she said now, well aware that Clay hadn’t been asking her permission but feeling compelled to offer some kind of response.
She hovered in the doorway of her room—little more than a lean-to, really—with one tiny window, high up, while Clay wrestled Sawyer out of his coat then eased him down carefully onto the bed, pulled off his boots.
The effort of going even that far must have been too much for Sawyer, strong as he looked, because he shut his eyes again, and didn’t respond when Clay spoke to him.
“I’ll get the doc,” Clay said to Piper, as she stepped out of the doorway to let him pass. “Do you have any more blankets? It’s important to keep him warm.”
Piper thought with a heavy heart of the fine, colorful quilts lying neatly folded in her hope chest. She’d always envisioned them gracing the beds of some lovely house, once she was married, like Dara Rose, with a proper home.
“Yes,” she said bravely, and though she didn’t begrudge Sawyer McKettrick those quilts, she couldn’t help lamenting their fate. She’d worked hard to assemble them from tiny scraps of fabric, carefully saved, and many of the pieces were all she had to remember friends she’d left behind in Maine.
She swept over to her bulky cedar chest, raised the lid, and rummaged through the treasured contents—doilies and potholders, tablecloths and dish towels and the like—until she’d found what she was looking for.
As she spread the first of those exquisitely stitched coverlets over Mr. McKettrick, he stirred again, opened his eyes briefly, and smiled. “Thanks, Josie,” he said, and there was a caress in the way he said the name.
Briskly, because she was a little hurt, though she couldn’t have pinpointed the reason why such an emotion should afflict her, Piper put another quilt on top of her patient, and then another.
Then, because it was nearly eight o’clock, she went to the other end of the building, where the bell rope dangled, and gave it a tug. Surely none of her pupils would make it to school on such a day, but Piper believed in maintaining routine, especially during trying times. There was something reassuring about it.
The silvery bell, high overhead in its little belfry, chimed once, twice, three times, summoning students who would not come.
Piper’s hands, rope-burned from hauling up well water the night before, stung fiercely, and she was almost glad, because the pain gave her something to think about besides the man sprawled on her spinster’s bed, probably bleeding all over her quilts.
She retrieved a tin of Wildflower Salve from her bureau, careful not to make too much noise and disturb Mr. McKettrick. Carrying the salve back to her schoolroom, she sat down at her desk and smiled a little as she twisted off the pretty little lid to treat her sore palms.
There was an abundance of the stuff, since Dara Rose, impoverished after the scandalous death of her first husband, upstairs at the Bitter Gulch Saloon, had once planned to sell the product door-to-door in hopes of making enough money to support herself and her two small daughters, Edrina and Harriet. Instead, Dara Rose had fallen in love with Clay McKettrick, married him, and thus retained what amounted to a lifetime supply of medicinal salve, which she generously shared.
A half hour passed before Clay returned, with Dr. Jim Howard, the local dentist, riding stalwartly along beside him on the mule that usually pulled his buggy.
Everybody in Blue River liked Dr. Howard, whose young daughter, Madeline, was one of Piper’s best students. At eight, the little girl could read and cipher with the acuity of an adult. Mrs. Howard, however, was not so easy to like as her husband and daughter. Eloise wore nothing but velvet or silk, dismissed the town as a “bump in the road” and told anyone who would listen that she’d “married down.”
“Miss St. James,” Dr. Howard greeted her, with a friendly smile and a tug at the brim of his Eastern-style hat, as he stomped the snow off his boots on the schoolhouse porch, the way Clay had done a moment before. Doc was a large man, good-natured, older than his wife by some twenty years, and his eyes were a kindly shade of blue. He carried a battered leather bag in one gloved hand.
Piper barely stopped herself from rushing over and embracing the man, she was so glad to see him. The responsibility of keeping Mr. McKettrick alive had, she realized, weighed more heavily upon her than she’d thought it did.
She merely nodded in acknowledgment, though, as he closed the door against the cold daylight wind, and she hung back when Clay led the way through the schoolroom and into the chamber behind it.
Of course she couldn’t help overhearing most of the conversation between Clay and Dr. Howard, given that the whole place was hardly larger than Dara Rose’s chicken coop out on the ranch, classroom, teacher’s quarters and all.
Clay was asking how bad the injury was, and Dr. Howard replied that it was serious enough, but with luck and a lot of rest, the patient would probably recover.
Probably recover? Piper thought, sipping from the mug of coffee she’d poured for herself. When Clay and the doctor—more commonly referred to as “Doc”—came out of the back room, she’d offer them some, too. She owned three cups, not including the bone china tea service for six nestled in her hope chest, which would remain precisely where it was, unlike her once pristine quilts.
“I’d like to take Sawyer out to my place,” she heard Clay say.
“Better wait a few days,” came Doc’s response. “He’s lost a lot of blood. The bullet went clear through him, though, which saves me having to dig it out, and Miss St. James did a creditable job of binding him up. He’ll have scars, but the wound looks clean, thanks to her.” A pause followed. “There’s a bottle of carbolic acid in my bag there—hand it to me, will you?”
There was another short silence, during which Clay must have done as Doc asked, soon followed by a hoarse shout of angry protest from the patient. He swore colorfully, and Piper winced. She believed that cursing revealed a poor vocabulary, among other personal shortcomings.
“Can’t take a chance on infection setting in,” the dentist said peaceably, evidently unruffled by the outburst. “The burning will stop after a while.”
Sawyer muttered something unintelligible.
Piper’s hands trembled as she set her coffee mug down on her desk. Doc’s reply to Clay’s statement about taking his cousin out to the ranch echoed in her mind. Better wait a few days.
All well and good, she thought fretfully, but what was she supposed to do in the meantime? There was only one bed, after all, and she couldn’t sleep in a chair until the man was well enough to be moved, could she?
Mr. McKettrick was indeed badly injured, but this was a schoolhouse, frequented by children five days a week—children who would go home after dismissal and tell their parents there was a strange man recuperating in Miss St. James’s room. She wouldn’t be able to hide him from them any more than she could hide that enormous gelding of his, quartered in the shed out back. Even unconscious, Sawyer filled the place with his presence, breathed up all the air.
Clay emerged from her room just then, took a second mug from the shelf near the stove and poured himself some coffee. He was probably cold, Piper realized with some chagrin, having ridden in from the ranch, proceeded to Doc Howard’s, and then made his way back to the schoolhouse again.
“I guess we’ve got a
