One Bright Morning (5 page)

“
Mr. Blue Gully,” she
ventured tentatively.

He grunted.

“
If this French Jack person
is after Mr. Green, do you really think it’s a good idea to leave
him here? I mean, with me? Alone? With nobody around?”

The Indian looked at her with a level gaze.
“You worried, ma’am?” he asked.

Maggie swallowed. “Well, yes. Yes, I guess I
am worried, Mr. Blue Gully. I mean, if this crazy man is after your
partner and he’s here and you’re not and he’s gunshot and
unconscious, don’t you think that might be a little dangerous for
us? For all of us? For my daughter and me? And Mr. Green, too?”

“
Don’t worry, ma’am,” Dan
Blue Gully said. “I’ll be watchin’.”

Maggie looked at him with dismay. He’d be
watching? She cast a glance at Jubal Green and sighed. Well, he
sure wasn’t going anywhere; that was for certain. He’d be lucky to
survive.

Ozzie came back shortly before Dan Blue
Gully left. He barged right in the back door without knocking. Not
that Maggie expected politeness from Ozzie. Still, it always
irritated her that he didn’t knock. She spoke sharply to him when
he lurched into the kitchen.

“
Will you ever learn to
knock, you useless bum? And you took your sweet time, didn’t you,
Ozzie?”

Ozzie looked hurt. Ozzie often looked hurt.
That irritated Maggie, too. If he weren’t such a no-good loafer, he
wouldn’t have so much to look hurt about.

“
Well, now, Miss Maggie, I
told Sadie Phillips you needed help, like you told me.”

“
You did that, all
right.”

Sadie and Annie were still keeping each
other company. They were now in Annie’s room where Sadie was
dressing the baby and Annie was laughing.

Maggie was trying to clean up after the
various operations that been performed in her own bedroom. Jubal
Green was sleeping—or unconscious—in her bed, and she and Dan Blue
Gully had managed to get one of Kenny’s old night shirts over his
head, so he was at least decent.

She had covered him with two quilts, and
promised Dan that she would watch very carefully for fever and do
precisely what he told her to do in case fever struck. Maggie
decided that anybody who could cure one of her headaches was a
person whose advice was worth following when it came to medical
matters.

Now, as she washed out rags and bandages and
Ozzie lounged at the kitchen table, Dan Blue Gully was checking his
friend over one last time before he left to search for French
Jack.

“
Did you find Doc Prichard,
Ozzie?”

She felt just a tiny bit guilty for sending
Ozzie after a doctor whom she now no longer needed. Then she
decided she had nothing to feel guilty about. After all, she hadn’t
known that an Indian would show up and take over the show when she
sent Ozzie out earlier.

“
He was passed out in the
saloon.” Ozzie still looked downcast.

“
Humph. And I suppose you
had to hang around the saloon, waiting for him to wake
up.”

Maggie’s tone was unmistakable. She thought
both the doctor and Ozzie were worthless, disgusting specimens of
humankind. She was sure Ozzie had spent a good hour or more
guzzling bad whiskey while pretending to wait for the doctor to
rouse himself.

“
Well, now, Maggie, it were
a long, thirsty ride to town,” whined Ozzie.

Maggie just eyeballed him with contempt and
continued scrubbing lye soap over the blood stains on the sheet she
held. The water, when she dunked the sheet, turned a deep scarlet.
This Jubal Green, whoever he was, had fighting-red blood, she
thought. It would be a shame if he didn’t make it.

She glanced over to Ozzie
again and saw that he had turned paper-white and was staring at her
bedroom door. She figured the reaction must be from his first
glimpse of Dan Blue Gully, and thought contemptuously that at least
Sadie had had the
cojones
to scream. She nodded over at the
doorway.

“
Mr. Blue Gully, this here’s
my hired hand, Ozzie Plumb. Ozzie, this is Mr. Dan Blue Gully. He’s
a friend of the gunshot man. His name is Jubal Green.”

Ozzie just stared at Dan Blue Gully. Maggie
noted that he trembled and decided that was just like him. She
supposed if the Indian had been hostile, Ozzie would have
fainted.

“
He work for you?” Dan’s
head jerked toward Ozzie.

A loud sniff accompanied Maggie’s reply.
“He’s supposed to.”

