ice. Shay had remained upright until after Kyle was properly jailed, dictating the wires that were to be sent to surrounding towns, requesting an appearance by the circuit judge. Then, as he was crossing the floor of his office, his knees had given out, his eyes had rolled back, and he’d gone down in a heap at Aislinn’s feet.

  She’d given a little scream, certain that he was dead, that somewhere under all that dirt and blood was a fatal wound, and dropped down next to him, just as she had in the street, attempting to gather him in her arms. Tristan had lifted her gently back to her feet and set her aside, where Eugenie had waited to hold her upright.

  Shay was unconscious, but as Tristan and the other man picked him up, each draping one of his arms over their shoulders, he came around just long enough to insist that he wasn’t hurt, then passed out again. Moments later, he opened his eyes, shaking his head slightly, like a swimmer surfacing after a deep dive. Although he was standing, he was plainly dazed, and when he tried to speak, his words were jumbled and fractured.

  Aislinn, last to gain the stairs, was wholly focused on Shay, and when someone grabbed her arm and stayed her progress, she was startled. Seeing Cornelia, she pulled free with a powerful, angry motion and hurried after the others.

  The tiny room was hot and close and crowded, and while Tristan and the other man put Shay carefully down on the bed, Dorrie flittering here and there like a sparrow afraid to light, Aislinn flung up the window to let in a rush of clear morning air. Then she proceeded to the foot of the bed and carefully pulled off Shay’s boots.

  She was a doctor’s daughter, and she had assisted her father in his surgery on occasion, when there had been a carriage accident, or some mishap on a nearby farm. She had seen all manner of injuries, but she had never been in love with the patient before, and that, she found, made a profound difference. Her hands trembled, and her stomach pitched, as though it would rebel at any moment.

  “Hot water,” she said. “We need lots of hot water, clean cloth and carbolic acid or alcohol for disinfectant.”

  Amazingly, Dorrie and the deputy obeyed her commands without question or hesitation, hurrying out to do her bidding. Only Tristan remained, speaking the occasional quiet, soothing word to his half-delirious brother while he helped Aislinn remove his brother’s torn and bloody clothes.

  Aislinn was an innocent, but the sight of Shay’s bare body, magnificent as it was, did not move or shock her as it might have done in other circumstances. With Tristan’s help, she examined him, and they concluded that there were several ribs broken and very possibly an injury to the spleen.

  In due time, Dorrie and the deputy brought hot water in generous amounts, along with the other items Aislinn had requested. Dorrie said she’d go over to the doctor’s office and see if he was finished patching up the man Eugenie had shot, and Tristan sent the deputy away.

  Shay was unconscious, and Aislinn was struck by the careful way Tristan cleaned the dirt from his many cuts and abrasions. “Maybe you ought to leave this to me,” Tristan told her, with a faint, crooked grin. “My brother will be fit to be tied if he fin
ds out you were here looking on while he got his bath.”

  Aislinn straightened her backbone. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said and, tearing off a piece of cloth and soaking it in fresh water, she began washing a nasty gash in Shay’s right knee.

  “The doctor’ll be along presently,” Tristan said, intent on a deep cut in Shay’s shoulder. “Is that yardbird fit to operate, if the need arises?”

  Aislinn’s cheeks pulsed with frantic color. “No,” she answered. “He’s probably just a barber, calling himself a physician. I’ve seen him sit down to eat, over at the dining room, with dirt on his hands.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this sort of thing,” Tristan observed thoughtfully, without looking up from his work. Shay groaned in pain as his brother probed for small stones and other debris, but did not open his eyes.

  “My father was a physician,” Aislinn said. “A good one.”

  “Your folks are gone, then.” Not a question really, just an opening to step through.

  Aislinn nodded. “They were killed in a fire, several years ago.”

  “And you’ve been on your own ever since.”

