The Touch of Fire

  It took iron self-control to turn the horse and calmly walk it away, but the ground was too uneven to risk even a trot. Now was the most dangerous time, when Trahern was most likely to be awakened—

  He heard the snick of a hammer being thumbed back and instantly bent low over the horse’s neck as he reined it sharply to the right and kicked its flanks. He felt the sharp burning in his left side a split second before he heard the shot. The muzzle flash pinpointed Trahern’s position, and McCay had drawn and fired before Trahern could get another shot off. Then the big horse bolted, encouraged by another thud from McCay’s bootheel, and the darkness swallowed them. He could hear Trahern’s curses even over the thunder of his horse’s hooves.

  Concern for both their necks made him rein in the horse before they’d gone a quarter of a mile. His side was burning like hell, and wetness was seeping down the side of his pants. His horse at a walk, McCay pulled off his glove with his teeth and felt around, finding two holes in his shirt and corresponding holes in his body where the bullet had entered and exited. He yanked his bandanna from around his neck and wadded it up inside his shirt, using his elbow to keep it pressed to the wounds.

  Damn, he was cold! A convulsive shudder started in his boots and rolled all the way up his body, shaking him like a wet dog and nearly making him pass out from the pain. He put his glove back on and untied his coat from the bedroll, then shrugged into the heavy fleece-lined garment. The shivers continued, and the wetness spread down his left leg. The son of a bitch hadn’t hit anything vital, but he was losing a lot of blood.

  The guessing game started again. Trahern would probably expect him to ride hard and fast, putting as much distance between them as he could manage by sunrise. McCay figured he’d gone about a mile when he walked the horse into a thick stand of pines and dismounted. He gave the animal a handful of feed and some water, patted his neck in appreciation of his steadiness, and untied the bedroll. He had to get the bleeding stopped, and get warm, or Trahern was going to find him lying unconscious on the trail.

  Keeping the canteen of water beside him, he wrapped up in the blanket and settled down on the thick layer of pine needles, lying on his left side so his weight would put pressure on the back wound while he pressed the heel of his hand over the exit wound in front. The position made him grunt with pain, but he figured the discomfort was better than bleeding to death. Sleeping was out of the question. Even if the pain would let him, he didn’t dare let himself relax.

  He hadn’t eaten since noon, but he wasn’t hungry. He drank a little water every now and then and watched the glimmer of the stars through the heavy tree cover overhead. He listened for any sounds of pursuit, though he didn’t really expect Trahern to come after him so soon. The night held only natural sounds.

  Gradually he began to warm, and the hot pain in his side subsided to a dull throb. His shirt was stiffening, which meant the flow of fresh blood had stopped. It was harder now to stay awake, but he refused to give in to his growing lethargy. There would be time for sleep later, after he’d killed Trahern.

  It wasn’t quite dawn when he eased to his feet. A wave of dizziness threatened to topple him and he braced his hand on a tree to support himself. Damn, he must have lost more blood than he’d thought; he hadn’t expected to be this weak. When he was steady, he went to the horse with a soothing murmur and got some beef jerky from his saddlebag, knowing that food and water would steady him faster than anything. He forced himself to eat, then quietly led the horse back the way they had come. It hadn’t worked the first time, but it should the second. Trahern would be intent on following the blood trail.

  He had been in position only a few minutes when he saw Trahern slipping up the hollow, handgun in his fist. McCay cursed silently, for the fact that Trahern was on foot meant that he was wary. The bounty hunter either had a sixth sense for danger or he was the luckiest son of a bitch McCay had ever seen.

  He steadied the rifle, but Trahern used his cover well, never exposing all of himself at the same time. Rafe caught only a shoulder, part of a leg, the flat crown of that distinctive hat; he didn’t have a clear shot at any time. Well, if a wounding shot was all that was offered, he’d take it. At the very least it would slow Trahern down, even the odds between them.

  The next target that Trahern offered was a sliver of pants leg. A cold smile touched McCay’s face as he sighted down the barrel. His hands were rock steady as he gently squeezed the trigger. Trahern’s scream of pain was almost simultaneous with the sharp report of the rifle, both sounds muted by the trees.

