One Bright Morning (9 page)

“
They must’ve got another
man to ride with ‘em, because we followed their trail and two of
‘em doubled back, but French Jack, he fooled us both and shot
you.”

“
Hell,” Jubal said
again.

“
I chased the decoys and
when I figgered out what they’d done, I went back for you, but he’d
already got you so I shot one of ‘em and followed your blood to
here.”

Jubal didn’t react to Dan’s gruesome
revelation, but looked around the room in which he lay. He was
certain he had never seen it before.

“
Where am I?”

“
Little cabin in the woods
near Lincoln. It’s Mrs. Bright’s farm.”

“
Mrs. Bright?” Jubal didn’t
recollect knowing a Mrs. Bright. He looked at Dan with a big
question in his eyes.

“
Mrs. Bright. She took you
in and saved your life,” said Dan.

Another frown greeted those words. Jubal
couldn’t recall ever meeting anyone by the name of Bright
before.

“
Who’s Mrs.
Bright?”

“
Widow lady. Lives with her
daughter here in this cabin. We’re about ten miles outside of
Lincoln. French Jack’s still around though. He shot her hired man.
Then she up and shot his hired man.”

Dan Blue Gully grinned at the
recollection.

“
She shot him?”

“
Right in the ass.” Dan
actually chuckled.

Jubal’s expression settled into a frown of
pained concentration. He was troubled by flittery, shimmery images
of a rumpled angel with stringy blonde hair and a tire, good face,
and he couldn’t dislodge them from his mind’s eye. He wondered if
the person attached to those foggy mental pictures was the one who
shot French Jack’s colleague. It didn’t seem likely somehow. He
would have shaken his head in an effort to clear it of those
strange memories, but everything hurt too much to shake.

He decided to mention that fact to Dan.

“
I hurt like
hell.”

“
I bet you do,” said Dan
with another grin. “You got shot all to blazes.”

That wasn’t exactly what Jubal wanted to
hear. He gave his friend a murderous scowl. Then he remembered
Dan’s earlier comment.

“
You said this Mrs. Bright
saved my life?”

The question sounded vaguely incredulous.
Jubal Green had never known a woman who was good for more than just
one thing, and that one thing was something a man only wanted every
now and again. Well—a man might want it more often than that, but
he only needed it every now and again.

But Dan Blue Gully was firm on that
point.

“
She saved your life,” he
said, and Jubal knew he meant it.

“
Hmmmm,” he muttered. “I’ll
have to thank her, I guess.” It didn’t sound as though he relished
the prospect.

“
You better,” said Dan. “She
worked herself damned near to death for you, you ungrateful son of
a bitch.” The words were said mildly and were laced with a liberal
dose of fondness.

Jubal looked up at him and his gaze
registered vague curiosity. Dan Blue Gully sounded suspiciously as
though he actually respected this Mrs. Bright person, and that was
a reaction Jubal would have found perfectly astonishing if he’d had
the strength. Neither Jubal Green nor Dan Blue Gully had discovered
very many people who were worth respecting in the course of their
lives and, thus far, those few people included no women. And he
wasn’t forgetting his mother, either.

“
What’s she like?” he
asked.

Dan thought hard about Jubal’s question for
a while. All that heavy thinking required him to stare at the wall
across from Jubal’s bed for a good two or three minutes until Jubal
was so frustrated he would have hollered at him if he’d had the
energy.

“
Well?” he finally demanded,
irritated beyond rationality. He chalked his short temper up to his
having been badly wounded. Generally speaking, he was possessed of
an abundance of patience.

Dan’s face wore a frown of concentration
when he peered down at Jubal.

“
She’s got a big spirit. Her
spirit’s stronger than her body,” he said at last. That was
all.

Jubal glared at Dan for a few moments until
he realized his friend didn’t have anything more to add to his
evaluation of the unknown Mrs. Bright. Then Jubal’s glare faded and
was replaced by an expression of resignation.

He sighed heavily. “Hell, Danny, you’re
talking like a goddamned Indian again,” he said with the barest
hint of a grin.