Dan nodded. “You need help here,” was all he
said to her.

Then he looked hard at Ozzie. His eyes
narrowed slightly and he pointed a long, brown finger at him.

“
You help her,” he said. His
voice held no more inflection than it usually did, which meant it
was fairly flat, but Ozzie shrank back into his chair. He looked as
though he might throw up.

“
Yessir,” he
whimpered.

Maggie was impressed. There was a lot more
to this Indian than met the eye. Which reminded her of something.
She wiped her hands on her apron.

“
Mr. Blue Gully?”

He turned to look at her and nodded
slightly.

“
Would you mind leaving
another one or two of those bark pieces with me? Usually those
headaches come in twos and threes, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d
surely appreciate it, if you have enough to spare.”

“
Oh, sure, ma’am,” Dan said.
“Should have thought of that myself. Guess I was too worried about
Jubal to think about anything else. Here you go, ma’am.” He handed
her a little bundle of bark in a leather pouch.

Maggie shook her head in solemn gratitude.
“I don’t quite know how to thank you, Mr. Blue Gully. You don’t
know what this means to me,” she said softly.

The thought of actually receiving relief
from the agony she suffered two or three times a month was almost
overwhelming. There were tears in her eyes when she lifted her gaze
to Dan’s face and she felt a little silly.

He shuffled in embarrassment. “Shucks,
ma’am, it’s nothing. My aunt, she give ‘em to me. I can get more
for if you need ‘em later. Hell, them trees grow right there in
Arizona.”

A tear slipped out of Maggie’s eye, and then
she really felt silly. “It’s not nothing to me, Mr. Blue Gully. You
don’t know what this means to me.”

“
Well, ma’am, if you take
good care of Jubal for me, I’ll make sure you have all the bark you
need for the rest of your life.” He grinned a little bit to let her
know how much he appreciated her help.

“
Oh, I’ll take care of him.
Can’t do anything else. After all, he’s in my bed.”

Maggie gave him a little smile after her
small show of levity. Dan only looked a bit puzzled.

“
Well, guess I’ll be off
now, ma’am. I’ll be back soon.”

Although Maggie wondered what “soon” was,
she didn’t ask. Instead, she turned to Ozzie who still clutched the
edge of the kitchen table with quivering fingers.

“
Get on out and chop some
wood Ozzie. You haven’t chopped wood for days, and we’re almost
out. What do I pay you for, anyway?”

Ozzie started to whine a protest, glanced up
to see the squat but intimidating form of Dan Blue Gully standing
next to Maggie, and his words died unspoken.

“
Yes’m,” was all he uttered
as he scrambled to his feet.

“
I’ll call you in when
breakfast is ready,” she hollered after him.

“
Yes’m,” he said
again.

“
You stay for breakfast, Mr.
Blue Gully. With so much going on in here, food’s real late in
getting prepared this morning.”

“
Better not stay, ma’am. Got
to catch French Jack’s trail, if it’s not too late
already.”

“
Don’t want him to get
away?”

“
No, it ain’t that so much,
ma’am. French Jack ain’t goin’ nowhere until me and Jubal’s dead or
he is. I just want to know where he is so he can’t sneak up on
us.”

Maggie looked a little sick. “Oh,” she
whispered.

She glanced toward the bedroom and decided
she didn’t particularly want French Jack to sneak up on Jubal Green
right now, either, since he was lying unconscious in her bedroom
and the only way to him was through her.

“
That’s a good idea,” she
added in a somewhat strangled voice.

Dan Blue Gully touched her arm. “Don’t
worry, ma’am. I won’t let him hurt you or your little girl.”

Maggie looked up at him with worried eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, and there was uncertainty in the words.

Dan shook his head at her a little sadly and
seemed to take note of those exhausted blue eyes, rimmed now with
tired purple circles, set into a face with cheeks sunken from not
enough food, too much work, and too little sleep.

“
You need some rest, ma’am,”
he stated flatly.

Maggie sighed and turned toward her stove.
“Yeah, I guess so.”

Dan shook his head again, and took his
leave.

Sadie took Annie to her house to stay for a
couple of days since it looked as though Maggie was going to be
occupied as a full-time nurse for a while. Maggie felt a little
disgruntled when her little girl happily toddled out of the door,
holding onto Sadie’s hand.