  McCay withdrew and pulled himself into the saddle, the movement more difficult than he had expected. His side began to burn again, and a damp feeling spread. Damn it, he’d opened his wounds. But now Trahern was wounded, too, and it would take him a long time to get back to his own horse, giving McCay a good head start that he couldn’t afford to waste. He’d see to the wounds later.

  Annis Theodora Parker calmly brewed a mild valerian tea, all the while keeping a weather eye on her patient. Eda Couey looked like a big, competent country girl, the sort you’d expect to give birth as easily as any woman could wish, but she was having trouble and was beginning to panic. Annis, known from childhood as Annie, knew that both Eda and the baby would fare a lot better if Eda was calmer.

  She carried the hot tea to the bedside and held Eda’s head so she could sip. “It’ll help the pain,” she quietly assured the girl. Eda was only seventeen, and this was her first. The valerian wouldn’t really ease the pain, but it would calm the girl so she could help get her child into the world.

  Eda quieted as the sedative began to work, but her face was still paper white and her eyes sunken as the labor pains continued. According to Walter Couey, Eda’s husband, the girl had already been in labor for two days before he’d given in to her pleas for help and fetched Annie to their one-room lean-to shack. He’d grumbled that he hadn’t been able to get any sleep with all the carryin’ on, and Annie had controlled a strong urge to slap him.

  The baby was turned breech, and the birth wasn’t going to be easy. Annie silently prayed for the infant’s survival, for sometimes the cord would get pinched during a breech birth and the baby would die in the birth canal. And she wondered if, even should it survive being born, it would live to see its first birthday. The conditions in the miserable lean-to were appalling, and Walter Couey was a mean, stupid man who would never provide anything better. He was in his forties, and Annie suspected that Eda wasn’t really his wife but only an illiterate farm girl sold into virtual slavery to relieve her family of one more mouth to feed. Walter was an unsuccessful miner, even here at Silver Mesa where men were finding the precious metal in thick veins; mining was hard work and Walter wasn’t inclined to work hard at anything. She couldn’t allow herself to think that it would be a blessing if the baby did die, but she felt pity for both mother and child.

  Eda moaned as her belly tightened again with a massive contraction. “Push,” Annie commanded in a low tone. She could see a smooth moon of flesh crowning: the baby’s buttocks. “Push!”

  A guttural scream tore from Eda’s throat as she bore down with all of her strength, her shoulders lifting off the pallet. Annie put her hands on the hugely swollen belly and added her strength to Eda’s.

  It was now or never. If Eda couldn’t deliver the infant, both mother and child would die. Labor would continue, but Eda would grow progressively weaker.

  The tiny buttocks protruded from Eda’s body. Quickly, Annie tried to grasp them, but they were too slippery. She worked her fingers inside the stretched opening and caught the baby’s legs. “Push!” she said again.

  But Eda was falling back, almost paralyzed with pain. Annie waited for the next contraction, which followed within seconds, then used the natural force of Eda’s internal muscles to aid her as she literally pulled the infant’s lower body from the mother. It was a boy. She inserted the fingers of one hand again to keep Eda’s muscles from clamping down, and with the other hand st
eadily pulled the baby the rest of the way out. It lay limply between Eda’s thighs. Both Eda and the baby were still and quiet.

  Annie picked up the little scrap, supporting it facedown on her forearm while she thumped it on the back. The tiny chest heaved, and the baby set up a mewling squall as air flooded its lungs for the first time. “There you go,” Annie crooned, and turned the baby over to make certain its mouth and throat were clear. Normally she would have done that first, but getting the child to breathe had seemed more important. The little fellow jerked his legs and arms as he wailed, and a tired smile wreathed Annie’s face. He sounded stronger with every squall.

  The cord had stopped pulsing, so she tied it off close to his belly and clipped it, then quickly wrapped him in a blanket to protect him from the chill. After placing him next to Eda’s warmth, she turned her attention to the girl, who was only half conscious.

