A Cowboy at Heart (8 page)

Though his insides had begun to tighten into worried knots, Jonas answered in a calm, even mildly reproving tone. “A saloon in Apple Grove?”

“Long gone from Apple Grove is he.”
Mader
jerked her head in
a nod, as if the statement was an accepted fact. “Mark my words. We won’t see him again for days.” If he didn’t know his mother so well, Jonas might have missed the hint of worry in the gaze that scoured the fence line. “Come, Jonas, before the meal is unfit to eat.”

She turned away, wiping her hands on her apron in a gesture of dismissal. He allowed a quiet sigh. Perhaps she was right. Jesse had ever been an unpredictable man, impulsive and given to capricious behavior. The past year he’d seemed to settle down under the steady guidance of Emma’s Luke, but Luke wasn’t here, was he?

He started to turn away when he spied movement at the crest of a gentle hill. A horse, not running but walking slowly toward him. Was that Rex?

“
Mader
, look.”

She turned, and followed his gaze.

Yes, that horse looked like Rex, but where was Jesse? No rider sat in the saddle. Unless…Jonas shielded his eyes against the setting sun. Was that a man slumped on the horse’s back?

Mader
threw her hand up to cover her mouth. Without a word, they took off across the field. Jonas held his hat on his head and broke into a run, leaving his mother to hurry after him. The horse seemed to sense that help was near, and picked up its pace a small measure. They met halfway around the fence, and the horse came to a halt.

Yes, it was Jesse, and Jonas spied the evidence that he’d been hurt. Dark, sticky blood matted the left side of his head and covered his back, saturating his shirt and dripping down his side to stain Rex’s mane. The source was immediately apparent, a bullet
hole in his back. Alarm blossomed in Jonas. Was he alive? Could a man live after losing that much blood?

Mader
arrived at his side, her breath coming in heaves. She took in the scene in an instant, her expression grave. With one gnarled hand she reached for the side of Jesse’s neck.

“Warm,” she told Jonas without taking her gaze off of the wounded man. “He lives.”

As if to prove her words, Jesse gave a low, incoherent moan.

Mader
rose on her toes in an attempt to inspect his back, but she was not tall enough. “We must get him home. Quickly, before he…”

Her lips clamped shut, but the unspoken words rang in Jonas’s mind.
Before he dies
.

Gott
help him! It is on my account he is shot
.

Guilt nearly dissolved his knees beneath him. Why had Jesse gone alone to speak to Mr. Littlefield tonight? He was impulsive, as Jonas had just been thinking. If only he’d known, Jonas would never have allowed another man to walk into danger because of him. On him lay as much guilt as the one who had held the gun.

But he had not pulled a trigger.

The anger that Jonas nearly buried while feeding his livestock resurfaced with full force. He turned a glare toward the horizon, to whatever lay at the end of the awful fence. What sort of man would shoot another, and in the back? Fury churned in his stomach. The curse of Abel’s brother Cain lay on mankind, and even today resurfaced in the actions of evil men. If he could but find this Littlefield man—

No! I must not forget the words of the Confession. I may not return evil for evil
.

His hands tightened into fists. Gott,
help me. I am not able to keep this command alone
.

Mader
could not guess the struggle that raged within him as she moved to take the horse’s reins and tugged toward the house. Rex obeyed, following behind the elderly woman like an obedient puppy.

“Home we will take him,” she said without turning her head. “Together we will get him inside, and then you must go for help.”

“I will fetch the
Englisch
doctor in Hays City,
ja
?”

“
Ja
.” She nodded, a curt downward jerk of her head. “But first you will fetch Katie Miller. The girl has the healing touch, and our Jesse needs her.”

Our Jesse
. If he hadn’t been so conflicted and worried, Jonas would have smiled. Jesse had long been a favorite with
Mader
, even though he was everything she disapproved of in the
Englisch
. A ray of hope lit the tumultuous darkness that raged in Jonas’s mind. Perhaps with the attention of
Mader
and Katie Miller, his friend Jesse would live.