Dan looked down at Jubal and relief flooded
his features, as though any lingering doubts about his friend’s
health and possible recovery had just been banished.

“
I am an Indian,” he
said.

The two men grinned at each other like a
couple of idiots for a long time before Jubal Green drifted off to
sleep again.

Maggie finally woke up when the bath water
got cold. She was shivering when she washed her hair, dried
herself, and put on her clean clothes. It felt good to be clean
again, although she was so exhausted that she couldn’t quite keep
her balance when she pushed the makeshift screen aside and stepped
into the kitchen.

Dan Blue Gully caught her before she hit the
floor when she fainted.

“
Lordy, ma’am, you’d better
get some rest,” he murmured.

He carried her into the bedroom and laid her
on the pallet he’d made for her against the wall. Then he went out
to the kitchen and gave Four Toes Smith a few instructions and,
while Maggie slept, the two Indians went to work.

When Maggie woke up again, it was deep
night. She yawned and stretched and then curled back up and hugged
her pillow. She felt good and wondered why. It had been so long
since she’d felt good that she’d forgot what it was like. She lay
there for another couple of minutes before the events of the past
couple of days sifted through the pleasant fog of well-being that
engulfed her and reclaimed her attention. Then she sat up on her
pallet with a gasp of dismay.

“
Oh my sweet Lord,” she
breathed.

She looked wildly around her and couldn’t
figure out exactly where in her house she was. The last thing she
recalled was being in the bathtub. She felt her hair and discovered
that it was dry.

“
Oh, my land,” she murmured
again. “I must have been asleep for hours and I don’t even know how
I got here. I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”

She knew she couldn’t be in her bed because,
last she remembered, somebody else was there. When her pulse
stopped hammering in her ears and she had calmed down some, she
took a careful survey of her surroundings.

It was pretty nearly pitchy black in the
room, but a kerosene lamp, turned very, very low, squatted on the
bedside table and cast its feeble light upon the bulky form
sleeping on her bed. Maggie finally figured out that Dan Blue Gully
must have made her a bed on the floor. She appreciated that.

“
I guess I needed some
rest,” she commented softly to herself. She wondered how long she
had been sleeping.

Very carefully, she rose from her pallet and
stepped toward the bed. She guessed she should check on the health
of the invalid she had abandoned.

A quick stab of guilt shot through her at
that thought, but she tamped it down almost immediately. After all,
she hadn’t abandoned him until help had returned to them. She half
expected to see the hunkered form of Dan Blue Gully sitting on the
chair by the bed, but he wasn’t there.

Maggie stood beside the bed, stared down at
Jubal Green, and decided that he looked a little better tonight.
She sighed. He was a handsome devil, all right, and she hoped he
made it. It would be a shame for such a handsome man to die in her
bed. Or for anybody else to die there, either, she amended
guiltily.

It was so dark in the room and Maggie was
still so fuddled with sleep that she didn’t notice Jubal Green’s
eyes slit open and stare up at her.

It’s that damned angel
again
, he thought groggily. Maggie looked
distinctly less scruffy and more angelic since her bath.

Jesus, I wonder if I really
am dead
, crossed his mind.

Then he remembered Dan telling him about
something bright. He couldn’t remember the words, but they had had
something to do with a bright woman shooting French Jack in the
hand. Or was it the ass. He peered at Maggie’s face, which was, at
that moment, catching the soft glow of the kerosene lamp rather
artistically. Her dark, burnt-honey hair was clean and shimmered in
the low, flickering light. Jubal was a little puzzled.

He couldn’t tell from where he lay whether
Maggie looked bright or not, but she looked very peaceful to Jubal
and not at all the sort of female who would want to shoot people.
Still, she must be the woman who had helped him. Maybe there were
two of them.

Maggie was startled when she felt Jubal’s
hand clutch at hers where it dangled at her side.

Jubal frowned at her startled reaction to
his touch, but he decided not to take exception. He didn’t have the
energy and anyway, according to Dan, he owed this woman a portion
of gratitude.

