it out of your mind, she ordered herself. There was no sense in pandering to her imagination.
Since she couldn’t quite face searching the fellow’s pockets—it seemed too intimate an undertaking—she turned her thoughts to other things. After collecting a pair of scissors from the drawer of her battered oak desk, Piper undertook the task she would rather have avoided, kneeling beside the man’s prone form and gently rolling him onto his back.
The singular odors of gunpowder and blood rose like smoke, one acrid, one metallic, to fill her nostrils, then her lungs, then her fretful stomach. She gagged again, swallowed hard, and forced her trembling hands to pick up the scissors and begin snipping away at the front of the man’s once-fine coat.
The bullet had torn its way through the dark, costly fabric, through the shirt—probably white once—and the flesh beneath.
When Piper finally uncovered the wound, she was horrified all over again. She slapped one hand over her mouth, though whether to hold back a scream or a spate of sickness she couldn’t have said.
The deep, jagged hole in the flesh of the stranger’s shoulder began to seep again.
Piper shifted her gaze to the supplies she’d gathered, now resting beside her on the floor—a basin full of steaming water, strands of clean cloth, iodine—and was struck by their inadequacy, and her own.
This man needed a surgeon, not the bumbling first aid of a schoolmarm.
She raised her eyes to the night-darkened window and the huge flakes of falling snow beyond, and mentally calculated the distance to Dr. Howard’s house, on the far side of Blue River.
At most a ten-minute walk away, in daylight and decent weather, Doc’s place might as well have been on another continent, for all the chance she had of reaching it safely. Furthermore, the man wasn’t a physician, but a dentist, albeit a very competent one who would definitely know what do to in such an emergency.
Since she had no means of summoning him, she would have to do what she could, and hope the Good Lord would lend a hand.
Piper spent the next half hour or so cleaning that wound, treating it with iodine, binding it closed with the strips of cloth. Stitches were needed, she knew, but threading a needle and sewing flesh together, the way she might stitch up a patchwork quilt, was entirely beyond her. If she made the attempt, she’d get sick, faint dead away, or both, thereby making bad matters considerably worse.
Mercifully, the stranger did not wake during the long, careful process of applying the bandages. When she’d finished, Piper covered him again, brought a pillow and eased it under his head, and, rising to her feet, looked down at the front of her dress.
Like the cloak and the mittens, it was badly stained.
Piper rinsed the basin, filled it with clean water, and retreated into the little room at the back of the schoolhouse. She stripped to her petticoat and camisole, shivering all the while, and gave herself a quick sponge bath. After that, she donned a calico dress—a little scant for the season, but she’d need her gray woolen one for some time yet and wanted to keep it clean. Once properly clad again, she took her dark hair down from its pins and combs, brushed it vigorously, and secured it into a loose chignon at her nape.
Needing to keep herself occupied, Piper burned her knitted mittens in the stove—there was no use trying to get them clean—and then assessed the damage to her cloak. It was dire.
Resigned, and keeping one eye on the unmoving victim, Piper took up her scissors again and cut away the stained parts of her only cloak, consigned the pieces to the stove, and folded what remained to be used for other purposes.
Waste not, want not. She and Dara Rose, growing up together in a household of genteel poverty, had learned that lesson early and well.
She ate supper at her desk—a bowl of the beans she’d been simmering on the stove all afternoon—and wondered what to do next.
She was exhausted, and every muscle ached from the strain of dragging a full-grown man halfway across the schoolyard and inside, tending to the horse as well as its master, fetching the wood and the water. She didn’t dare close her eyes to sleep, though—the stranger might be incapacitated, but he was still a stranger, and he was accustomed to carrying a gun. Suppose he came to and did—well—something?
From a safe distance, Piper assessed him again, cataloging his features in her mind. Caramel-colored hair, a lean, muscular frame, expensive clothes and boots. And then there was the horse, obviously a sturdy creature, well-bred. This man was probably a person of means, she concluded, but that certainly didn’t mean he wasn’t a rascal and a rounder, too.
He might actually be dangerous, a drifter or an unscrupulous opportunist.
Again, she considered braving the weather once more, making her way to the nearest house to ask for help, since Doc’s place was too distant, but she knew she’d never make it even that far. She had no cloak, and in that blizzard, she didn’t dare trust her sense of direction. She might head the wrong way, wander off into the countryside somewhere and perish from exposure.
She shuddered again, rose from her chair, and carried her empty bowl and soup spoon back to the washstand in her quarters, where she left them to be dealt with later.
Still giving the stranger a fairly wide berth, she perched on one of the students’ benches and watched him, thinking hard. She supposed she could peel that overcoat off him, put it on, and tramp to the neighbors’ house, nearly a quarter of a mile away, but the effort might do him further injury and, besides, the mere thought of wearing that bloody garment made her ill.
Even if she’d been able to bear that, the problem of the weather remained.
She was stuck.
She retrieved her knitting—a scarf she’d intended to give to Dara Rose as a Christmas gift—and sat working stitches and waiting for the man to move, or speak.
Or die.
“Water,” he said, after a long time. “I need—water.”
New energy rushed through Piper’s small body; she filled a ladle from one of the buckets she’d hauled in earlier, carried it carefully to his side, and knelt to slip one hand under his head and raise him up high enough to drink.
He took a few sips and his eyes searched her face as she lowered him back to the floor.
“Where—? Who—?” he muttered, the words as rough as sandpaper.
“You’re in the Blue River schoolhouse,” she answered. “I’m Miss St. James, the teacher. Who are you?”
“Is…my horse—?”
Piper managed a thin smile. She didn’t know whether to be glad because he’d regained consciousness or worried by the problems that might present. “Your horse is fine. In out of the storm, fed and watered.”
A corner of his mouth quirked upward, ever so slightly, and his eyes seemed clearer than when he’d opened them before, as though he were more present somehow, and centered squarely within the confines of his own skin and bones. “That’s…good,” he said, with effort.
“Who are you?” Piper asked. She still hadn’t searched his pockets, since just binding up his wound had
