Annika heard Wilson and Kase in the hallway. Relieved that Patsy would soon be gone and Buttons would be safe, Annika told him, “Go and tell her good-bye, Buck. We’ll go upstairs with Rose.”
IT was the longest climb of his life. Buck mounted the stairs slowly, still favoring his injured leg. He found Annika and Buttons in Rose Storm’s room, Annika seated on a rocking chair drawn up beside the bed as she talked softly with her sister-in-law. He paused for a moment to stand unnoticed in the open doorway so that he could watch her for what would be the last time. She smiled as she reached down to pat the new baby on its well-padded, blanketed behind.
“Are you feeling all right, Rose?”
“Sí. Thanks to your friend Buck, I am good. So is Joseph. I still think about what might happen to me if he did not come here. I am grateful to him and to you.”
Buck saw Annika hesitate, hated the sadness that crept across her face and darkened her radiant smile. “Yes, I’m glad he was here to help, too.”
Before she could say anything else, Buck cleared his throat and both women looked in his direction. “I came to see how you’re doing, Mrs. Storm, but it looks like you’re doing fine.”
Rose smiled up at him. Her color was good, her eyes clear. She even looked rested. Rose had twisted her long hair into a single braid that hung over one shoulder as she lay propped up against a barrage of pillows. The simple hairstyle reminded him of the way Annika had plaited hers at Blue Creek before she went to bed at night. It was a far cry from the upswept hairdo she had assumed now that she had returned to civilization.
“You just tell your own doctor about those stitches, ma’am, and he’ll see to them and take them out when the time comes.”
Rose colored bright red at the mention of such a delicate matter, but nodded all the same. “Sí, I will do this, Mr. Scott.”
He forced himself to cross the highly polished floor, to tread the thick Persian carpet in the center of the room with his weathered moccasins to stand close to Annika. He looked at Joseph and smiled. The little boy was one thing he could be proud of.
“Will you hold him?” Rose asked.
He heard a soft, choking sound from Annika, but dared not look at her again. He shook his head and thrust his hands in his pockets. “No, that’s fine. I wouldn’t want to upset the little fellow. Is he eating all right?”
“Like his papa,” Rose said with a laugh. “Hungry all the time.”
“From the looks of him, he’ll be a tall one.” Buck felt out of his element standing in the cozy atmosphere of the bedroom while he made small talk with another man’s wife. He found himself wanting to turn and walk out the door and out of the house without a word to Annika Storm, but he knew he couldn’t give in to his cowardice and simply disappear. He turned to her, found her staring up at him with round blue eyes filled with hope and love that he knew he didn’t deserve.Not now. Especially not now, when he knew full well he was going to leave her.
“Will you walk me out to the barn?” he asked Annika.
The rocker stopped but she continued to stare up at him as if she were memorizing every bit of him, his unruly hair and every black-and-blue corner of his face. She didn’t answer him, merely nodded, then stood up and began to walk out of the room. Annika paused in the doorway and spoke softly to Buttons. “Stay here with Rose, will you, Buttons, and be very quiet, because Joseph is asleep.”
“Me go, too, Buck?” Buttons looked up from where she was piling wooden spools into a lopsided triangle.
He turned to Annika for help, but she quickly looked away. “No, you stay here. Annika will be right back,” he promised the child.
When he turned back to face her, Annika had already disappeared down the hall. He heard her muffled footsteps on the stairs.
SHE had promised herself she would not cry.
But promises are made to be broken, she decided, as tear tracks stained her cheeks. The wind blew across the open land, and because she had forgotten her coat, Annika wrapped her arms about her and rubbed her hands up and down to warm herself. She walked ahead of Buck like a condemned man as they approached the barn. Late afternoon shadows filled the interior of the huge, open building that smelled of hay, horses, and dust. The men were still working; one could be seen across the stable yard repairing the broken corral gate. The barn was deserted when Annika walked inside and moved far enough away from the entrance so that they would be hidden by shadows.