  She nodded again. “I’ve got two brothers, but they’re very young. I’ve been saving my wages to bring them out here, but, well, I keep getting into trouble of one sort or another. I’ve lost my job at the hotel, through my own foolishness, and even though Dorrie is the very spirit of kindness, I’m not really welcome in this house or at the general store. Frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

  “There must be some solution to the problem,” Tristan mused, still intent on what he was doing.

  She shrugged. Wondering all the while how she could prattle that way with Shay lying there before her, broken and bleeding, maybe even dying, Aislinn poured out the story of how she’d put her brothers into a boarding school and traveled west, from job to job, saving practically every penny she earned.

  Tristan didn’t so much as glance in her direction. “A lot of women in your position would have stayed back East and married. Why didn’t you?”

  Aislinn reached for the bottle of sherry Dorrie had brought for disinfectant, doused a cloth, and prepared to advance on the worst of the tears in Shay’s flesh. “I guess I wanted something that was our own, for Thomas and Mark and me. So we wouldn’t be beholden. Besides, a woman should go to a man out of choice, not necessity.”

  “That’s not always possible,” Tristan observed, putting his hands to his brother’s shoulders and pressing him back onto the soiled bedding when he would have risen up against the pain. Shay murmured something about bringing in firewood before the snow got any deeper and then lay still again, his eyes closed. “Seems to me women don’t have as many choices as they ought to.”

  She sighed, reminded of Liza Sue and the stark lack of alternatives she’d had. Anything and everything was better to think about than what might be happening inside Shay’s battered body. “No,” she agreed. “You’re right. I guess I’ve been luckier than a lot of people.” After they’d bathed Shay, they would have to move him off the bed long enough to put on fresh linens. That enterprise called for extreme care, lest they make any internal injuries worse. Moving him at all had been a significant risk, but of course they couldn’t have left him on the jailhouse floor. Tears pricked her eyes, like a shower of tiny needles, and she missed her father with a sudden and piercing intensity that fairly took her breath away. If only he were here now; he would know how best to help Shay, whether to perform surgery or simply wait for the healing process to run its course.

  Tristan reached over then, to touch her hand, and she realized for the first time that he himself was awash in dried blood—probably from Mr. Kyle’s sundered ear. “Shay’s tough,” he said quietly. “He’ll come through this just fine.”

  She sniffled, nodded, renewed her efforts with the sherry, causing Shay to flinch and curse beneath the keen bite of the alcohol. “What about the next time? Those men will come back—there must be a hundred hands on the Powder Creek spread, drifters and petty criminals most of them, and Kyle has money enough that they’d ride into the jaws of hell itself if he asked them.”

  “Billy and the old man are behind bars. As long as that’s the case, we’ve got the upper hand.” Tristan didn’t seem the least bit worried. “Hush, now,” he said to his brother, when Shay tried to roll away from the sherry, which must have felt like flames licking through his skin to the muscle and sinew beneath. The gruff affection in his voice made Aislinn’s throat go tight. What must it have been like for them, to discover a nearly exact counterpart to themselves, after so many years?

  “There aren’t many men in this town who’ll be willing to stand up to the Powder Creek outfit,” she pointed out, after swallowing hard. “Aren’t you even a little afraid?”

  He smiled. “I’m an intelligent man, Aislinn. I’ve got sense enough to be scared. But this life is full of challenges that have got to be met, whether the folks involved feel up to the exercise or not. As my old daddy used to say, ‘We’ve got it to do.’”

  She looked at Shay and realized with a sense of abiding bleakness how dearly she loved him. “You won’t abandon him to them?” It was no idle question; she was asking for a promise, a sacred oath, for Shay’s sake and for her own.

  “You have my word that I’ll see this through,” Tristan replied, looking directly into her eyes. “If they have to bury Shay, it’ll be the day after my funeral.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She might have kissed him, such was her gratitude, if half the length of Shay’s body hadn’t been between them. There was a commotion in the corridor—the doctor had arrived, no doubt. She got up and hastened out of the room, in order to collect herself.

