Fired Up (11 page)

Nope, no place for a woman. Dare said, “Tell her she can't come.”

Dare felt like he knew Tina Cahill at least some, and any problem of Jonas's was a problem for all the Regulators.

“She's already left,” Jonas replied, nearly choking on the words. “I hardly know her.”

“Sure you do.” Vince clapped Jonas on the back, clearly enjoying the parson's distress. “She wrote you constantly during the war. We all got to know her. Those letters coming to Andersonville were like a ray of sunlight.”

“A ray of sunlight?” Jonas turned to Vince, his teeth bared. Speaking through a clenched jaw, he said, “She's got no business coming here to Texas without asking. And we live in a desert—we don't need any more stinking sunlight.”

Vince raised both hands like he was surrendering, but of course Vince never surrendered. “She'll be all right.” Vince's voice broke on a laugh, quickly squelched. “We'll help you guard her from the no-account cowboys who want to marry her, the cougars that'll aim to eat her, the avalanches that'll try to bury her, and the Indians who might want to scalp her or maybe just carry her off. It'll be fun.”

Jonas clenched a fist, while Vince, no longer pretending not to laugh, prepared himself in case he had to run.

“You didn't mention lunatic women,” Dare added, having fun for the first time in a while. “And don't forget rattlesnakes and fires and stray bullets and . . .”

The fight went out of Jonas, and he leaned forward until his forehead clunked on the table. Dare was glad Vince had moved him, or his face would've landed right in his plate of food.

Jonas, speaking past the wood, mumbled, “I don't know how to care for a child.”

“Christina can't still be a child,” Dare said. He'd read Jonas's letters from his sister. The girl was a letter-writing fool, and they'd all read them over and over in Andersonville until they felt they knew her. She
had
been a ray of sunlight. Dare wondered if those letters hadn't saved his sanity. Jonas hadn't seen the girl since he'd left home at least a decade ago; only her letters had kept them connected. But she was a pill. A pesky, prissy little reformer. She often told stories of how she was fighting to change the world, or her little corner of it anyway. Broken Wheel was going to have to look out.

“Yep,” Jonas said, “and Aunt Iphigenia remarried, and
apparently there's been trouble between Tina and Iphigenia's new husband.”

Dare expected the new uncle had been on the receiving end of Tina's wagging finger once too often.

“Aunt Iphigenia found a freighter who travels with his wife. They'll give Christina a ride to Broken Wheel. She's already on her way. Aunt Iphigenia paid her fare. It sounds like my penny-pinching, cheeseparing aunt was eager to do it.”

Dare and Vince exchanged a look, then both of them started laughing.

Vince scrubbed both hands over his face. “Good luck, my friend. It sounds like you're going to need it.”

Jonas lifted his bowed head, scowling at them. “I left home when she was a toddler. I went home now and then, but I haven't seen her since she was . . .” Jonas fell silent, and Dare saw him moving his fingers like he was counting. “She couldn't have been more than ten years old, maybe nine. And then I only saw her for a couple of days. Aunt Iphigenia didn't approve of me, so I mostly stayed away.”

“Well, you ran wild for a few years,” Vince reminded the parson. “Your aunt had a point.”

“How am I supposed to take care of a little girl?”

“How old is she now?” Vince asked.

Jonas shrugged. “I'd say eighteen or nineteen.”

Dare laughed. “She isn't a child anymore. I had two sisters married and already mothers at the age of nineteen.”

“She was always a chubby little thing.”

“Chubby?” Vince said.

Jonas scowled at him. “Okay, she was a tub of lard. She
had skimpy bits of flyaway white hair always snarled up. More than her share of skinned knees. She had a black eye once when I was there. Aunt Iphigenia told me Tina was apt to get sent home from school for scolding the other children, and she wasn't afraid of a fistfight if she thought someone had it coming. I had to play big brother and protect her a few times. It was usually her own fault that she got in trouble.” Jonas's red brows lowered. “And from her letters I'd say she's still not a careful young woman. She's coming to a town full of men, and she's going to start right in reforming all of them.”

Smiling, Dare recognized the big-brother attitude and couldn't say he blamed him. “You can probably take worrying about no-account cowboys showing interest in her off your list. There isn't a man in all of Texas who'd put up with a fat, bald woman scolding him. So we can stop worrying about that, whatever her age. That only leaves cougars and avalanches and Indians and lunatics and fires and—”

“She'll want to reform both of you, too.” Jonas glared at Dare's smile.