“The bleeding has stopped,” Katie said as she gingerly dabbed at the open wound on Jesse’s back. Was it good or bad that the bullet hole no longer seeped the sticky red fluid of life? She didn’t know. Perhaps he had lost so much he had no more blood to shed. He’d certainly lost a lot, judging by the shirt that lay in shreds on the floor where
Maummi
Switzer had put it after she cut it off of him. And the amount she’d rinsed from his hair. She shook her
head. They’d had to empty the wash basin three times while cleaning his head and back.

Jesse lay on the narrow bed in
Maummi
Switzer’s bedroom just off the family common room, where Jonas had put him before riding across the fields to fetch Katie. A startling sight he’d made galloping up to the house astride Jesse’s horse like an
Englischer
. Papa had looked askance until Jonas blurted out his errand, that his friend lay dying from a gunshot wound acquired while helping him. No more had the words left his lips than he whirled the horse and headed away, Jonas calling over his shoulder that he rode to fetch the doctor in Hays City. Katie had wasted no time in gathering her nursing bag while Papa and her brother Levi hitched their horse to the buggy she used.

Maummi
Switzer pressed two fingers against Jesse’s neck, and her unsmiling face became even grimmer. “His heart beats too slowly, but at least it still beats.”

“Perhaps a tea of red clover tops and goldenseal root?” When Maggie Cramer lost so much blood after the birth of her baby last winter, the midwife had told Katie to give her plenty of tea made from red clover and goldenseal to help rebuild her strength.

But
Maummi
Switzer shook her head. “If the stomach has taken any of the bullet, filling it will do more harm than good.”

Katie nodded. She should have remembered that. It was just that she felt so helpless merely sitting here doing nothing while a man clung to life before her eyes. She rinsed her cloth in the basin of fresh water and wrung it out before gently wiping away a spot of blood she’d missed before. The muscles across one shoulder blade contracted when her cloth touched his ribs, and she almost laid a
comforting hand across his bare skin. Aware of
Maummi
Switzer’s presence on the other side of the bed, she stopped herself. She’d learned that the comfort of a gentle touch did much to calm the sick or injured, but she was an unmarried woman and this man lying before her was only half clothed. And
Englisch
besides.

He was shapely built. Solid and sleek, without a hint of fat in the broad expanse of his back or at his trim waist. Tanned, too, as though he spent much time shirtless in the sun. She’d heard that was sometimes the way of
Englisch
men, to work in the open without proper clothing. Shameless, of course, but only for an Amish man. The
Englisch
had no such prohibition against exposing their flesh to the view of others. Her gaze lingered on his muscled shoulders and then strayed to the row of soft curls that rested against the nape of his neck. Her Samuel had been lean and wiry, his spine in much more evidence than Jesse’s. Absently, she pulled a piece of dried grass from one golden brown lock, her fingers lingering perhaps a moment too long on the soft hair.

The sound of a door opening interrupted her thoughts. Guiltily, she dropped the cloth into the water basin and glanced sideways to see if
Maummi
Switzer had observed her study of her patient’s form. Fortunately, the older woman seemed not to have noticed. She leaped from the chair she had pulled close to the bedside.

“Finally!”

Katie rose while
Maummi
Switzer hurried toward the doorway, but before she got there a stranger appeared with Jonas close on his heels. Dressed in clean but wrinkled trousers and shirt, the doctor carried a leather satchel at his side. Disheveled gray hair spoke to the haste of his departure from Hays City. A pair
of spectacles rested on his nose. With a quick nod of greeting to
Maummi
Switzer and Katie, he hurried to the bedside, where he bent over to examine his patient.

“Lost a lot of blood, has he?” He addressed the question to no one in particular, but
Maummi
Switzer answered.

“
Ja
. The bleeding stopped not long ago.”

“Hmm.” He glanced at Jonas as he unstrapped the closure on his satchel. “You say this is the same man I worked on some years ago, the one with the broken leg?”