  Tristan turned to his brother, who lay unmoving now, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow and slow. “For all that you’re probably going to wish you were dead before this is over,” he said, “you’re a very fortunate man, Shay McQuillan.”

  The door creaked open and the doctor came in. He was a seedy-looking character and there were half-moons of dirt under his fingernails. His clothes smelled of sweat, whiskey and mothballs, and his skin was mottled with the broken veins of a drinking man. Tristan drew his pistol.

  “Don’t take another step,” he said.

  The mean-eyed spinster, Cornelia, slipped in behind old Sawbones. “Put that dreadful thing away. This is my house, that is my brother, and he will be seen by my doctor!”

  Tristan didn’t move, or lower the .45. “You’re right about one of those things, ma’am,” he said easily. “This is your house. But Shay is my brother—my face is proof of that—and nobody is going to lay a hand on him without my say-so.”

  “Go on out, Cornelia,” the doctor said, with resignation and a thin shadow of something that might once have been dignity. “Leave us alone to talk this over.”

  Cornelia fulminated for a few moments, then left the room, shutting the door smartly behind her. The doctor shed his coat, went over to the washstand, poured water into the basin, and began to scrub his hands with a cake of yellow soap taken from his bag. The sharp scent of lye filled the room, temporarily blotting out the other smells.

  “You can put that iron away, young fella,” said the doctor. “I sized you up out there in the street, when you changed old Kyle’s looks for him. You might shoot off one or two of my ears, fingers or toes, but you won’t do me any lasting harm.”

  Tristan cocked the pistol, but the rum-sodden old man still didn’t flinch. He did look back over one meaty shoulder, though. “My name’s Jim Yancy. St. Mary’s Surgical College, class of ‘65,” he said. “I mean to have a look at the marshal, whether you care for the idea or not, so you might as well do any shooting you’ve got in mind right now so we can get on with this.”

  With a sigh, Tristan shoved the .45 back into its holster. “You don’t look like much of a doctor to me,” he said, but he had a grudging respect for the man’s courage.

  Yancy laughed. “I’m not,
but right now, I’m pretty much all young Shamus there has, aren’t I?” He took a brush out of his bag, gummed the bristles with soap, and began to scour his fingernails. When he was satisfied that they were clean, he rinsed his hands by dunking one and then the other into the pitcher, and dried them on a fancy white towel one of the McQuillan sisters had brought in earlier. “Move aside, and let me have a look.”

  Tristan moved, but he didn’t go far. He watched as Yancy felt Shay’s ribs, ran his hands over his limbs, poked and prodded at his middle.

  “Make yourself useful and fetch me the stethoscope out of my bag,” the doctor said.

  Tristan found the requested item amidst a jumble of vials, a battered instrument case, a leaky whiskey flask and assorted tools of the medical trade. While Yancy was listening to Shay’s heart and lungs, the door opened, and Aislinn slipped in, big-eyed and defiant, as though she expected somebody to try to run her off.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  “Broken ribs,” the doctor answered, still bent over the patient. “Going to have to bind them up tight. See if you can rustle up some clean sheets, sturdy ones, a sharp pair of scissors and one of those big, fancy brooches Miss Cornelia wears at her throat.”

  “Are there—internal injuries?”

  Yancy turned to look at Aislinn curiously, surprised by the knowledgeable question. “I don’t believe there are. Who might you be? You look familiar, though I can’t quite place you.”

  She raised her chin and her eyes flashed and once again Tristan thought Shay was a lucky bastard, even if he had been bounced on the ground behind a horse with most of the town looking on. “I’m Miss Lethaby, from the hotel dining room,” she said. Her gaze went, pointedly and with an utter lack of apology, to his hands, and widened a little when she saw they were immaculate. “My father was a doctor.”

  “Good,” Yancy replied, after studying her for a few thoughtful moments. “Well, get those things I asked for, and we’ll bind up the marshal’s ribs, you and I. I daresay he’ll be good as new, once those fractures knit themselves back together.”