“Oh, I cared, all right. But when I realized that I loved him, it simplified things. Then I knew what I wanted. I wanted him to come back.”
Sage held her breath. “What did you do then?”
A soft glow came into her aunt’s face. “I made sure he would want to come back.”
“What if Cord doesn’t want to come back?”
Her aunt’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Well, what if he doesn’t? It will hurt, of course. But no one can stop you from loving someone. No one, not even yourself. Not even if you wanted to. It’s what you do about it that will matter.”
“What I do? Isn’t it something he has to do?”
“You cannot simply make other people, especially a man, do what you want. You can do only what you want.”
“Aunt Cissy, I want to practice medicine. I want to be a doctor. A good doctor.”
“And Mr. Lawson has a calling, as well,” her aunt reminded her.
“Yes.”
“And you love him.”
“Yes. But…I want him to love me back.”
“How do you know he doesn’t?”
“Because he would have stayed in Russell’s Landing, but he didn’t. He went kiting off to catch that outlaw.”
“That is his life, Sage. His livelihood.”
“If he loved me, he would at least have told me so before he left. Wouldn’t he?”
Constance shook her head and smiled. “With a man it is often not what he says, but what he doesn’t say. A woman learns to read the silences.”
Sage gave a small groan and bit into a cookie. “Anatomy textbooks and surgical procedures are easy to understand, but this? Men? Relationships? This is beyond me.”
Aunt Cissy refilled her cup, added milk and a lump of sugar and waited. Suddenly Sage was blinking back tears.
“Oh, I do hate not understanding things!”
Constance laughed, then leaned forward and cupped Sage’s face between her two hands. “Dr. West? You’re a graduated physician, but as a woman you’re just beginning your education. Have another cookie and come see me tomorrow.”
Sage rose from the swivel chair behind the desk in her office and paced twice around the blue-wallpapered room. Until yesterday it had been the second parlor of the house Mama and Pa had given her as a graduation gift; today it felt like a prison. She could not sit quietly for one more minute, waiting for a patient to arrive!
The hall clock struck ten. Her consulting hours were clearly painted on the neat sign just above the brass door knocker; she’d been waiting a whole hour with nothing to do but arrange and rearrange her shelf of medical books and the journals stacked on the corner of her oak desk. Twice she had flicked her feather duster over the vase of fragrant yellow roses and the fluted glass candy dish, and then she’d reinspected the beveled glass cabinet that held her instrument case and other supplies—not because any dust had settled in the last fifteen minutes, but because she needed something to do.
Oh, why didn’t someone—anyone—arrive for a medical consultation? Then she would turn into a whirlwind of helpful activity, gathering bandages or administering medicine or perhaps even setting and plastering a broken limb. She could hardly wait. Her hands itched to be doing something useful, not brushing unseen dust motes off her already spotless supplies.
By noon, her first day as a physician in residence seemed the longest she’d ever endured. By two o’clock, when she decided to forgo even a light lunch in case a patient happened by, she simply could not believe that no one, not one soul in Russell’s Landing, had a sniffle or a sore shoulder or something that needed treatment.
Her fees were reasonable; she’d made it known she would accept eggs or bushels of corn in payment. She was well-qualified and extremely capable. So why has no one knocked at my door?
Had word spread about her failure to save that young Mexican girl in the mountains? Sage thought it over, then decided that wasn’t the case. In Russell’s Landing, gossip spread like ball lightning rolling along the hilltops. If the townspeople knew something, it was instantly, and loudly, on everyone’s lips.
She plunked herself back down on the cane-bottom office chair, propped her elbows on the smooth oak desktop and leaned her forehead against her folded hands. What good am I as a doctor if I have no patients?
She considered the question so intently she failed to hear the rap-tap at the front door.
The sharp knocking sounded again, and Sage raised her head. What was that noise?
Rap-bam! Someone’s fist battered the plank frame.
“Dr. West? Sage?”
Oh, please let it be Cord. Please, Lord.
She flew down the hall and flung open the door, then felt as if a pail of stones spilled over in her stomach.
