“All right,” Sam said. “Just take it easy. I’ll give you a hand.”
He got his arm around Matt’s shoulders and lifted him into a sitting position. Matt’s head spun crazily for a few seconds before settling down.
The wounds in his side and back throbbed, too, but he ignored the pain. The bleeding had stopped, thanks to the poultices, and as long as it didn’t start again, he was confident that he would be all right.
“Juan Pablo, thank you for helping me,” Matt said. “I owe you a debt.”
Juan Pablo looked skeptical, but he gave Matt a curt nod. Without saying anything, he went over to the fire and hunkered next to the pot where the stew was simmering. He took a wooden bowl from his wife, dipped it into the pot, and began eating with his fingers, picking out chunks of meat and wild onions from the savory broth.
Elizabeth brought bowls of stew to Matt and Sam. Earlier, when Matt smelled the stuff cooking, he had thought he was hungry. But now his stomach suddenly rebelled against the idea of eating. He grimaced and pushed the bowl away, saying, “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Sam said, “Drink the juice, anyway, even if you can’t eat the rest of it right now. After losing all that blood, your body needs the nourishment.”
Matt could see the logic in that argument. Sam held the bowl to his mouth and tipped it up, and Matt forced himself to swallow the thick liquid, sip by sip. When he was finished, Sam helped him lie down on the blankets again.
“For some reason ... I just got ... mighty tired,” Matt managed to say as his heavy eyelids drooped and exhaustion washed over him.
“Go ahead and get some sleep,” Sam urged. “It’ll be good for you.”
Matt nodded, or at least thought he did. He couldn’t be sure. He closed his eyes to let sleep overtake him.
Just before he dozed off, a thought occurred to him and he tried to open his eyes again. He wanted to tell Sam he had seen that green-eyed, redheaded young woman in the Navajo getup first.
But that probably wasn’t true, he realized, since he’d been unconscious when they got here, so it was just as well that oblivion claimed him before he could say anything.
Sam didn’t sleep much that night, because Matt developed a fever and would have tossed and turned restlessly all night if Sam hadn’t sat beside him and tried to keep him calm.
As it was, Matt muttered incoherently most of the time and jerked his head back and forth. Elizabeth Fleming, who seemed to have appointed herself a nurse as well as a teacher, and Juan Pablo’s wife took turns wiping Matt’s forehead with a wet cloth in an attempt to cool his fever.
Juan Pablo himself left the hogan, muttering disgustedly to himself as he went to look for somewhere more peaceful to sleep.
Sometime during the long ordeal, a rustle of movement close by made Sam’s head come up sharply. He had dozed off sitting up, without realizing it. He saw Elizabeth on her knees on Matt’s other side. She had taken over the job of bathing his feverish forehead.
Sam started to smile and nod at her. He was in mid-nod, though, when the urge to yawn gripped him. He couldn’t hold it back. His mouth opened wide before he could stop it. All he could do was cover the yawn sheepishly with his hand.
Elizabeth laughed.
The soft sound didn’t waken the older woman, who now snored on the other side of the hogan. Sam chuckled, too, and grinned at the redhead.
“I can tell by your accent you’re not really fresh from Killarney,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“Bennington, Vermont, actually,” she told him. “What about you?”
“Montana. Like I said, my mother was a teacher. My father was Medicine Horse of the Cheyenne.”
“I don’t think I’ll be marrying one of my students here in Arizona.”
“Then we
Elizabeth nodded.
“Yes, in Sweetwater Valley, about twenty miles west of Flat Rock.”
“I didn’t think there was any sweet water in these parts.”
“You should know that Indians are capable of irony,” Elizabeth said with a smile.
“What’s this Flat Rock you mentioned? I don’t reckon I’ve heard of it. Some natural landmark?”
“No, it’s a town,” she said. “The closest town to this spot. I took the stagecoach there from Chinle.”
Sam shook his head.
“Must not have been there for very long. It’s been a few years since Matt and I rode through this area.”
“All I know is that it has a rather rough reputation. The stage line ends there, and the driver said he would be glad to turn around and start back to civilization.”
Calling anywhere in this region “civilization” was stretching things a mite, Sam thought. A lot of it had been unchanged for hundreds of years.
Matt stirred and let out a low moan. Elizabeth leaned over him with a frown for a moment, then got the cloth wet again in the basin of water on the ground beside her and wiped it over his forehead.
“He needs proper medical care,” she said, “but I’m afraid this is about all we can do for him.”