“
I go wi’ Say,” Annie
announced to her mama with a big, nearly toothless
smile.

“
Well, you don’t have to
look so danged happy about it,” her mama told her with feigned
sternness.

In truth, she hated like the devil to see
her baby go away, even for a couple of days. Annie was all Maggie
had in the world, and she couldn’t bear to be parted from her.

“
She’ll be just fine,
Maggie. You know she loves to play with the twins.” Sadie and Pig
Phillips had two little boys just six months older than
Annie.

“
I know she will be,” said
Maggie, and that didn’t make her feel very good, either.

Annie would probably be better off if Sadie
kept her forever, she thought grumpily to herself. At least the
Phillipses had a profitable pig farm and each other. All Annie had
here was her.

She sighed with weariness when she bade
Sadie and Annie good-bye at the door. Then she realized she hadn’t
heard the steady chop-chop-chop of wood from the rear of the house
for a while now, and stepped around back to see what Ozzie was up
to.

He was up to a nap, as usual, and Maggie’s
nerves twanged sharply and finally snapped. She picked up a large
chunk of wood and hurled it at the man snoring next to the wood
block. The heavy chunk hit Ozzie square in the small of his back
and Maggie smiled in satisfaction.

Ozzie sat up with a bellow of rage and pain
and thunked his head on the ax handle, which was sticking out at
right angles to the blade that he had embedded in the block before
he laid himself down to snooze. One hand rubbed his head while the
other rubbed his back and he looked over at Maggie with a terribly
hurt expression on his wrinkled pink face.

“
Either you finish chopping
that wood by four o’clock this afternoon, Ozzie Plumb, or you get
the hell off of my place right now,” said Maggie with venom
dripping from her tongue. “For God’s sake Ozzie, I need you more
now than ever. I got me a gunshot man to tend in the house, and I
can’t be always after you to do the work I pay you to do. And don’t
forget, you miserable son of a sow, that I still have your damned
guitar in the house.”

She whirled around to stomp back to the
house before Ozzie could do more than flap his mouth.

Ozzie wasn’t a quick thinker even when he
was awake or he might have mentioned the fact that Maggie didn’t
own a clock. Instead, he glared at Maggie’s back for several
seconds, all the emotions common to weak men crossing his face,
from anger to a craving for revenge, to perplexity. His expression
finally settled into a glower of long-suffering abuse when he
hauled himself up onto his two hind legs and resumed chopping
wood.

The aroma of fresh-cut pine followed Maggie
to the house. It was one she liked a lot, and it mingled nicely
with the fragrant wood smoke that billowed out of the chimney. She
paused at the door to look about her, and the scene that met her
eyes was one of deceptive peace and beauty. In fact, Maggie
thought, if she weren’t so blamed exhausted, she might even enjoy
it.

Even now, during the tag-end of a hard
winter, the woods were beautiful. Piñons and mesquite lined the
clearing in which Kenny had built their home, and the front of the
house afforded Maggie a grand view of the meadow where Kenny had
planted his corn. Maggie couldn’t keep up the field alone, so it
was reverting as fast as it could to meadowland.

A little branch of the Hondo River ran
beside the house, so water was easy to come by. Water was the only
thing easy to come by around here. The stream was so insignificant
that nobody had bothered to name it yet, but Maggie always thought
of it as Bright’s Creek. She thought of Kenny every time she
fetched water from it. Building the house near the stream was the
smartest thing Kenny had ever done, most likely.

The house itself could more appropriately be
termed a cabin, since it was put together out of thick rough-hewn
logs, but Kenny had called it a house, and that was all right with
Maggie. It had a kitchen, a bedroom, and a small parlor, and if
that wasn’t a house, Maggie didn’t much care. It was hers and she
loved it, in spite of the hardships she faced to keep it.

There was a screened-in back porch where
they could keep milk cold in the winter, and a dugout that could be
accessed from the porch. She stored her fresh and preserved
vegetables in barrels in the dugout. Kenny had built shelves on the
porch, and Maggie still had jars and jars of preserved fruits,
vegetables, pickles, and jams from her garden’s reapings during the
summer and autumn, in spite of winter being almost over.