“Why, Mr. Stryker, good morning! What can I do for you?” Her heart thudded so loudly she almost missed his answer.
“Good afternoon. I came to—”
“Of course, Mr. Stryker. Come right into my office, won’t you?”
A patient! How fitting that it should be her old friend Friedrich Stryker with a medical complaint. She noted the newspaper editor’s halting gait as he followed her down the hallway. A sprained ankle, perhaps? Rheumatism?
“Sit right down here,” Sage said, gesturing to the carved-back consulting chair positioned alongside her desk. Sure enough, he favored one leg when he seated himself.
“I hope this is no bother, Miss Sa—uh, Dr. West.”
“Why, it’s no bother at all. It is, after all, what I am trained to do.”
An unsettled look crossed his craggy face. “Trained?”
“Of course,” she said, trying to keep that note of pride out of her voice. She’d spent six years preparing for this moment. Be businesslike. Professional.
“And what is the problem, Mr. Stryker?”
“Oh, no problem, Miss…Dr. I just came by to ask…”
“Yes?”
“To ask…that is, to see if you could…”
Sage thought she would explode. “Let me guess. It’s your leg, is it not?”
His bushy gray eyebrows rose. “My…?”
“Possibly your ankle? Or a stiff—” She broke off at the frown that brought his eyebrows back down almost to the bridge of his nose.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Mr. Stryker, we will get nowhere if you cannot tell me where it hurts.”
The newspaper editor straightened in the hardbacked chair. “Here.” He tapped his chest with the knuckles of one hand. “It hurts here, in my heart.”
Sage felt the blood drain from her face. “Your heart?” she whispered. “You mean you have pains in your chest?”
“Nein, nein,” the man sputtered, shaking his head.
“Not your chest, then. Your arm? Your jaw?”
Friedrich Stryker lurched to a standing position and made an awkward bow from the waist. “I came to…to apologize. To ask you to forgive me for writing that you were…plain. You are not plain, Miss Sage. I wanted to make a point in my editorial, and I was carried away by my rhetoric.”
Sage grew a bit dizzy. “You came about… rhetoric?”
“Exaggeration,” he amended. “I did not mean…” He sagged into the consulting chair once more.
“But your leg?” Sage said, brushing aside the man’s explanation. It was his affliction, not his apology, she wanted to address.
“There is nothing wrong with my leg.”
Sage tilted her head back and studied Mr. Stryker’s trouser-clad limb. “You favor one leg when you walk,” she said. “Your left leg, I would guess. See how you hold it straight when you sit?”
He glanced down at the appendage, attempted to bend it. The effort made him wince.
“Your knee is stiff, is it not?”
“My knee? Oh, well, it is sometimes, a little…. But it is early yet. I have not exercised.”
“It is four o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Stryker. You have a stiff, probably painful knee, and you are here in my office where I conduct my consul
tations. Shall I take a look?”
“Himmel! Look at my leg? Certainly not.”
Sage bit back a smile. “It is perfectly proper, Mr. Striker. I am a physician, remember?”
“But…”
“Roll up your trouser leg, please.” She kept her voice as crisp and neutral as she could.
“Oh, Miss Sage, I couldn’t allow you to—”
“Here,” Sage interrupted. “Have a lemon drop.” She offered the fluted bowl of candy, and when both his hands were occupied, she bent swiftly and hiked up his pant leg.
“Miss Sage!”
“Dr. West,” she corrected in a calm voice. She eased the fabric over the man’s smooth white kneecap and heard the crunch of the lemon drop in his mouth.
“It is swollen, here and here.” She touched his skin lightly with the tip of a steel probe. “Does it hurt?”
“I—” He swallowed the remains of the lemon drop.
“You must tell me, if I am to help you.” She waited while he munched another candy.
“It is stiff in the morning,” he said at last. “Before breakfast. After I walk to the newspaper office it pains a bit, yes. I cannot go down my porch steps without it hurts. Here.” He tapped his kneecap.
