of them had been in the living room putting the last of the tinsel on their Christmas tree when the girl insisted she heard a thump outside. They both went to the door and Renee managed to use a rug to drag the man inside while keeping a watch on the darkness to be sure the wolf was gone.
“Don’t touch him,” Renee added as she covered the phone with her hand.
Tessie pulled back and nodded, but she kept looking at the man—particularly at the brown mole high on his left cheek.
Her daughter had longed to meet a prince since the night of her first bedtime fairy tale. Renee had tried to tell her that those kinds of princes did not exist, and if they did, they didn’t go calling on bunkhouse cooks and their little girls. But Tessie never quite believed her. Renee had a sinking feeling that she knew what Tessie had whispered in Santa’s ear at the school program last week.
Renee couldn’t help but stare at the man. Snow was melting in his hair. Except for the dark circles under his eyes and a faded scar on one cheek, she had to admit he did bear a striking resemblance to the drawings of the aristocratic hero in her daughter’s beloved Sleeping Beauty story—especially because the prince in the book also had a mole high on his left cheek.
The temperature gauge on the porch read below zero, so Renee hadn’t really had a choice about bringing the man inside, especially with that wolf following him. But she fervently hoped he would be taken away soon. She had enough trouble with Tessie’s imagination without this kind of a coincidence.
Right then, the snap of chewing gum sounded in Renee’s ear, indicating that Betty Longe, the 911 operator, had finished contacting the emergency crew and was back on the line.
“Is he still breathing?” the woman asked.
Renee nodded.
Then she realized the operator could not see the action. “Yes, his pulse and breathing are much better. I think it helps that he’s out of the cold. The bleeding seems to have stopped, too, now that he’s not moving around.”
“We can ease up a bit, then. The sheriff should be there in a few minutes.”
“The man needs an ambulance more than the sheriff!” Renee could hear the tension in her voice. Even though the man was doing better, she didn’t have much beyond iodine and bandages to use if his wound decided to bleed some more.
Betty grunted. “Anytime a strange man stumbles onto your porch in the middle of the night with a bullet in his shoulder, I’m going to send out the sheriff along with an ambulance. Sheriff Wall is just closer than the others right now.”
“Actually, we’re not at my place.” Renee realized that in the rush of things she hadn’t mentioned that pertinent fact to the operator. She’d barely had enough wits about her to make the call. “I’m housesitting. The Elktons are spending Christmas in Washington, D.C., with their son and they asked me to stay in the main house while they’re gone.”
Everyone knew the bunkhouse cook at the ranch had her own quarters, and the EMTs would lose precious time if they went there first.
“Worried about possible rustlers, are they?” Betty asked, her words slow and chatty, as if she had all the time in the world.
“Yes.” Renee recognized that the operator was trying to help her calm down. She took a deep breath. “Have there been more cattle reported missing?”
Betty was silent for a moment, likely passing along the additional information about where to go and then coming back to speak.
“Not that I know of. It’s still seventy-three reported gone.”
Renee listened for the sheriff’s siren but didn’t hear anything but the slight scraping sound of Tessie’s slippers as she fidgeted.
“Well, be careful,” Betty finally said. “Women tend to think an unconscious man is harmless, but you never know.”
“I don’t think he’s harmless,” Renee protested. She looked down at the man. He was still breathing okay. She didn’t easily trust the men she knew, let alone someone she’d never met. “I wonder what he was doing out there all alone in the middle of the night. Riding a horse and being trailed by a wolf. I can’t believe he was up to any good.”
“We don’t have wolves around here,” Betty said sharply and then paused. “Well, not many.”
“It only takes one to do damage.”
Renee looked up and suddenly noticed the room had grown silent. Her daughter was standing stiffly next to the man. It was as if Tessie had never danced in delight at finding the stranger. Instead, her little face was scrunched up in resignation. And the angel wings that their friend Karyn McNab had lent her to wear in the church nativity pageant seemed to weigh down her shoulders.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Renee asked as she covered the phone again.
“You think he’s a bad man,” Tessie muttered. “You don’t believe Santa sent him.”
“Oh, dear,” Renee said to her daughter. “I know you want him to be a prince, but we talked about this. Princes don’t exist. Not the fairy-tale kind, anyway. We need to accept that. And Santa is just for fun.”
Tessie got a stubborn look on her face. Her lower lip protruded and her lips pressed together in a straight line. Renee would have said more, but she saw tears start to form in Tessie’s eyes.
“I know who he is,” the girl finally whispered. “If Santa didn’t send him, then Daddy did. The prince has a Christmas message for me. He just needs to wake up so he can tell me what it is.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Renee said, not caring that her hand had slipped off the phone.
Before she could say anything more, Betty spoke. “Well, if you ask me, no one needs a prince like that to deliver a message. Not when we have the good old U.S. Postal Service with their white trucks and pretty stamps.”
“Did you hear that, Tessie?” Renee held the phone out so her daughter could listen. She was surprised at the support she was getting from Betty, but she was grateful anyway. Maybe her daughter would pay more attention to another adult. “Betty doesn’t think you need a prince, either. If your daddy wanted to write you a letter, he’d just send it in the regular mail.”
Renee supposed adding some reality to her daughter’s fantasies was an improvement even if the odds of Tessie’s father sending her a letter were no greater than her meeting a storybook prince out here in the middle of the Montana plains.
“You listen to your mother, Tessie,” Betty said, the words coming through loud enough to be heard by both Renee and her daughter. “A letter is easy enough to send.”
Tessie stepped closer to the phone and asked the operator, “But what if he is a prince?” Then she turned her back, no doubt hoping Renee couldn’t hear, and whispered, “Mommy doesn’t know what a prince even looks like.”
“That’s not true—” Renee began and then stopped. She wasn’t going to get into a ridiculous argument like this. Renee intended to keep her daughter safe from strange men even if Tessie was angry about it. Her daughter could afford to fall in love with fairy-tale princes, but Renee could not.
They