She refused to say anything more to try to change his mind. She had already all but begged, and begging was something she was not about to do. Strength came to her as she thought of her mother, knowing Analisa would do the same under the circumstances. Recalling her mother’s stand against the ridicule of her neighbors would keep her own spine stiff and her hands from reaching out to Buck. He would remember her for her strength and stubbornness if nothing else—she was determined of that as she stood waiting in the deepening shadows.
He walked over to the stall where his big-rumped bay was stabled. She waited while he slipped on the bridle and then saddled the horse. It gave her time to wipe her tears and straighten the wisps of hair that had escaped the upswept style. Her fingers touched a dangling hairpin and she shoved it back into place. Glancing down, she noticed her bright yellow button shoes were muddy.
“Annika?” He was standing before her, turning his big hat over and over in his tanned hands.
“Well,” she said, drawing in a deep breath, standing straight and tall, “I suppose this is good-bye.”
He looked taken aback for a moment, as if he had actually expected her to weep and wail and cling to him. Then he said, “I guess it is.”
She held out her hand. “Then I wish you well, Buck Scott. It has been quite an adventure for me. I hope it wasn’t all bad for you.”
“Annika, I—”
“And there’s no need to worry about Buttons.” Before he could say or do anything to shake her false courage, she interrupted him. “Rose and Kase have asked to have her, and I’m sure you can see she will have the best home any little girl could want.” As if I could give her up now. She heard herself speaking in a clear, steady voice and wondered how it could be so when she felt as if she were breaking into millions of tiny cells that would soon dry up and blow away on the Wyoming wind.
It gave her satisfaction to see him fidget with the reins he held loosely between his fingers. She was thankful for the weak light—it helped to hide the tears that still threatened.
“I’m so sorry, Annika. I wish it could be another way.”
“No you don’t,” she said. “If you did, you would believe me when I say I’m willing to try to live wherever you want, instead of telling me you know what’s right for me.”
He put on his hat. It covered his shining curls and cloaked his face in shadow. He took down his heavy jacket from where he had thrown it over his saddle and shrugged into it.
She raised her hand to touch the curls that fell over the back of his collar but drew it back before he noticed.
He wanted to kiss her good-bye. She knew it by the tension in his stance, his hesitation about leaving.
She wanted his kiss more than life itself at the moment, but she knew it would hurt forever if she let him touch her. This way she stood a chance of forgetting.
Annika stepped back, a silent signal for him to go.
Buck hesitated for a moment more, then walked his horse out of the barn.
She watched him mount up, stood ramrod straight with her arms clutched about her as he rode out of the yard without a backward glance. She could still see the top of his hat and his broad shoulders silhouetted against the sunset as he made his way past the bunkhouse and then the buffalo corral. It was a portrait of times past and present, the buffalo hunter outlined against the setting sun with the last few milling buffalo appearing as dark, nearly undefinable shadows in the foregound.
Annika waited until he was nearly out of sight before she dropped her arms and let her shoulders slump. Then, she picked
up her skirt and started running.
Her yellow boots were not made to travel over lumps of last year’s dried buffalo grass and mud, but still she ran. Nearly falling facedown in the muddy earth, she let go of her skirt, stepped on the hem, then caught herself. Sobbing openly now, she raced on, away from the setting sun, away from the sight of Buck Scott’s silhouette growing smaller and smaller on the horizon, running until she reached the small knoll with the twisted cottonwoods where her brother’s babies had been buried.
There, heartbroken, Annika sank to the earth and buried her face in her skirt. She cried for Buttons, who would never see her uncle again, for Patsy with her demented mind, for Buck who had forced himself to give up his niece so that she would have the best life had to offer.
But most of all she cried for herself because Buck Scott had not believed in the power of their love.
26
BUCK kicked his horse and rode toward the blazing orange and gold sky, forced himself to look directly into the sunset, and tried, unsuccessfully, to tell himself that was the reason his eyes burned with unshed tears. The mountain peaks to the northwest—hulking gray shadows against the intense sun—stood hunched together like the humped backs of Kase Storm’s buffalo.