Jonas nodded, his gaze fixed on the bullet wound in Jesse’s back.

“Well, it would be a shame to let him die now after I’ve already patched him up once. Let’s see what we have here.” From his satchel he extracted a polished wooden tube. The fluted end he pressed against Jesse’s skin, and then he turned his head to place the other end, which was rimmed in black rubber, in his ear. His worried expression grew grave.

“He will be all right,
ja
?” Jonas hovered in the doorway and fiddled with the strap of one of his braces just below his shoulder.

The doctor remained silent. He lowered the listening device and with gentle fingers pressed at the skin around the bullet hole. Though it didn’t look to Katie as though he’d applied pressure, Jesse moaned, and the arm closest to her moved. His control of the limb was feeble, and it fell off the bed to dangle toward the floor. Katie picked it up and returned it to the mattress. His skin felt warm and dry to the touch. Too warm? The development of a fever this soon after his injury was a bad sign.

The doctor finished his examination of the bullet wound and turned to Jesse’s scalp. A gash topped a knot the size of Katie’s
fist. That wound had stopped bleeding before the one on his back, though it had oozed more deep red liquid while she’d gently sponged the blood from his matted hair.

The doctor replaced the device in his satchel and then turned toward Jonas, his expression grave. “I can suture the head wound, and as long as he hasn’t cracked his skull he’ll recover from that. He’ll probably have a pounding headache for a few weeks. As for the other wound…” He turned back to his patient. “That bullet needs to come out. If he’s lucky it didn’t puncture the right lung, but what I hear gives me cause for concern. He’s fortunate that shot wasn’t an inch or so to the left, or it would have hit his spine. How did you say this happened?”

“He rode out to investigate the fence my neighbor has built. When he came back…” Jonas gestured toward Jesse to indicate that this was the shape in which he’d returned.

“My guess is bandits.” The doctor’s lips pursed. “It’s getting so as a man can’t take a stroll without worrying about being shot.” His gaze slid to
Maummi
Switzer and then came to a rest on Katie. “Are you his wife?”

Startled, Katie’s eyes rounded. She took a backward step away from the bed. “No. I-I came to help care for him.”

“That’s fine. You can give me a hand. I’ll need strong soap and clean water, two or three big basins, and some cloths. Make sure they are clean cloths.”

Katie started to shake her head and looked toward
Maummi
Switzer for help. The older woman had far more experience at this sort of thing than she. But
Maummi
Switzer flicked a hand in her direction.

“Young eyes are sharper than old ones. On the shelf in the room at the top of the stairs you will find bedsheets and such.”

The doctor glanced up. “Old cloths will be just fine, ma’am. When we finish with them they won’t be much use anymore.”

Maummi
Switzer dismissed that with a snort. “Whatever is needful to help our Jesse, that is what we will use. Come, Jonas. We will fetch soap and water.”

Katie hurried up the stairs and found the sheets in a starkly furnished bedroom that looked much like hers at home, only no spare aprons or black dresses hung from the pegs. She retrieved a stack of soft white fabric and hurried back to the sickroom to find that the doctor had removed his vest and was rolling his sleeves above his elbows.

“Those will be fine. Put them on that chair. What’s your name, young lady?”

Katie deposited the linens where directed and gave a small curtsey. “Katie Miller, sir.”

“I’m Dr. Sorensen. Have you ever worked on a gunshot wound, Katie?”

Her gaze strayed toward the half-naked man on the bed, and she swallowed against a dry throat. “No, sir.”

“I’d wager to say I’ve removed enough lead from men’s bodies to fill that buggy I saw out in the yard. I doctored in the war.” He spoke in normal tones, a shock to her ears after the hushed voices she and
Maummi
Switzer had used. “Why, the bullets from General Bragg’s battle in Perryville alone nearly filled up a gallon bucket. If I’d been smart I would have kept them and sold the lead back to the army.”