Denim and Lace

by Rice, Patricia

  That statement wasn't even out of her mouth before men were yelling, "I've got chickens!" "There's flour at the trading post!" "I've been saving those tinned peaches!" And before she could comment, they were off and running.

  It looked like the payment for unloading two wagons was to feed the entire town.

  ***

  "I don't think you ought to go out there just yet, Samantha," Alice Neely protested as she made biscuits from some of the supplies left over from the prior night's meal. "They all seem friendly enough, but you don't know what will happen if you go out there alone."

  Sam knew her mother's real worries without her saying them aloud. Emmanuel Neely's enthusiastic letters had come to a grinding halt the day he left this place. Chances were very good that he never left here alive. If someone in this town had killed him, would that someone hold the same grudge against the entire Neely family?

  It didn't seem likely, but death came so easily out here that it seemed safest to hide from it. Samantha felt the ache of her father's absence, but he had been gone from as much of her life as he had been in it, so she could hide the ache well. She wasn't the dreamer that her father was. She was a provider, and she meant to provide.

  "I'll take a gun belt and a rifle. It isn't likely anyone will bother me. And I suspect it's too early yet for any of them to be up and about. I'll be back before they have time to besiege the house, I promise."

  Alice smiled faintly. "Dr. Ramsey seemed like a gentleman. He seemed quite smitten with you."

  Uneasy with the thought that someone had been watching her when she hadn't known it, Sam shifted from foot to foot, waiting to make her escape. "He doesn't look like any doctor I've ever met."

  "Men are different out here. We'll get used to it, I'm sure."

  Men were the same everywhere, and she would never get used to it, but Samantha nodded obediently and made her escape. Men and thoughts of men made her uncomfortable, but she would feel fine once she was in the saddle with a rifle in her hand. She didn't have to think about men and their sly looks and knowing touches when she was wandering the woods in the early dawn. She could pretend the only living things on God's earth were the birds singing in the trees and the rabbits she meant to have for supper.

  The sun took a long time rising over the mountains, but Sam was content to weave her mount through needle-strewn paths and smell the air. This was her idea of heaven, and she hesitated to disturb it with an explosion of gunfire. Maybe she could meet some Indians who would teach her to use bows and arrows. Somehow, that seemed a much more civilized manner of hunting in these pristine woods.

  So lost in her thoughts was she that she almost didn't see the shadow darting from tree to tree near the clearing ahead. When she did take notice, she narrowed her eyes. No animal she knew moved with such furtive clumsiness. It had to be a man.

  Gripping her rifle carefully, Sam eased her horse off the path and closer to the clearing. Whatever the man watched was in that direction. Perhaps he'd found a pond and ducks. She hadn't had roast duck in a long while. Mouth watering at the thought, she climbed down and tied the horse to a tree, then hid behind a massive evergreen at the clearing's edge.

  Disappointment at not finding a pond almost distracted her from the scene unfolding before her. She knew the other hunter was poised and ready to strike just beyond that other stand of trees. But the only animal to be seen was a horse with a saddle on its back, taking water from a meager stream. These mountains had too much game for any sane man to want to eat horse.

  She was a second too late in realizing another man stood on the far side of that horse. Screaming a warning, Sam aimed her rifle in the direction of the furtive shadow, but her target fired first.

  The horse whinnied in terror, rising up on its hind legs, and crashing down again. Sam sent a bullet winging toward the hidden assailant before he could fire again. The man at the stream got off one shot before he staggered backward, but his attacker had already disappeared. To Sam's horror she could see the man at the stream drop to his knees and lose his grip on his gun while his horse reared and kicked over him.

  Without thinking, she flew into the open clearing. The horse was wild-eyed and prancing too near to the place where the man had gone down. Snorting through red-edged nostrils, it towered over her, tossing its tangled mane. A bigger, meaner-looking stallion she'd never encountered, and it didn't appear to be half-broke. A horse like that could trample a man and never know the difference.

