Gambler's Magic Page 5

  “Please, Mr. McMurdo. Be reasonable. Can’t you postpone your visit for only a little while. Even another two or three days? Until Mr. Perry’s out of danger? Surely that family can spare you for the sake of a seriously wounded man, can’t they?”

  “Oh, aye. I expect they might, but I gave my word, you see. This is Cody and Millie’s first baby together, and I promised to stand godfather to the wee mite and take care of their little Katie whilst Millie rests up.”

  Joy blinked, her chaotic thoughts diverted. “Their little Katie?”

  “Aye.”

  “But you said this was their first baby.”

  “Together.”

  “You mean they have another child—separately?” How had the couple managed that? Adoption, perhaps?

  “Aye, lass. Little Katie, from Mellie’s first marriage.”

  “Oh. I see.” Joy’s too-soft heart hurt as she thought how sad it would be to be left a widow with a child, especially out here where there was no employment and perishingly few people. Women had such a difficult time in the world without a man or a family to provide for them. She couldn’t even imagine being left a widow in Rio Hondo, in the middle of this hostile nowhere.

  “Aye. Melissa divorced her first husband and married up with Cody a little over two years ago.”

  Compassion fled, a victim of shock. “Divorce?”

  Mac winced, and Joy realized she’d spoken quite shrilly. But divorce? Divorce was disgraceful and sinful and went against everything she had ever been taught was right in the world. Her nose wrinkled in reaction.

  Mac laughed at her. “Don’t get prune-faced about our dear Mellie, lass. Ye’re quite a one for the Bible. Recollect that verse tellin’ folks to let the good Lord judge us.” He tapped her on the head. “Ye’ve got enough to do, what with takin’ care of yourself, lass—and poor Elijah Perry over there—without goin’ around condemnin’ other folks before ye know them. Ye needn’t be doin’ the Lord’s work for Him. He’s plenty competent. He can judge Mellie for Himself, I reckon.”

  Joy experienced the strangest sensation when Mr. McMurdo’s finger touched her once, twice, thrice, very lightly, on her head. It was a tingly feeling that started with his finger and sparkled through her body from top to toe. It was very curious, and the novelty of the physical sensations were only augmented by the sparkles she saw dancing in the air. She shut her eyes against them, shook herself, and prepared to argue some more.

  Mr. McMurdo forestalled her. “Lass, I know ye’d like to quarrel with me for a few more hours, but I don’t have time for it right now. I have to get to the O’Fannins’ place before Cody sends out a search party.”

  Joy forgot about the bizarre feelings in her body and the odd sparkles in the air. “No! No, you simply can’t leave me here alone with that man. I’m not fit to nurse him! Besides, it’s . . . it’s improper.”

  “Improper?” Tipping his head to one side, McMurdo looked at her with the kindest expression Joy had ever seen directed at her. There was something in his face that spoke eloquently, both of his faith in her and of his pity for her.

  Nobody’d ever pitied her before. Especially nobody like Alexander McMurdo, a canny old Scottish scoundrel whom her mother would stigmatize as a tool of Satan. Joy didn’t like it.

  Stiffening her spine, she said in a voice that was even stiffer, “Very well. I suppose you won’t be swayed, and there’s no help for it. I shall do my best.”

  “Ye’ll do fine, lass. Trust yourself for once.”

  His smile was so sweet, and touched something so deep within her, that Joy felt a compelling urge to burst into tears. Ridiculous! She grimaced to make up for the emotions tumbling around in her belly. Her mother would surely berate her for displaying so fruitless a thing as sentiment when what she needed was resolution.

  Don’t waste your time in crying over the wicked, Joy Hardesty. The Lord expects action from his servants.

  Yes, Mother.

  Action be hanged. Joy was scared to death.

  McMurdo finished packing his bag and loaded it onto his horse. The last thing he did before he left for the O’Fannins’ ranch was show Joy a beautifully embroidered christening gown. He was taking it to the baby, a little boy they’d named Arnold after Cody O’Fannin’s favorite cousin.

  “What do you think, Joy? Think their newborn ranch hand will suffer embarrassment to be gowned in this thing?” He held the dress up for her inspection.