Sage nodded and gave him her best “Mmm-hmm.” “How many floors have you in your house, Mr. Stryker?”
“Three. Four, counting the basement.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Fear flickered in his tired blue-gray eyes. “You think I am going lame, like an old man?”
“Certainly not,” she said in a breezy tone. “You have a touch of rheumatism, and you have aggravated it by going up and down too many stairs of late.”
“Oh?” He lifted another lemon drop from the bowl.
“I prescribe a half teaspoon of this powder. It’s crushed willow bark, and you must dissolve it in a tumbler of water and drink it morning and evening.”
She removed a brown glass bottle from the cabinet, shook a scant handful of the contents onto a square of white parchment and folded it into a packet.
“And…” she added as he hurriedly rolled down his trouser leg, “…try to stay on the first floor of your home for the next week. Let the inflamed tissues heal. I will prepare some special liniment for you and bring it to the newspaper office tomorrow.”
Mr. Stryker stood up. “I thank you, Dr. Sage. For your professional opinion.” He held out his hand. “And for accepting my apology for what I write in the paper.”
Sage enfolded his ink-stained fingers in hers. “We have always been friends, Mr. Stryker. You used to correct my spelling, remember? Now I am correcting your patellar ligament.”
“It is a good bargain. You have learned very much. I will tell Flora about your nice office,” he said. “She will like to hear.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stryker.”
“Also,” he said with a twinkle in his watery blue eyes, “I will tell about the lemon drops. That, I think, you learn from me.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cord swore under his breath. Ambush. Goddamn it, whoever it was had got the jump on him.
“Do not move, Señor Cord.”
His gut clenched at the voice. How could he have lost Suarez long enough for the outlaw to circle around in back of him?
“Again I have you in my sights, señor. You grow careless.”
Cord said nothing. He thought about the distance between his palm and his holstered revolver. He wouldn’t have enough time. He hadn’t been careless, he’d been tricked. Suarez had laid a false trail.
“You got a new plan, Suarez?”
“Ay, I do. Santa Maria came to me in a dream, and she tell me what to do.”
Cord heard the sand crunch as the man took a step forward. Next to his own lengthening shadow in the lowering sun’s light loomed a shorter one. Solid and compact, as if the figure was hunched over. As if…
In that instant he knew what Suarez intended to do. The Mexican wouldn’t risk shooting him in the back. Too obvious. He’d get Cord to turn around. Either that or…
The shadow changed, spread wide and moved in. Cord bent, clenched his hands together and whirled. His knotted fists caught Suarez’s gun arm, just as he raised it to crack the weapon against Cord’s skull.
Yeah, he’d been right. Suarez intended to knock him senseless, then shoot him in the chest and make it look like an accident.
The revolver catapulted out of the outlaw’s hand, dropped onto the coarse sand with a plopping sound. Before Cord could kick it out of the way, Suarez threw his body on top of it.
“Get up,” Cord ordered.
Suarez’s hand twitched under his belly. Cord expected it, knew the man would maneuver the revolver into his grasp, then roll over on his back and fire at him.
His hand itched to draw his own weapon and make an end of it. Taking him alive was better, but at the moment dead seemed very attractive.
“Now!” Cord’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Comprendez?”
Suddenly Suarez flopped over, his hand scrabbling for the weapon beneath him. The gun went off.
Oh, Jesus. The misaimed bullet punched a hole in the Mexican’s neck. Within a heartbeat he lay motionless, eyes open and staring at the sky.
It was over.
A week dragged by. Then another. Sage’s spirits rose when the occasional patient stopped in, and fell when her mother came to cluck sympathetically and ask what she was eating that she looked so peaked. Apparently Aunt Cissy had told Mama just enough to calm her worries and her Billy-get-theshotgun response, but not enough to set her fears entirely at rest. Sage wished her mother would call during office hours; that way, when Mama got sniffly, Sage could escape to an imaginary patient in the reception room.
On Thursday, the Willamette Valley Voice was published. Sage had asked Mr. Stryker to print a simple boxed announcement of her office hours.