Just as she had done since the moment he’d first laid eyes on her, Annika Storm had just surprised him. He had expected her to argue with him one more time, to lay out all the reasons why he should stay and change his ways, take up her foolish notion that he could be educated and pronounced a doctor without a lick of trouble; it would be easier to change a leopard’s spots. But she hadn’t argued, nor had she asked him to take her with him, and that surprised him, too. She hadn’t insisted he say good-bye to Buttons, either.
Hell, come to think of it, she’d practically waved him on his way like a distant relative who had overstayed his visit.
Buck took a swipe at the irritating moisture in his eyes and pulled his collar up against the wind. It might be May, but the nights could get downright cold once the sun set, so he planned to be in Busted Heel by dark. He also planned to be downright drunk within an hour of his arrival.
One thing about getting down-and-out drunk—waking up the next day was a little like being reborn. Everything that had gone on the night before always seemed a little groggier, a little more distant. It was that distance that he craved.
While he had not been paying it any mind the sky had transformed itself from hues of yellow, gold, and orange to soft reds and pinks with streaks of violet. The underbellies of the high, scattered clouds were tinted red. Movement a mile down the narrow road drew his attention, and as he galloped toward it, the outline of a black buggy took shape against the weakening light. As the buggy drew nearer he slowed his pace, curious who might be heading toward the Storm ranch this time of day.
His initial thought was that it might be Richard Thexton returning to apologize to Annika and try to win his way back into her favor. Buck frowned at the thought. He had relinquished all claim to her when he left, but the thought of pasty-faced, buttoned-up Richard Thexton ever taking his anger and spite out on Annika again would make him turn around in an instant. Even if he couldn’t claim Annika for his own, he wasn’t about to let Richard take advantage of her.
Buck all but stopped in his tracks as the buggy neared and he was able to make out the shape of a man in a tweed suit trying to negotiate the vehicle over the badly rutted road. When the buggy was but a few yards distant, Buck saw that the man driving was not Thexton. He waited, nearly blocking the road, with one hand resting on his rifle in the fringed scabbard hanging from his saddle. He nudged his horse off the road to make room for the buggy and the driver slowed to a halt. The covered buggy looked weathered and well used.
“Been out to the Storm ranch, by any chance?” The man in the rumpled tweed suit stared up at Buck from behind round spectacles. His curly brown hair stuck out from beneath a bowler hat that had been pulled too far down on his forehead. As he waited for Buck to answer, he grabbed a top coat off the floorboards and set it on the cracked leather seat beside him. Even in the receding light, Buck recognized the black instrument bag that the coat had hidden from view.
“You the doctor?” Buck asked.
“That I am. Doctor Richard Earhart. On my way to see Mrs. Storm. You been out to the ranch looking for work?”
Buck could tell by the quick once-over the man gave him that the good doctor doubted someone like Buck might have been visiting the Storms. “Yeah. I been there. Mrs. Storm had her baby yesterday.”
Earhart’s face fell immediately. “Everything all right? Did it live?”
Buck nodded. “It’s a boy—healthy as a horse. You might want to take a look at Mrs. Storm’s stitches.” He would have given anything just then for a photograph of the doctor’s face at that moment.
“Who delivered her?”
“I did.”
“And she’s fine?”
“Believe it or not.”
An unmistakable look of relief washed over the doctor’s face. He put his thumb under the brim of his hat and pushed it back off his forehead. “Well, that’s great news. Great news! Congratulations in succeeding where I’ve failed before, young man.” He slapped his thighs. “When I rode into Busted Heel and found out Kase had come for me I felt terrible. Nothing to be done for it, though, I had to go clear into Cheyenne for supplies and stop off at three ranches on the way back. Not another doctor around between here and the Montana border. Spend most of my time driving over hill and dale only to do too little too late.” He picked up the reins and threaded them through his fingers.