  Joy’s heart, which she generally tried to keep packed with cotton wool and hidden away so people wouldn’t suspect how tender it was, melted, along with her panic. “Oh, how beautiful!” She reached out and fingered the fine embroidery. “Wherever did you get such a lovely christening gown?”

  He winked at her. “I have me own ways, child.”

  She was so charmed by the idea of a tiny infant wearing that delicate gown for his christening that she forgot to resent Mac’s wink and sly words. “Any mother would love to be given so beautiful a christening gown, Mr. McMurdo. I’m sure Mrs. O’Fannin will cherish it forever.” Joy would have cherished it, had it been given to her for her own child. Not that she’d ever have a child. Who’d ever admire Joy Hardesty enough to plant a child in her?

  “I’m sure she will, too. Y’know, Joy, I have a feeling you and Mellie could become fast friends.”

  Fast friends with a divorcée? Most unlikely. Joy pinched her lips together and didn’t say so, feeling rather righteous about her forbearance. Instead, she asked, “But how do babies get christened out here, Mr. McMurdo? I didn’t think Rio Hondo had a church.” Which only went to show once more how depraved a place it was.

  “Mr. Horgan, the circuit-rider, pops by from time to time. He’ll be here in a few weeks, and little Arnold can come to town and be christened then.”

  “A circuit-rider. Oh, my.” Never, not once, had Joy envisioned living anywhere in the United States or its territories so unsettled as to have no churches. Auburn, Massachusetts, fairly teemed with them.

  “Well, I’d best be off.”

  Mac whisked the baby gown from Joy’s slack fingers, sending up a puff of those strange sparkles. They must be a figment of her fevered brain—or dust particles shining in the sunlight. Of course. That was it. The wind blew constantly here, and there was always dust in the air. Those sparkles were the result of sun and dust. That’s what they were. They weren’t mysterious at all.

  Then the import of Mac’s words hit her.

  He was leaving! In fact, he was walking out the door as she stood there contemplating dust. Her insides gave a hard twinge, and she hurried after him, wringing her hands. “I hope you won’t be gone too long, Mr. McMurdo.”

  He winked again. “Didn’t know you cared, Joy, m’dear.”

  Unfamiliar with teasing, Joy sputtered several unconnected syllables. The old man patted her on the shoulder.

  “Don’t take on so, dear. Ye’ll do fine with our poor Mr. Perry. You’re just what the fellow needs.”

  She shook her head hard. “I don’t think so.”

  “Sure y’are.” He turned and put his foot in the saddle. “And he’s exactly what you need, too.”

  And then, before Joy could react to his appalling misapprehension, Mr. McMurdo kneed his mount and they trotted off in a cloud of dust. She stared after him, flapping the powdery earth away from her face and feeling almost too frightened to move.

  She’d never had to shoulder so heavy a responsibility without a strong hand propelling her in the right direction and screeching at her what to do. Without her mother or someone almost as strong—nobody was quite as strong as Joy’s mother—to guide her, she couldn’t seem to focus her thoughts or her energy. She felt like steam from a kettle dissipating into the air; like a pile of beans without the bag around them. She was a glob of clay with no one to mold her. Clay couldn’t mold itself, for heaven’s sake.

  “Oh, dear.”

  She walked to the wagon yard gate and watched Mr. McMurdo and his horse ride down the beaten stre
tch of earth the citizens of Rio Hondo had—in a fit of outrageous optimism, in Joy’s opinion—named Second Street. It certainly wasn’t like any street Joy had ever seen before. The settled part of town ended not far away from the wagon yard, and Mac rode on beyond it.

  In Auburn, of course, the road would have curved, or trees and buildings would have obscured her line of sight, and Mac would have been hidden within minutes. In these parts the land was so flat, and there was so little by way of plant life or humanity between anything and anything else, that Joy could see him getting smaller and smaller and smaller, until he was no more than a tiny black dot moving against the anemic yellow-brown of the desert.

  Eventually the prairie swallowed up the black dot, and she was left all alone, staring at nothing. With a gunshot stranger whom she was required to nurse. With a man whose very way of life was anathema to her and who, moreover, might die any second.

