arguing, Caroline, my mind’s made up.”
Caroline sighed. “All right, then. Forget I suggested it. Perhaps we should tell the fiddlers to start tuning up so our single Spinsters can invite the men inside. Too bad Mr. MacLaren left—there’d be another man to partner the ladies.”
Why did Caroline have to mention him again? Now Maude would be tormented with the image of Jonas MacLaren, his arm around her waist, gazing down at her through those intense hazel eyes as he swept her around the floor in a waltz...
But no, she refused to clutter her mind with such nonsense! She had no interest whatsoever in dancing with the man. And even if she did, he likely had no interest in “romantic claptrap” like dancing, either. Indeed, the rest of the evening—and, as far as she was concerned, the foreseeable future—would be far more pleasant without Jonas MacLaren.
* * *
Maude was startled out of her sleep later that evening by the pounding on the front door of the boardinghouse. Gracious, it’s got to be the middle of the night, she thought, as the remnants of her dream faded like smoke in a breeze. Didn’t the sign on the porch plainly state that new boarders must arrive by no later than eight at night?
But Mrs. Meyer was no stickler for rules when she had a vacancy. The boardinghouse provided her livelihood.
Still drowsy, Maude huddled under the quilt and heard rain drumming on the tin roof overhead. Then she heard Mrs. Meyer’s footsteps below and her sleepy voice calling out, “All right, I’m coming, I’m coming! Stop pounding or you’ll wake everyone in the place!”
Mr. Renz, the drummer from Kansas, had left just this morning, so there was an empty room, Maude knew—the one right next to hers. In a few minutes there’d be footsteps on the stairs, and she’d hear Mrs. Meyer’s muffled voice informing the new arrival of the house rules before she turned over the key and let them all get back to sleep.
But, instead of that, the next sound she heard was Mrs. Meyer’s running feet, followed by a pounding on her own door.
“Maude, Maude, get up, I need your help! There’s a woman here, and I think she’s about to give birth!”
Hoping she was still dreaming and there would be no one there when she got downstairs, Maude threw her wrapper on and trudged to the door, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles.
It was no dream. Mrs. Meyer stood there, wearing a threadbare, patched wrapper, her iron-gray hair in a thick braid down her back. Trembling, she clutched a candle in a tin holder. Her shakiness left a dancing shadow on the wall.
“Where is she?” Maude asked, for Mrs. Meyer was alone in the hall.
“Downstairs at the entrance,” the boardinghouse proprietress said in a hushed voice, jerking her head toward the stairs behind her. “She’s drenched—and bleeding, too, I think. She didn’t look strong enough to make it up the stairs, even with me to help her.”
Down the hall, a couple of the other inhabitants’ doors creaked opened and curious faces peeked out to see what all the fuss was about.
Mrs. Meyer seized on the closest one. “Delbert, come with me. There’s a girl downstairs about to have a baby. I need you to assist Maude to get the poor girl upstairs to the vacant room, then I want you to run for Doc Walker. I’ll get the bed ready. Hurry, now—she’s about ready to drop—”
Whether “drop” meant to deliver the baby or Mrs. Meyer thought the woman might collapse, Maude didn’t linger to clarify. Darting a glance at Delbert Perry, who looked thunderstruck at the older lady’s words, Maude dashed for the stairs.
The girl huddled in the circle of lamplight cast by the kerosene lamp Mrs. Meyer had left burning by the door, clutching an abdomen that looked impossibly large in such a small frame. In the flickering light she was waxy pale, slight in stature and possessed of a matted wild mane of a nondescript color. An irregular splotch of blood stained the floorboards beneath her battered short boots. Mrs. Meyer’s statement seemed correct in both interpretations. The baby was clearly coming—and soon—and the pregnant girl herself looked as if she might swoon from exhaustion at any moment.
“What’s your name? Is it your time? Is the baby coming?” Maude demanded as she skipped the last two steps and landed with a thud next to the girl.
“April Mae Horvath, and yeah, it’s comin’. I bin havin’ pains since early mornin’,” the skinny girl told Maude, then drew back her lips to let loose a scream as another pain seized her. The small pool of blood on the floor widened. “Is Felix here? This was where he told me he stayed when he came to Simpson Creek—he has t’be here, t’ help me...”
“Are you talking about Felix Renz, the drummer?”
The girl nodded emphatically, her eyes lit with a weary hope.
“No, he left this morning.”
The girl clutched Maude’s arm so tight it would undoubtedly leave a bruise, her eyes desperate. “But he cain’t be gone!” she cried. “I come fifty miles here to find him!” Big tears rolled down her pallid cheeks and trickled into the rain-drenched neck of her dress.
“Is he your husband? He never said—” But she’d given her name as Horvath, hadn’t she? So Renz hadn’t married this slip of a girl who now claimed him as the father of her soon-to-be-born child. Inwardly, Maude consigned the drummer to the nether regions for leaving this girl to whatever fate dealt out. But she couldn’t afford to spare more than a thought to him, wherever he may be. Her attention right now had to stay focused on the girl. His problem was now their problem, and she meant to deal with it as best she could.
Maude stopped talking and grabbed the laboring girl just as she sagged toward the floor in a faint.
“Delbert, help!” she yelled up to the town handyman, who still stood transfixed at the top of the stairs.
The four years since her father had been cut down on Main Street by raiding Comanches fell away as if no time had passed at all. She’d assisted her father at a score of deliveries. Admittedly, the situation had never before been quite so...fraught. But, still, she knew what needed to be done. “Get her arms,” she told Delbert, “and I’ll get her legs. Ella—” for her friend was awake now, too, and hanging over the railing above, watching with wide eyes “—as soon as we get past, you run down to the kitchen and set some water to boiling while Delbert goes to fetch the doctor.” Even as she rattled out the instructions, she said a prayer that Nolan Walker would be able to stanch the bleeding. From the pallor of the girl’s skin, she’d already lost way too much blood.
Once they’d helped April Mae into the bed whose covers Mrs. Meyer had hastily pulled down, and Delbert had dashed out into the downpour in the direction of the doctor’s house, Maude and Mrs. Meyer assisted the girl out of her blood-drenched dress and into one of Maude’s clean nightgowns. Every three minutes or so they had to stop what they were doing while April Mae shrieked her way through a contraction.
“April Mae, don’t scream!” Maude ordered her. “Breathe with the pain, don’t hold your breath. You’re just making it harder for that baby to come. Watch me, next time it starts, and I’ll show you—”
“Ain’t F-Felix h-here?” April Mae panted, ignoring her, while Maude grimly shoved dry towels under her to replace the blood-soaked ones she’d just pulled