  Catching the horse's reins, Sam stood back, murmuring the soothing words she had learned at her father's knee. She was no stranger to horses. Her father had raised some of the best horses in the country before he decided he'd done his job and needed something new to do.

  The stallion jerked in fear, trying to free itself, but she gentled it with words and touches until it stood shivering but still.

  Then she looked for the wounded man.

  He was on his knees and struggling to rise, but blood seeped through his fingers from the wound in his shoulder. He was the biggest man she'd ever had the misfortune to come across, or perhaps just the idea of being this close and needing to help him exaggerated his size. Whatever it was, it made her heart squeeze into her throat and block her breathing as she crouched down beside him.

  "Put your arm around me. We've got to get you into the saddle."

  Eyes of icy gray and muddied with pain turned to study her with contempt. Her eyes were almost on a level with his when she kneeled beside him, giving some indication of her height. But she was slender, no bigger than a gangly youth, and his expression conveyed his opinion of her offer. "I'll manage. Just go back to where you came from."

  Shocked at his rudeness, Sam thought she really ought to do just that. Perhaps she ought to shove him over and make him work a little harder just for the meanness of it. But it wasn't in her nature to ignore the injured or hurt the helpless. Smiling unpleasantly, she grabbed the handkerchief he was pulling from his pocket and applied it firmly to the wound.

  "I can see why they took a shot at you. Hold that tight so it doesn't bleed so much." Without asking, she grabbed his good arm and hauled it around her shoulders to help him stand.

  He was heavy; there was no getting around that. She staggered as his weight shifted to her shoulders when they stood up. She thought he might be deliberately giving her all his weight until she glanced up to see his eyes closed against the pain. He couldn't bend his wounded arm to hold the cloth to it, and blood poured down the sleeve of his dark shirt.

  The amount of blood made her waver, but the cynical flicker of his eyelids as she hesitated straightened Sam's spine. "I can't get you into that saddle. Is there any place close I can take you until I can get help?"

  He gave her a wary look. Even wearing her usual checkered shirt and vest, it was evident up close that she wasn't a boy. Sam waited as he took in this fact and nodded slowly. She breathed a sigh of relief that he no longer rejected her help.

  "Cabin up the path. I can make it."

  Sure, and hell had tulips, but Sam didn't mouth that sentiment out loud. Wishing she'd had the sense to bind the wound before she'd lifted him, she moved her feet in the direction indicated. Tending the wounded had always been her mother's job. She didn't have much experience at it.

  Concentrating on the task ahead, neither of them spoke as they staggered up the dusty path into the pine woods. If the gunman was still around, they would make splendid targets, but he had obviously run at the first sign of a witness. That was one thing in her favor, Sam counted as she shuffled along with the stranger's heavy weight across her shoulders. She couldn't think of any others to count right off hand. Not crumpling to the ground might make number two.

  Muttering to herself in this manner, she managed to distance herself enough from the task to reach the cabin. It wasn't more than a collection of split logs, but it offered shelter of sorts. It hadn't seemed quite humane to leave the man lying on the ground while she went for help.

  He collapsed on a lo
w pallet strung to the walls. He'd closed his eyes again, and the dark shock of curls falling across his forehead made his skin seem pale. Nervously, Sam pulled the handkerchief from his dangling hand and tried to apply it to the gaping hole in his shoulder, but blood had matted the shirt and his skin, and she couldn't be certain what she was doing.

  "I've got to get help. I don't know what to do." She didn't even have a petticoat to rip up and use for bandages. What did men use when caught unprepared? Their shirts. Flushing at that thought, she glanced around helplessly for likely clothes.

  "Get my shirt off. Use the clean side to wrap it." His words were more a moan than a order, but the effect was the same.

  Setting her teeth, Sam ripped at the buttons of his shirt, surprised at the expensive black cambric beneath her fingers, but distracted by the amount of man revealed when the buttons popped open.