  She heaved a heavy sigh. “I expect there’s no help for it.”

  Feeling overburdened and intensely inadequate, Joy shut the wagon yard gates, bolted them against visitors—she didn’t feel up to nursing Elijah Perry and running Mac’s business, too—and, with feet of lead, walked back into McMurdo’s house.

  # # #

  “What am I supposed to do with you, Mr. Perry?” she muttered as she stared down at the wounded man.

  His formerly swarthy complexion was a pale, sickly color today. His hair and mustache, which had seemed wickedly jaunty before, now lay limp against his skin. With trembling fingers, Joy brushed the hair back from his forehead and noticed that his hairline was receding. Leaning closer—but not too close, since the man was a miserable sinner and she didn’t dare—she saw that his hair was thinning on top. This sign that he was a mere human male and, therefore, subject to the same mortification of the flesh as the rest of the world, comforted her strangely.

  His skin had been tanned where the sun could reach it. The rest of him, Joy noticed, was more olive than pink. She wondered if his ancestors had come from some sunny Mediterranean clime. His skin didn’t have the pasty-white pallor of her own. The white bandages Mac had wrapped around his wounds looked stark against his darker skin.

  “Oh, dear,” she murmured again. “Whatever am I supposed to do now?”

  The notion of nursing this fellow all by herself had kept her stomach pitching uncomfortably ever since Mac had told her she’d have to do it. Now she pressed a hand to her midsection and commanded her innards to stop heaving. They didn’t, and she sighed again.

  “I suppose what I should do is think calmly about what Mother would tell me to do.”

  Her stomach rebelled violently. Joy shut her eyes and prayed for strength.

  All right. Perhaps her mother was a little too potent an influence to contemplate at the moment. “What would the nursing teachers have told me to do at school in Boston?”

  The teachers at the nursing school in Boston, while firm and demanding, had been much more soft-spoken and kindly disposed toward her than her mother had ever been. The thought of them didn’t make Joy want to vomit. She took it as a sign that she should attempt to use them as her guides in this present instance.

  “A sustaining broth,” she muttered.

  The nursing teachers in Boston had advocated broths and thin soups as preferable to solid foods for an injured patient. Water was best of all, but often patients—particularly male patients—objected to having nothing to support them but water. Thank heavens Mr. McMurdo had prepared some chicken soup already.

  Joy went to the kitchen and found the pot simmering on the stove. She lifted the lid, sniffed, and decided it smelled quite tasty. “Good. I won’t have to cook for a day or so.”

  She thought about the asparagus growing wild by the river and felt a sudden craving for fresh green vegetables. Frowning, she told herself not to be foolish. She couldn’t leave this man by himself while she went jauntering off to the river.

  “Later,” she promised herself. If she managed to keep the poor fellow alive for another two days, she’d reward herself with a trip to the river. She’d walked up there before, when she was recovering from her own illness and feeling discouraged because Mr. Thrash and his party had ventured forth without her. The Spring River was only the equivalent of a couple of Auburn city blocks away, to the north, and it was surrounded by marshland and even some trees. She could catch fish there, too. Fish and asparagus would provide the patient with a light but strengthening meal when he could handle solid foods.

  Because she anticipated fever, she mixed up some of the willow-bark tea McMurdo had recommended. She also got the bottle of laudanum down from the cupboard, and set a glass out, so that she could mix some laudanum and water should it prove necessary. She pumped fresh water at the kitchen sink into a pitcher and set it beside the glass, just in case.

  She rummaged through some of Mr. McMurdo’s medical supplies a while longer and found some antiseptic tablets. Good. She could soak Mr. Perry’s bandages after she’d laundered them. She was pleased that she’d thought of soaking the bandages, cleanliness being next to godliness and all that.

  There. She was rather proud of herself that she was now prepared. Her mother would have commended her. Or, at least—Joy tried very hard never to be boastful—her mother wouldn’t have chastised her for being unprepared. In any event, since most of her life had been spent trying with every breath to stay on her mother’s extremely small charitable side, Joy experienced a feeling of relief, and that lightened her mood.