With no reason to linger, Buck kneed his horse away from the buggy.
“What’d you say your name was?” Dr. Earhart called out.
“I didn’t, but it’s Buck Scott.”
“Well, Buck Scott, I could use a good assistant, if for nothing else but delivering babies. It’d free my hands for emergencies.”
A chill ran down Buck’s spine. If he didn’t know better he would have suspected Annika was behind the man’s sudden appearance. He looked at the emptiness surrounding them. The sun was completely gone, the land and sky turned gray. “I’m not a doctor,” Buck said. “I’m a buffalo man.”
Earhart barked out a laugh again. “Since when did that stop anyone west of the Mississippi from doctoring if they had half a mind to? Shoot, I’ve seen a veterinarian take out an appendix and I knew a seamstress who shoved a man’s intestines back in and sewed him up clean as a whistle.” He flicked the reins and his horse lurched forward. His coat slid to the floorboards again. As he pulled away from Buck he called out over his shoulder, “It’d beat chasing after buffalo that aren’t around anymore, son.”
Riding as if all the hounds of hell were after him, Buck kicked his horse again and bent low over his neck, pushing the big bay toward Busted Heel. But even the familiar cadence of hoofbeats and the creaking leather saddle couldn’t drown out the doctor’s parting words.
“BUY me a drink, mister?”
Buck straightened up, pushed away from bar, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. A blond—young in years but wise behind her eyes—stood as close to him as possible and leaned one elbow against the bar. One feathered strap of her frilly lavender chemise dropped low off her shoulder. He didn’t say a word, just stared.
“D’you hear me, mister?”
“I heard you,” he grumbled. He’d had more than his share of whiskey already, but he was still lucid, still aching. Now, as luck would have it, he was confronted by a half-naked blonde near enough in age and looks to be Annika if he squinted and the light fell across her face just right.
The hair was too different, though. Where Annika’s was tawny gold shot with honey-colored strands, this girl’s was brassy yellow, frizzled and frowsy, nearly standing on end around her head. It looked like somebody had been chewing on it, and since she looked the type that would let a man pay for anything, someone might have been doing just that.
Buck turne
d a cold shoulder to her and splayed his elbows on the bar again. He stared down into his whiskey but didn’t find any relief floating in the amber liquid. He threw back the drink and looked up, studying the occupants of the barroom in the mirror behind the long bar. He watched the girl’s reflection as she shrugged and walked away.
Two of the men near the door looked like drifters. They had an unshaved, unwashed look about them that bespoke homeless wandering. The rest were cowhands, their Levi’s worn in the seat and baggy at the knees. One, a tall, lanky man with red hair to his shoulders and a moustache that drooped to his chin, sat on a chair tilted back against the wall, laughing with a group of four others.
No one had paid Buck any mind. To a man they studiously ignored him. He guessed they had heard of or recognized him from his fight with Kase Storm.
Although he had carefully avoided his own reflection, it finally caught his eye as he tipped back the drink. Buck lowered his glass and studied himself. His buckskin jacket and pants marked him as a trapper. His lip was still cut and bruised, but the swelling was gone. A short slash running vertically down his lower lip marked the place where Kase Storm’s fist had connected with his mouth. His month-old beard had filled in during his time alone in the mountains. He wondered how long it would take him to grow it as long as Ted’s. Years? How many?
How many long and lonely years would it take?
Stop it. You made your choice. It was best for everyone.
He pulled his hat lower to shield the blue loneliness he saw reflected in the eyes that looked back at him from the mirror, but he couldn’t hide as easily from the thoughts that plagued him nor the memory of Annika’s face when he’d left her.
How does it feel to be the biggest coward alive?
His mood was so foul that if any man in the room had called him out, he would have beat him beyond recognition. But how could he rid himself of his own conscience?
She said she loved you. That she was willing to go anywhere with you.
Come Spring Page 38