  Her father was the only man she'd ever seen partially undressed, and this man looked nothing like her father. Dark hair curled on a broad chest that appeared made of steel for all that it was tanned a burnished brown. A ripple of pain moved through the muscles beneath her hand as she pulled at the shirt, and she nearly jerked her hand away in fear.

  This would work a whole lot better if she could close her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she peeled the shirt off his good arm. If she could only tear it off his back, it might be easy, but this was good cloth and not easily torn.

  "You're going to have to sit up. I can't get this off you otherwise."

  He didn't waste breath on words, but used his good arm to prop himself up, allowing her to pull the shirt around him. When it reached the matted blood on his shoulder, he cursed, and Sam halted.

  Dropping back to the pallet, he opened his eyes and gave her a look of disgust, then grabbed the shirt from her hands. With a single rip he tore the shirt from the wound and off his other arm.

  "There's a knife in my boot. Cut the shirt in half and wrap it tight around my shoulder. That should stop the bleeding."

  If it wasn't obvious that he was fighting unconsciousness, Sam would have told him what he could do with his knife. She didn't take orders easily, and she certainly didn't take them from men who looked at her as if she were little more than a mindless lump of lead. But he apparently knew what he was doing, and she didn't, so she took his words and applied them to action.

  He grunted with pain when she had to move him to get the shirt around his shoulder, but he clenched his teeth and kept silent as she tied the shirt and pulled it as tightly as she could manage around the padding of his handkerchief.

  "That'll do. Ride back and get Injun Joe. Give him a pot of coffee before he comes up here. He'll take care of the rest."

  Sam looked doubtful. It was obvious the stranger was about to pass out from pain and loss of blood. What he needed was a doctor and not an Indian medicine man. "Injun Joe? The old Indian? He doesn't look like he can ride. Why don't I get Dr. Ramsey?"

  The man grimaced. "Ramsey won't come. The old Indian is Chief Coyote." He pronounced the word Ki-oat. "Coyote can tell you where to find Joe."

  Sam wasn't going to argue with a man in the process of bleeding to death. Without a word she ran out of the cabin and toward the horses waiting in the clearing.

  Her patient lay breathing heavily into the silence the patter of her departing feet left behind. He didn't know who the hell she was or what kind of woman wore pants, but he would remember that anxious look in stunning blue eyes for the rest of his days. It had been a long time since anyone had looked at him with anything resembling concern, and he knew full well that those eyes would never look the same at him again once she reached town.

  As the pain came to claim him, he savored the picture of riotous red curls and young breasts pressed against thin gingham. Maybe they were making women different these days. He'd have to live to find out.

  Chapter Three

  “The only man likely to be out there at this time of day is Sloan Talbott. What did he look like?"

  Sam had obviously woke the doctor from a hangover. His face was unshaven, and he wore only a wool undershirt over a pair of pants he had hastily donned and hadn't fastened. He rubbed at eyes bleary from lack of sleep and shoved a hank of hair out of his face. Samantha strived to keep her patience. "He's bigger than you, with dark, curly hair. What does that matter? He's going to bleed to death unless someone helps him." She tried not to think about the hated name the doctor had mentioned. She couldn't hate a man who was very likely dying. She couldn't even think straight with the urgency of the situation.

  "That's Talbott. Let him die. The world will be a better place." Without further explanation, Ramsey shut the door in her face.

  Samantha stared at the closed door with incredulity. People didn't behave like that where she came from. She pounded on the door futilely for a full minute before giving in to the realization that he wasn't coming back.

  She could haul him out of there at gunpoint, but the journey here hadn't hardened her to that extent. A man held at gunpoint wasn't likely to be very helpful in any case.

  Sloan Talbott. Damn, but she should have known. Mean, hateful, wretched excuse for a human being that he obviously was, she still couldn't let him just die like that. If she meant to kill him, she wanted him to know why.

  Furious, scared, Sam ran across the plaza to her mother. She didn't even know where to find Chief Coyote or Injun Joe, and neither one of them seemed likely candidates for healing.