  In furtherance of her need to stay in her dead mother’s good graces, Joy made sure Mac’s supply of bandages, pins with which to fasten them, and a crock of his healing balm were set out in case she needed them. She opened the crockery pot full of medicine, sniffed, and wrinkled her nose. What was in that stuff? It was greasy and smelled of herbs, and was nothing at all like the medicines she’d had access to in Boston. Well, that was nothing to the purpose. This is what she had, and this is what she’d use.

  The idea of changing that man’s bandages assaulted her and made her stomach heave again. She fought down her nausea with grim determination. She would do what she had to do, and that was that. If what she had to do entailed changing bandages on the nether limbs of a vile sinner, so be it. If it entailed touching all that naked flesh on Mr. Elijah Perry’s body—Jerusalem! Joy controlled with difficulty the spurt of fright that ambushed her heart—but she controlled it.

  All right then. She was prepared with broth and water, tea and medicine. Water and laudanum. Bandages and balm and antiseptic tablets. And training.

  Ever since Joy had been old enough to understand the spoken word, she’d been taught, by look and tone, that she was intrinsically worth less than nothing—and Joy had been a good pupil. Now, in her twenty-fifth year, she knew she was inept and useless.

  But she had gone to nursing school. She did know how to care for patients. She might very well be bad at it, but she knew how to do it. And she would do it. That man, Elijah Perry, for all his immorality, deserved no less from her.

  The idea that he might see the error of his ways and reform if she were to cure him occurred to Joy, and her mood lightened another fraction of an inch. Goodness, wouldn’t that be something, if she, the least of God’s creatures, led a sinner to the light?

  Unlikely. But not impossible.

  Besides, her mother wasn’t here to berate her when she failed. That notion came to her out of the blue and made light explode within her.

  Her mother wasn’t here!

  The only three human beings on the face of the entire earth who would know if she failed were herself, Alexander McMurdo, and Elijah Perry. And if she did fail, Elijah Perry would be dead, so that meant there were really only two.

  She guessed she was being sinfully weak again, but the notion of having no witnesses to her undertaking of the nursing of that man in McMurdo’s Wagon Yard suddenly appealed to her. She’d never been able to hide her flaws and errors before. Perhaps having been left here all alon
e to tend to the poor man wasn’t such an awful prospect after all.

  Joy felt, in fact, almost light-hearted when she finished taking stock of her supplies and tiptoed into the back room to check on her patient once more. Her relatively good mood vanished.

  “Jerusalem. You look perfectly dreadful, Mr. Perry.”

  Joy felt his forehead with her hand. Thank heavens he didn’t feel feverish yet. She prayed the situation would continue, although she didn’t hold out too many hopes. From everything she’d been taught, a fever was to be expected in the case of sudden severe injury. She expected bullet wounds counted as sudden injuries, although the nursing teachers had been talking about carriage crashes or farming accidents or mishaps of that nature. They hadn’t addressed gunfights. Of course, they lived in Boston. Boston was civilized. Not like Rio Hondo.

  She decided not to think about that, but pulled a chair close to the bed. Picking up her patient’s limp wrist, she found his pulse and counted the beats, measuring the time by the large clock on the dressing table across the room. “Fast,” she murmured. “But not thready. You have a strong heart, Mr. Perry.” Even if it was a black one. Presuming he had any heart at all. She decided not to think about that, either.

  Mr. McMurdo had laid Elijah Perry’s personal effects on the bedside table beside the kerosene lamp. Joy glanced at his belongings now, and felt a little spurt of sadness. How pathetic, for a man to have only these few paltry earthly possessions to show for himself. Mr. Perry wasn’t any spring chicken, after all. Yet a pair of spectacles in a leather case, a handsome silver-encased pocket watch, a folded piece of paper, some money, a multi-purpose pocket knife, and a small leather-bound volume were all Joy discerned to mark the passage of the years of his life.

  She picked up the book, wondering if it might be a Bible. “The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins.” A novel, with its pages neatly cut, all ready to read. She should have suspected as much from such a specimen as Elijah Perry.