When he saw the snug little cabin in the valley of the high lonesome, the vastness of the high mountains all around it, Smoke knew, somehow, he had made it in time.
Smoke was just swinging down from the saddle when Dr. Colton Spalding stepped out of the cabin, smiling broadly when he spied Smoke. The doctor stopped the gunfighter before Smoke could push open the cabin door.
“She’s going to make it, Smoke. But it was a close thing. If Bountiful had not awakened when she did and convinced Ralph that something was the matter…” The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it would have been all over here.”
“I’m in their debt. But Sally is going to make it?”
“Yes. I have her sedated heavily with laudanum, to help her cope with the pain.”
“Is she awake?”
“No. Smoke, they shot her three times. Shoulder, chest, and side. They left her for dead. She was not raped.”
“Why did they do it? And who were they?”
“No one knows, except possibly Sally. And so far, the sheriff has not been able to question her about it.”
“Bounty hunters, maybe. But there is no bounty on my head. I’m not wanted anywhere that I’m aware of.”
“Nevertheless, Sheriff Carson believes it was bounty hunters. Someone paid to kill you. Or to draw you out, to come after them. The sheriff is with the posse now, trying to track the men.”
“I’ll just look in on her, Colton.”
The doctor nodded and pushed open the cabin door. Smoke stepped past him.
The doctor’s wife, Mona, a nurse, was sitting with several other women in the big main room of the cabin. They smiled at Smoke as he removed his hat and hung it on a peg by the door. He took off his gunbelt and hung it on another peg.
“Doc said it was all right for me to look in on her.”
Mona nodded her head.
Smoke pushed open the bedroom door and stepped quietly inside, his spurs jingling faintly with each step. A big man, with a massive barrel chest and arms and shoulders packed with muscle, he could move as silently as his nickname implied.
Smoke felt a dozen different emotions as he looked at the pale face of his wife. Her dark hair seemed to make her face look paler. In his mind, there was love and hate and fury and black-tinged thoughts of revenge, all intermingled with sorrow and compassion. Darker emotions filled the tall young man as he sat down in a chair beside the bed and gently placed one big rough hand on his wife’s smaller and softer hand.
Did she stir slightly under his touch? Smoke could not be sure. But he was sure that somehow, in her pain-filled mind, Sally knew that he was there, beside her.
Now, alone, Smoke could allow emotions to change his usually stoic expression. His eyes mirrored his emotions. He wished he could somehow take her pain and let it fill his own body. He took the damp cloth from her head, refreshed it with water, wrung it out, and softly replaced it on her brow.
All through the rest of that day and the long, lonely night that followed, the young man sat by his wife’s bed. Mona Spalding would enter hourly, sometimes shooing Smoke out of the room, tending to Sally’s needs. Doc Spalding slept in a chair, the two other women, Belle North and Bountiful Morrow, Smoke and Sally’s closest neighbors, slept in the spare bedroom.
Outside, the foreman, Pearlie, and the other hands had gathered, war talk on their lips and in the way they stood. Bothering a woman, good or bad, in this time in the West, was a hangin’ matter…or just an outright killin’.
Little Billy, Smoke and Sally’s adopted son, sat on a bench outside the house.
Just as the dawn was breaking golden over the high mountains around the Sugarloaf, Sally opened her eyes and smiled at her husband.
“You look tired,” she said. “Have you had anything to eat?”
“No.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Stop worrying about me. How do you feel?”
“Washed out.”
He smiled at her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” he said gently. “I go off for a time and you get into a gunfight. That isn’t very ladylike, you know? What would your folks back east think?”
She winked at him.
“Doc says you’re going to be all right, Sally, But you’re going to need lots of rest.”
“Three of them,” she whispered. “I heard them talking. I guess they thought I was dead. One was called Dagget…”
“Hush now.”
“No. Let me say it while I still remember it. I heard one call another Lapeer. He said that if this doesn’t bring you out, nothing will.”
She closed her eyes. Smoke waited while she gathered strength.
Doc Spalding had entered the room, standing in the doorway, listening.