  A few minutes later, she was staring at her mother with equal incredulity. "Me? You want me to go back there? What am I going to do?"

  "Whatever is necessary. I'll give you some supplies and send Jefferson out to find your Indian or whatever. If he needs to have coffee poured into him, it's going to be a while before he can get up there. It doesn't sound like the man can last that long."

  "But you know how to do these things. I don't. Let me find Chief Coyote while you go tend to him."

  "I don't know where he is, and you know I don't ride. This is the only way. Find a basket while I get some bandages."

  Lord God in Heaven please help and guide her because she was going to need every ounce of strength and patience she possessed to go back up there again. Samantha prayed with every terse instruction and new medicine added to the basket. She might tend a lame horse or help birth a new calf, but she had never tended to a human being before, and particularly not one as big and mean and ornery as this one. She would rather face the gunman in the woods than her patient.

  But within minutes she was riding out with her basket of supplies tied to the saddle and her rifle in her hand. She would take great pleasure in shooting at anyone who might interfere in hopes that it might be the sneaking bastard who had gotten her into this mess. And if she didn't find the bastard, she just might shoot the man in the cabin and put him out of his misery.

  He had looked at her as if she were lower than a worm in an apple. He had talked to her as though she were a bumbling idiot. He hadn't shown the slightest iota of gratitude for her aid. From what she understood, he ought to be grateful that she had even bothered to try and warn him. She could have just let the gunman kill him.

  Muttering to herself, Sam battened down her courage until she was angry enough to face the miserable wretch when she reached the cabin. The prospect of opening the door and finding him dead was a trifle daunting, but she would never know by standing outside.

  Kicking open the door with her foot and keeping her hands firmly on her rifle and basket of supplies, she carefully scanned the interior before entering. The room was too small to hide anyone. Propping a boot stand against the door to hold it open and give her light, she approached the bed.

  He looked to be asleep. A beard heavier than the doctor's shaded his jaw. She could see now that his hair was more brown than black, but it was curlier and shaggier than her own. She grinned at that. She hated her curls, but at least women were supposed to have curls. She bet he took a lot of ribbing for his.

  The bleeding seemed
to have stopped, but her mother had said it would start again when she removed the bandage. It seemed to her it would make sense to leave the bandage on instead of disturbing it, but there was more than likely dirt in the wound, and it had to be cleaned. She glanced nervously at his back. Her mother had said she ought to find a hole behind his shoulder where the bullet came out, and if she didn't, the bullet would have to be removed. She didn't see a second hole, but the shirt might cover it.

  She tried to unwrap the makeshift bandage as gently as possible, but when she pulled it away, he groaned and opened his eyes.

  "Where's Injun Joe?" Pain laced his words, but they came out as cantankerous as he intended.

  "Jack's gone to look for him. I didn't think it wise to leave this untended until he could get here."

  That was unarguable. Grimacing, he lay back against the bed. "You can't cut the bullet out. Just douse it with alcohol and tie it back again."

  One thing you didn't say to a Neely was "can't." The last time Sam had heard that word, she'd tied and roped a cow faster than the half-wit who had said she couldn't. And heaven only knew, their house had been littered with the inventions her father had created when he'd been told things like he couldn't pump hot water into a sink or churn butter without hands. No Neely turned down a challenge.

  "You want to drink this before I use it?" Samantha handed him the full bottle of whiskey with one hand while producing a scalpel from her basket with the other.

  Sloan looked at the scalpel, up at her, then reached for the bottle. He drained a goodly portion of the liquid in a few gulps and handed it back.

  "Do you know what you're doing?"

  "Nope." Cheerfully, Sam stuck the scalpel into the whiskey bottle and swished the instrument around as her mother had told her to do. She was beginning to enjoy this game now that she knew him as the man who had driven her father out of town.

  He looked obligingly furious at her good humor, but saved his breath for important things. "Have you got anything in there to pack the wound? You'll not see a blamed thing when I'm bleeding like a stuck pig."