  “Here’s your baby, Eda,” Annie said. “It’s a boy, and he looks healthy. Just listen to him cry! Both of you came through it fine. In a minute the afterbirth will come, and then I’ll get you cleaned up and comfortable.”

  Eda’s pale lips moved in silent acknowledgment, but she was too exhausted to gather the baby to her.

  The afterbirth came quickly, and Annie was relieved that there was no unusually heavy bleeding. A hemorrhage now would kill the girl, for she had no reserves of strength. She cleaned Eda and restored the mean little lean-to to rights, then picked up the fretting infant, as his mother was too weak to see to him, and crooned as she rocked him in her arms. He quieted, and his fuzzy little head turned toward her.

  She roused Eda and helped the girl cradle her child as she unbuttoned Eda’s nightgown and guided the baby’s rosebud mouth to his mother’s exposed breast. For a moment he didn’t seem to know what to do with the nipple brushing his lips, then instinct took over and he eagerly began sucking on it. Eda jumped, and gave a breathless little “oh!”

  Annie stood back and watched those first magical moments of discovery as the young mother, exhausted as she was, looked in wonder at her child.

  Tiredly she put on her coat and picked up her bag. “I’ll be by tomorrow to check on you.”

  Eda looked up, her white, weary face lit with a glowing smile. “Thankee, Doc. Me and the baby wouldn’a made it without you.”

  Annie returned the smile, but she could barely wait to get outside into the fresh air, cold as it might be. It was late in the afternoon, with less than an hour of light left, and she had been with Eda all day without a bite to eat. Her back and legs ached, and she was tired. Still, the successful birth gave her an immense feeling of satisfaction.

  The Coueys’ lean-to was at the opposite end of Silver Mesa from the tiny two-room shack that served Annie as both office and living quarters. She treated patients in the front room, and lived in the back one. As she trudged through the mud of Silver Mesa’s one winding “street,” miners called out rough greetings to her. This late in the day, they were leaving their claims and crowding into Silver Mesa to fill up on raw whiskey and lose their hard-earned money to gamblers and fancy women. Silver Mesa was a boomtown, without any sort of law or social amenities, unless you counted the five saloons located in tents. Some enterprising merchants had built rough plank buildings to house their wares, but wooden structures were few and far between. Annie felt lucky to have one of them for her medical practice, and in turn the inhabitants of Silver Mesa felt lucky to have any sort of a doctor at all, even a woman.

  She had been here for six—no, it was eight—months now, after failing to establish a practice in either her native Philadelphia or Denver. She had learned the bitter fact that, no matter how good a doctor she was, no one was going to come to her if there was a male doctor within a hundred miles. In Silver Mesa, there wasn’t. Even so, it had taken a while for people to come to her, though like boom-towns everywhere Silver Mesa was a violent place to live. Men were always getting shot, cut, or beaten, breaking bones or crushing various limbs. The trickle of patients had slowly turned into a steady stream, until now she sometimes didn’t have time to sit down from daylight to dark.

  It was what she had always wanted, what she had worked years for, but every time someone called her “Doc” or she heard someone say “Doc Parker” she was filled with sadness, for she wanted to look around for her father and he would never again be there. Frederick Parker had been a wonderful man and a wonderful doctor. He had let Annie help him in little ways from the time she had been only a child, and he encouraged her interest in medicine, teaching her what he could and sending her to school when he had nothing left to teach her. He had given her his support during the hard years of earning her medical degree, for it seemed as if no one other than the two of them had wanted a woman to be learning anything at all about medicine. She had not only been shunned by her fellow medical students—they had actively tried to hinder her. But her father had taught her how to keep her sense of humor and her commitment, and he had been as excited as she when she had left to come west and find a place that needed a doctor even if she was a woman.

  She had been in Denver less than a month when a letter arrived from their pastor, regretfully relaying the news that her father had passed away. He had seemed healthy enough, though he had been complaining that he wasn’t a young man any longer and was beginning to feel his age. But on a quiet Sunday, just after enjoying a good meal, he had suddenly clutched his chest and died. The pastor didn’t believe he had suffered.