She guessed it had done some good, because by midday, the trickle of patients began to turn into a steady stream.
She was kept so busy with sore throats and sprained ankles she didn’t get to sit down and read the paper herself until the following afternoon. At day’s end, tired after lancing a boil on Thad Nayler’s neck, setting two broken arms at opposite ends of Douglas County and concocting a batch of salve for Mr. Stryker’s sore knee, Sage finally sank onto her shaded front porch and unfolded the unread newspaper.
Doctor’s Heroism Lauded.
Instantly alert, she scanned the print beneath the headline.
Dr. Sage West has recently returned from a harrowing and dangerous trek into the wilderness on a call of mercy. Accompanied by only an Indian guide…
“Indian guide!” Sage spluttered.
…our intrepid and gallant physician rode day and night, bravely meeting all hazards of the wild with singular courage.
She clapped her hand over her mouth. How fortunate that Mr. Stryker had such good journalistic sense.
And a sore knee. She would take the salve over directly and thank him for his restraint. Knowing Mrs. Benbow, it must have been difficult.
Patients poured in all the next day. Letitia Halstead complained of palpitations from canning forty quarts of snap beans on the hottest day of the year. Arvo Ollesen limped over with a lump on his hip the size of a dishpan where a horse had kicked him. Both the Runyon twins were down with the measles, and after Sage rode out to check on them, she returned long past suppertime to find Rafe Pokell waiting.
“Ella’s havin’ her baby,” he announced.
Sage sighed and climbed back onto the saddled mare and followed him to his farmhouse outside town.
Every hour of the night, and all through the long, hot day as Ella labored, Sage boiled water and murmured encouragement and thought about Cord. Was he alive, or had Suarez killed him somewhere along the trail? Would he be pleased that she was gaining patients? Was he even thinking of her at all?
The baby was born at dusk, a wrinkled but beautiful boy with a fuzz of dark hair. Rafe cried, and then Ella
cried, and then Sage as well, tears streaming down her sweat-sticky cheeks. Then all three of them laughed at themselves and drank a toast of warm milk and whiskey. They named the baby Justin, and Sage rode wearily back to town just as the setting sun turned the sky pink.
She felt good. Tired, yes, but satisfied that she had done her best and it had come out right. This was life itself, she reflected as she guided the horse past the apple orchard. Bringing new life into the world made her feel alive.
And yet…
Down deep inside, in a place so secret most of the time she didn’t know it existed, something called to her. Something thrilling and sweet that bit into her heart.
Cord. Oh, Cord.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The annual July social, held in the maple-tree-dotted meadow next to the Methodist Church, brought the community of Russell’s Landing together for a midsummer celebration. Farm families came with barefoot children crowded into wagons; townsfolk put on their Sunday best and gathered by the tablecloth-swathed trestle tables to gossip and exchange yarns, speculate on the weather, exclaim over new babies.
By the time Sage arrived with her pies, one lemon and one cherry, the speeches were already under way. Her father, the mayor, stood near the wood platform listening to the speakers, his gold pocket watch ostentatiously displayed. When their time was up, he cut them off with a finger drawn across his throat.
Any citizen who had something to say was invited to speak his or her piece, and the speeches never lasted very long. Over the years, community dignitaries and housewives alike had learned not to ramble.
Sage made her way toward the already loaded dessert table, overhearing the tail end of Cal Ollesen’s announcement about new rates for boarding horses at the livery. “Yus’t’ink you all like to know,” Cal finished.
She stopped to hug her father as she passed. Billy squeezed her tightly, but kept one eye on his watch. “You wanna speak about yer office hours, honey-girl?”
“No, Pa. Word seems to be spreading. My patient load is running over.”
“Must be that horse kick you doctored on Arvo’s hip. Why, he all but gave you a testimonial earlier.”
Sage laughed. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell how he refused to unbuckle his trousers and let me inspect the wound!” She kissed her father’s gray-whis-kered cheek. “Until I insisted. Men can be such babies at times!”
High Country Hero Page 14