Instead of becoming surly as he usually did
around women, he whispered, “Thank you, ma’am.” There. That was
polite of him, wasn’t it?

He couldn’t figure out why the blasted
woman’s eyes looked like they were suddenly full to overflowing.
Jubal Green hated like hell when women cried at him. He scowled at
Maggie. His hand dropped.

“
You’re welcome, Mr. Green,”
Maggie whispered back to him.

In spite of the frown Jubal was aiming at
her, she smiled a happy, tired smile down at him.

While Jubal wasn’t entirely satisfied about
it all, he decided that her smile was enough for now. He couldn’t
seem to keep his eyes open any longer anyway.

Maggie wiped her tears away as Jubal drifted
back into sleep.

“
He’s going to make it,” she
breathed to herself over Jubal’s sleeping body. “He’s going to make
it.”

She didn’t know why she was so happy or why,
when she was so happy, she felt like bursting into tears, but both
of those conditions prevailed within her at the moment. She decided
she’d better calm down before she went into the kitchen in search
of Dan Blue Gully.

It was her physical needs, which she had
forgot all about and which were becoming perilously insistent,
which finally propelled Maggie out of the bedroom and into the
kitchen. As soon as she passed through the doorway, she stopped
dead and gaped into the room, astonished.

The kitchen was Maggie’s favorite room in
the house. It was always warm and welcoming in there for her, and
smelled pleasantly of the herbs that she bundled and hung up to
dry. But she hadn’t expected it to be warm and welcoming at the
moment since she herself had not had time to tidy it up for days.
And then, instead of cleaning the kitchen as a proper farm wife
should, she had apparently been sleeping for hours and hours.

Yet when Maggie stepped into the room, it
looked just like home should look. In fact, it looked a good deal
better than her own home usually did.

Either one or both of the Indians had swept
and mopped the floor, and there was a neat stack of freshly chopped
wood in a basket by the pot-bellied stove. The stove itself
gleamed. She’d been meaning to clean it for weeks and hadn’t had
the time. She would have made Ozzie do it, but she could never find
him when she needed him.

Her soup simmered on the immaculate stove
lid, ready for anyone who wanted it. It had been joined by two
beautifully roasted chickens, a pan full of golden corn bread, and
a huge pot of greens.

“
Greens,” whispered Maggie,
awed that anyone could have found greens in February.

Three-quarters of one of the chickens had
been consumed already, and Maggie’s eyes strayed from the stove to
the table, where Dan Blue gully and Four Toes Smith sat. They had
just eaten, a fact that was obvious to Maggie from their satisfied
expressions and the dirty plates and full coffee cups that sat in
front of them.

“
Good evening, Mrs. Bright,”
said Dan formally.

“
Good evening, Mr. Blue
Gully,” said Maggie back.

“
Ma’am,” said Four Toes
Smith by way of greeting, and then ducked his head
bashfully.

Maggie nodded and smiled at him.

“
Feel better, ma’am? More
rested?” asked Dan.

“
Yes, thank you.”

“
Four Toes fixed us up a
good meal, Mrs. Bright. Four Toes and you. That soup goes real good
with the chickens and greens and corn bread.”

“
Where on earth did you find
greens?” Maggie couldn’t help asking.

“
Woods,” said Four Toes in a
muffled undertone.

Dan jerked a thumb at his friend. “He kin
find food anywhere, ma’am. It’s a gift.”

Maggie figured it must be. Greens in
February. She couldn’t get over it.

“
Sit down and have some,
ma’am. It’s real good.” Dan stood up and pulled out a chair for
her.

Maggie’s stomach took that opportunity to
growl painfully, and she realized just how hungry she was.

“
Thank you,” she said. “But
first I need to use the privy.” She felt quite embarrassed to be
speaking aloud of such things, but she needed to know the answer to
her next question. “Is it safe to go outside?”

Dan nodded. “Four Toes will go out with you,
Mrs. Bright. He’ll stand guard.”