  Annie had grieved silently and alone, for there was no one to whom she could talk, no one who would understand. When she had ventured bravely out into the world she had still felt his presence in Philadelphia as an anchor to which she could return, but now she had been cast adrift. By letter she had arranged for the house to be sold and the personal possessions she wished to keep stored at an aunt’s house.

  She wished she could tell him all about Silver Mesa, how rough and dirty and vital it was, with humanity teeming in the mud street and fortunes being made every day. He would envy her the drama of her practice, for Annie saw everything from bullet wounds to colds to birthings.

  The late-winter twilight was deepening as she opened her door and reached for the flint that always rested on a table just inside the door; she struck it and lit a thin strip of twisted paper, which she then used to light the lamp. Sighing with weariness, she put her bag on the table and rolled her shoulders to ease the kinks out of them. She had bought a horse when she’d arrived in Silver Mesa, for she frequently had to travel a fair distance to her patients, and she needed to see to the animal before it got any darker. She kept it in a small corral behind the shack, with a ramshackle three-sided shed for its shelter. She decided to go around the shack rather than through it, for she didn’t want to track mud through her home.

  Just as she turned to go a shadow in the far corner of the room moved, and Annie jumped, pressing her hand to her chest. She peered at the shadow and made out the form of a man. “Yes? May I help you?”

  “I came to see the doctor.”

  She frowned, for if he was from Silver Mesa then he knew he was seeing the doctor. Apparently he was a stranger and was expecting a man. She lifted the lamp, trying to see him better. His voice had been deep and raspy, little more than a whisper, but with a slow, southern rhythm to the words.

  “I’m Dr. Parker,” she said, moving closer. “How may I help you?”

  “You’re a woman,” the deep voice said.

  “Yes, I am.” She was close enough now to see fever-bright eyes and smell the particular too-sweet odor of infection. The man was propped in the corner, as if he had feared he wouldn’t be able to rise again if he’d sat down in a chair. She placed the lamp on a table and turned it up so the mellow light reached into the far corners of the little room. “Where are you hurt?”

  “My left side.”

  She went to his right side and braced her shoulder under his armpit, sliding her arm around his back to give added support. His heat shocked her, and for a
moment she felt almost frightened. “Let’s get you to the examining table.”

  He tensed under her touch. His dark hat shielded his expression but she felt the look he gave her. “I don’t need help,” he said, and demonstrated it by walking steadily, if a bit slowly, to the examining table.

  Annie fetched the lamp and lit a second one, then pulled the curtain that shielded the examining table should anyone else enter the room looking for medical attention. The man removed his hat, revealing thick, uncombed black hair that needed trimming, then gingerly shrugged out of his heavy shearling coat.

  Annie took both hat and coat and set them aside, all the while minutely examining the man. She couldn’t see any blood or other sign of injury, yet he was obviously sick and in pain. “Take off your shirt,” she said. “Do you need any help?”

  He looked at her with hooded eyes, then shook his head and unbuttoned his shirt as far as it would go. He pulled the fabric loose from his pants and shucked it off over his head.

  A dingy strip of cloth had been tightly wound around his waist, and it was stained a yellowish, rusty color on the left side. Annie picked up a pair of scissors and neatly sliced the bandage, letting it fall to the floor. There were two wounds in the fleshy part just above his waistline, one in front and one in back. Red streaks surrounded the back wound, though both were oozing bloody pus.

  A bullet wound, unless she missed her guess. She had seen enough here in Silver Mesa to give her a wide experience with them.

  She realized that she hadn’t removed her own coat and promptly did so, her mind on her patient. “Lie down on your right side,” she instructed as she turned to her instrument tray and got out what she needed. He hesitated, and she lifted her brows inquiringly.

  Silently, he leaned over to untie the thong that strapped his holster to his thigh, sweat breaking out on his face at the effort. Next he unbuckled the gun belt and placed it at the head of the examining table, within easy reach of his hand. He sat on the table, then stretched out to lie as she had instructed, on his right side and facing her. His muscles seemed to relax involuntarily as he felt the soft cushion of the mattress Annie had placed over the hard table so her patients would be more comfortable, then he shivered and tightened again.