“Heidi, pour some of my whiskey, please, then give me the bottle.”
As the young woman did as he asked, he used the last few drops from the other bottle Victoria must have dropped and cleaned his knife, glad he’d been frustrated enough on this trip to spend time sharpening the blade.
He could feel both women watching him. “I’ve done this procedure before, Victoria.”
“W-with a knife?” Heidi asked. “How’re you going to stop the bleeding with a blade like that?”
He noted that Heidi had apparently cut a slit in the breeches Victoria wore and tied strips of buckskin to either side of the slit, obviously so she could treat the wound more easily.
He untied the strips and pulled them back, then gently unwound the cloth covering the wound. What he saw made his blood chill. “Doctor, how many panther-claw wounds have you treated?” He looked up at her and saw her face pale further.
“We didn’t get any of those. Are you going to teach me another thing or two?”
“They lick themselves, and they eat a lot of things—”
She raised a hand, her movements graceful even under these circumstances. “That’s enough information for me. My stomach is already weak.”
Doing as Matthew had once done with him, Joseph doused his hands with whiskey and reached for the wound. He felt Victoria stiffen, but when he looked down into her eyes they held trust and determination.
“Holler if you have to,” he said. “I need to get these shavings out, and I might have to cut out some bad flesh. I promise what I have will be more comfortable than shavings. Heidi, I brought more supplies. You’ll find some clean cloths in the right saddlebag.”
He was reaching for the wound to pull out the packing when the clatter of horse hooves along the creek bed echoed from behind. One horse. “Heidi, get behind a tree. Quickly!”
She did as she was told while he leaned over Victoria to cover her body with his. There was no time to go for his rifle.
But there was no need. He recognized Deacon Fritz’s piebald mare as she raced into sight from the creek bend, splattering through the water. Deacon’s hat was pulled down low over his head.
He was avoiding a trail. Joseph didn’t like the looks of this.
The mare was winded when Deacon pulled her to a stop, but he didn’t get off. “You two ladies are hard to follow.”
“Meant to be,” Heidi said.
“That’s a good thing, but you can’t stop now. Doctor, how bad are you hurt?”
“She’s not good, Deacon,” Joseph said.
“Can she keep traveling? We’ve got us four men on horseback coming this way. I found some locals who told me they’ve seen rough riders patrolling the road through Jolly Mill for wagon trains headed to Kansas. We were right. There’s bad blood.”
“How far back are the riders?” Joseph asked.
“Not sure. I’ve been leading ’em on a maze. You know how hard it is to follow one trail and leave a different one? I’d say they’re at least a mile back.”
“You think they’re bushwhackers?” Unable to wait any longer, Joseph covered Victoria’s mouth with one hand and used the old bandage to ease out as much of the packing as he could. When Victoria groaned, he apologized and kept working.
“This bleeding has to stop now for her to survive, Deacon. We can’t leave yet. Take Heidi and the animals and follow the creek.”
“You think I’m going to leave you two behind?” Deacon shook his head.
“No!” Heidi pulled the bandages from Joseph’s saddlebag and ran to Victoria. “We’ll hurry. We’ll get this wrapped and take you with us.”
“No time,” Joseph said. He took the cloths from Heidi and laid a hand on her arm. “You did a good job, child, but I have other work for you now. Deacon can lead my borrowed horse and I’ll take Boaz into the woods with Victoria. My horse knows how to be quiet, and if you make the tracks obvious, those men will track you instead of us.”
“I think we can stay ahead of them,” Deacon said.
“No, please.” Heidi’s face puckered and tears trickled down her cheeks. “I can’t leave her. I can help. I’ll do anything you tell me to.”
“Then divert the riders,” Joseph said. “Keep them off our trail. That’s what we need most from you right now. You could be saving her life.”
“Directions?” Deacon asked.
“You’ll reach Capps Creek in a mile or so. It feeds into this one. Follow Capps upstream a mile and you’ll reach Jolly Mill. If you move fast enough, you’ll reach town before they can catch up.” He hastily cleaned the wound with whiskey and pulled out fresh bandages. “You’d better get the wagons out of sight as soon as you get there. Tell the others to pull out as if they’re headed east. They’ll encounter less resistance if they’re perceived to be leaving Kansas instead of entering. Then have them circle around and camp in the forest above the creek. No fires. No noise.”
“Got it, Captain. Anybody find the doc’s friends?”
“Not before I left, but if they have I daresay Buck and Francine will know what to do to help you, show you where to hide. They’d be prepared.”
Deacon nodded. “Let’s get on up the way, girl. And muzzle that donkey of yours. We’ll keep a pace so fast he won’t be able to run and breathe at the same time. We’ve got to warn the others.”
“Let him bray,” Joseph said. “You can muzzle him later, once the riders are past us.”
Deacon and Heidi prepared to leave as Heidi’s arguments echoed from the rock ledge above the creek, but she did as she was told.
Joseph wrapped the bandage as tightly as he could. But even then, there was no groan. As Deacon and Heidi rushed the animals up Shoal Creek, Victoria went limp in his arms.
* * *
The sound of birdsong reached Victoria just before she heard the rumble of male voices in the distance. The words were unclear, and she soon realized this was because everything around her was indistinct except for the faint fishy smell of nearby rushing water, the scent of wood smoke and wild mint that often characterized Joseph’s presence and the comforting aroma of horse.
She recalled Joseph stuffing her mouth with cloth and going to work on her leg right there on the creek bank. She recalled the warning they’d received from Deacon before she lost the mental coordination she needed to digest his message. Danger. They could be in danger. Or they already were. What had happened?
Her leg ached, but not as sharply as it had hurt all day. The scent of clove oil engulfed her. Comfort. After the initial pain, the mild disinfectant had lessened the pain. She opened her eyes and found herself being held firmly in Joseph’s arms. When she tried to move, his arms tightened around her and his hand came over her mouth. His mouth found her ear, and he shushed her.
Confused, she shivered despite the situation. She was far too affected by Joseph Rickard, but she didn’t have a choice. Not in her condition. She tried to pull away and ask what was happening, but he answered before she could ask. “Wait,” he whispered. “Wait until the men are gone, and pray they follow the right trail.”
Her chest squeezed and she found herself praying, despite the fact that less than—what, an hour ago?—she’d been near to taking her life into her own hands by berating Him again. He would not answer her prayers, but she continued to pray. After all these months of silence, she’d not forgotten how to pray, but the words that continued to sound in her heart were, “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”
What would the Almighty think of a person who only came to Him when told to do so? She’d not called on Him after the panther attack, only when reminded by Joseph to pray.
She prayed a few seconds longer and then she stopped. He’d mentioned a trail. She opened her eyes and studied the forest around them but she saw no trail, only juniper and pine trees surrounding them. She looked up to see Boaz hovering nearby, head lowered as if he, too, was praying. As she watched, the horse lowered himself to his knees and then lay on the ground.
Joseph leaned
forward again, lips against Victoria’s ear, and once again she felt a shiver that had nothing to do with any physical danger, nor with the fever that heated her skin.
“The bleeding’s stopped,” he said.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, surprised. What was this? An answer to prayer? “You’re sure?”
“Nothing more has come through the potato starch.”
Could she trust it? Of course, she wasn’t out of danger yet. None of them were. “What will happen to Deacon and Heidi if those men catch up with them?”
“You don’t know how long you’ve been out, do you?”
She blinked up into his dark eyes, made darker still by the shadow of his hat low over his forehead. “Couldn’t have been long.”
“Those loud-mouthed men know nothing about tracking and seem to be slow about their business of pillaging, raiding and burning those not of their political persuasion.”
Victoria heard the contempt in Joseph’s voice through the roaring in her ears. She glanced upward and silently apologized once again for her mistreatment of the Almighty. She needed to beg Him for mercy, not ostracize Him with her anger.
Joseph touched her hair and brushed it back from her face. “Are you feeling ill?”
She nodded. She also felt terrified, ashamed, overwhelmed. She needed distraction. “The men are gone?”
“They aren’t within hearing now. They’re tracking Deacon and Heidi. If they’re lost, though, they could come back this way. I’m waiting until I know for sure they’re gone.”
“I’m sorry for dragging you into this.”
“I dragged myself into it.”
“I didn’t mean for you to.” She swallowed and closed her eyes but she opened them again quickly, because the dizziness affected her stomach.
“I know.”
“I knew when Heidi showed up that you wouldn’t leave without her.”
“I wouldn’t have left without you.” He peered through the trees toward the creek. “How could I, Victoria? I love you.”
Her breath caught and held. “You seem able to say those words with ease.” She was beginning to believe, after all this time and all the doubts she’d experienced, that he truly meant what he said. Though if he didn’t, life would have been less complicated.
“I said the same words the day I left you in St. Louis. I meant them.” He turned to glance at her for a few seconds before returning to his study of the creek. “Maybe not as much as I mean them now.”
She tried to sit up, but her stomach churned. “We’ve danced around the subject for five weeks, and there’s never seemed to be time to talk.”
“I had the impression you didn’t want to talk.”
She took a deep breath through her nose and tried to calm her stomach. Must not make any sudden movements. “I’ve wanted answers for a decade, but when you showed up I wasn’t sure I still wanted them.”
“Do you now?”
“The way I feel right now, I’m not sure I would remember what we said.” She paused to breathe slowly. “When I heard about your engagement, I felt you simply loved me less than you loved your father’s ambitions for you. Or...that you truly loved the woman you were called upon to marry.” She said it lightly, but her heart seemed to beat through every word. He mattered far too much to her, and even though she knew her words were those of a desperate woman, and not something she would say if she were completely in control, she needed to say them. What if she didn’t survive this? He should know the truth, shouldn’t he? She felt ashamed to feel so in need of Joseph’s reassurance. Ashamed and vulnerable. It was an awful feeling.
“I can’t believe you have doubts now, after all this time,” he told her gently. “Why do you think I avoided seeing you and Matthew together?”
“What about those letters I never received? What...did you write to me?”
“I explained that no matter what you might hear, I was not going to marry Sara Jane, my lifelong neighbor and childhood friend.”
“You cared for her?”
“She was like a sister.”
“So you wouldn’t...you wouldn’t have married her even if she’d lived?” Her head pounded and she swallowed back the nausea again. Now was not the time for this conversation.
He turned to look at her, frowning. “Victoria?” He touched her forehead. “Your skin’s getting hotter.”
“I know. Tell me about Sara Jane. I need to be distracted right now.”
He moistened a cloth and placed it over her face. “It was always you.” His voice was tender, filled with compassion. “I never loved anyone else the way I love you. I would never have married Sara Jane. My father was ill. He made the announcement of our engagement without consulting either of us. He and Sara Jane’s father made the plans without us. The first I heard of it was when Sara Jane came riding like wildfire to the house to beg me to put a stop to it. That’s when she told me she was secretly engaged to a man in Atlanta.” Joseph studied the terrain past the trees again. “The announcement Matthew received about my engagement was from my father, not from me.”
“She was going to be married.” For some reason, tears burned Victoria’s eyes. “She was in love?”
“With a good man, but not with me.”
“And then she died.” Victoria never cried over sad stories like this. But the tears dripped down her face. She dabbed at them, sniffed. She had never felt so awful in her life.
Joseph held her hair away from her face, lifting it from her shoulders. “You’re overwrought because of your fever. We need to cool you down.”
“I wondered why you wrote to Matthew and not to me,” she said.
“I know. I sent you letters as well, many more than I sent to Matthew. At the time, I believed you never wrote back because you no longer cared. All I received from you was silence.”
“If I’d only known.”
Chapter Thirteen
Frustration slammed through Joseph like the kick of a mule. He had suspected for many years that Matthew had somehow intercepted the letters to Victoria so she would believe she’d been abandoned by the man she loved. But even as he’d suspected, he’d known Matthew too well to truly believe it.
“I picked up the clinic mail most days,” Victoria said, her words a little slurred by the effects of fever. And the tears. “What else did you tell me in the letters?”
Memories combined like burrs under a saddle for a long moment. “Everything.”
She leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. “Oh,” she said on a sigh.
“I asked you to wait. I told you all about Sara Jane and our childhood friendship and the trick our fathers pulled on us. I told you when she died and how I grieved her death.”
“You loved her as a sister.”
“I was devastated when she died, but never because I wanted to marry her. I wanted her to marry her beau and pull out from under her overbearing father’s fat, greedy thumb. Her death was only one incident that helped me decide to leave the family plantation for good. I told my father I was going to marry you.”
“Did you tell Matthew about any of this?”
“No. I knew how he felt and I didn’t want to rub salt in his wounds. He knew you and I were in love.”
“How could the letters have been lost? It isn’t as if you sent them all at the same time.” She looked up at him. “Where did you send them from?”
Joseph held her feverish gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes. Now that he knew the truth—that Matthew had not intercepted the letters and Victoria had never received them—he realized who had sabotaged their delivery. “Cleophas Rickard.”
“Your father?”
“He was a man accustomed to getting his way.”
“You posted your letters with him?”
“I didn’t think about it at the time, but yes. Or rather, I might just as well have.” Joseph fought back frustrated resentment as the reality of his loss settled into him.
“I suppose he had servants...slaves.
..do that.”
“My father had a young houseboy, Robert, who was at his beck and call all hours of the day and night. He slept at the foot of my father’s bed. I often left to post my own mail and poor Robert would be told to race to catch up with me and do the mailing for me. I would have preferred to send him away to play at the creek with friends, but I knew he might receive punishment for that, so I allowed him to stay busy.”
“You think your father had your letters destroyed.”
Joseph had been brought up not to speak ill of the dead, especially not his father. But anger held him captive. “I was wrong not to suspect something was up when you didn’t at least return greetings to me when I wrote to you, but I thought you were angry.”
“If I had received those letters...” She shook her head. The tears had stopped falling. “I’d have thought you and Matthew would communicate better.”
“I didn’t write to Matthew about you, and he seldom mentioned you in his letters. His posts were all about some new medical technique he had learned or a new medicine he’d begun to use on patients.”
“We both thought you had settled in Georgia for good.”
Joseph knew it must have been very difficult for Matthew to resist Victoria, especially when she wasn’t receiving word from the man she loved. “I regret to say that I held much resentment against Matthew for so many years.”
But the end result was that his love for her had been preserved, and right now he didn’t care why. God worked in amazing ways, and who was to say that God’s work, this time, had been as successful as always to bring about His will in the lives of His people.
“I knew of your frustration with family expectations,” Victoria said. Her voice was hoarse and her face had grown crimson.
Joseph picked up the wet cloth and remoistened it with whiskey. “I think you’re dehydrated. You need to drink.”
She took the cloth from him and used it to moisten her neck. “I don’t think I could hold any water in my stomach. When can we leave? The men haven’t come back this way.”
He desperately wanted to leave. He wanted to pick Victoria up and carry her to the creek and douse her to lower her temperature. “Not yet. I want to get you out of here as soon as possible, but we can’t take the chance yet.”
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