Vince's smile shrank away.

Dare had no interest in having a woman haranguing him. “When she gets here, tell her to stay on the wagon. We can all chip in to pay the man to haul her away. She'll have to learn to get along with her new uncle.”

Vince and Dare being upset seemed to cheer Jonas up considerably, which didn't seem very Christian of him. He changed the subject. “I found you another house, Dare. There's a decent one right behind the diner. It's right next door to the parsonage. No one's got a claim on it.”

“I'm through being a doctor. That house burning down was a message straight from God.”

A loud clatter of fast-moving wheels sounded outside and a man shouted, “Whoa!”

Dare turned to see a covered wagon skidding to a stop right outside the diner window. A cloud of dust swallowed the man sitting high on the wagon seat.

“I need a doctor!” The man, who had ebony skin, leaped to the ground from the dangerously high seat. “Somebody help me! My son, Elias, I think he's dying!”

Dare was outside in the blustery November wind before he gave serious thought to moving. He sprinted for the back of the wagon, meeting the man as he turned, holding a young boy in his arms. “He's running a high fever.”

“I'm a doctor.” Dare took the child, burning hot.

Vince was at Dare's side. “Bring him to the law office.”

Dare saw a woman and two more boys, younger than this one, climbing out of the wagon.

“We have to get him out of the cold. Follow me.” Dare hurried after Vince, who had his desk cleared by the time Dare got inside. It was the only flat surface in the room.

Stretching the child out, Dare looked up at Vince. “Get me cold water. We've got to get this fever down.”

“I'm on it, Doc.”

Dare thought he heard sarcasm in Vince's voice and undue emphasis on the word
Doc
, but he was too busy to pay it any attention.

“His fever broke.” Dare straightened from the child's side and staggered.

Vince caught him and did his best not to smile. Dare could not stop being a doctor.

“How long has it been?” Dare rolled his shoulders and twisted his neck back and forth to ease the aching.

“I don't know.” It'd been the longest day of Vince's life, helping Gil Foster chase after his harum-scarum sons. “Hours . . .”

The sun had set, and this whole thing had started during breakfast.

Elias had roused a few times, mostly shaken out of his unnatural sleep by fits of painful coughing.

“Will my son be all right, Doctor?”

Vince heard the almost worshipful note in Melanie Foster's voice. Dare had that effect on women. Mrs. Foster was a pretty lady with shining black skin, wearing faded yellow calico. Melanie had worked like a mule skinner, refilling Dare's basin with cold water, heating water so the boy could breathe moist air under a tent. Fetching
and carrying, following orders as fast as Dare could give them, which was real fast. The woman had done anything and everything she could to help. She stood now wringing her hands as if to stop working was to let her son die. Her husband, Gil Foster, and the other children had been in and out. Tending the two active younger sons, one just a toddler, was keeping Gil, an old friend of Luke's, mighty busy.

Jonas had helped Vince chase after the young'uns, but he'd needed to split his time inside praying with the mother, leaving Vince and the boys' pa to tend them alone for the most part. Glynna and her children had helped too, but they'd had a crowd in for the noon meal and weren't available most of the time. Those little terrors were more than a two-man job.

Glynna had offered her rooms above the diner for naps, and Gil had grimly informed her that his sons had given up napping at about a year old.

“Your son has pneumonia,” Dare said.

As if to prove that, the boy inhaled and his chest rattled. Then he exhaled with a groan.

“He's going to need care for a while, but usually, if I can get the fever to break, the patient makes it.” Dare rubbed the back of his neck.

The woman let out such a huge sigh that Vince thought she might just deflate all the way to a puddle on the floor. She did sink, and Vince took one step to catch her, but through pure luck there was a chair behind her and she sat down hard.

“Thank you, Doctor.” Melanie could barely choke out
the words. “Thank you so much. God bless y-you.” Her voice broke and a sob tore from her throat.

Dare looked at Vince helplessly.

Vince shrugged. He hated crying. “Don't look at me. You're the doctor.”

The distraught mother buried her face in her hands and wept until she bent in half. Vince wondered if he oughta go pat her on the back, or maybe fetch her husband. Then Vince might get stuck chasing after those wild boys who were rampaging all over town—which would be better than watching a woman sob.

Dare dropped his voice to a whisper. “I'm just going to let her cry for a bit. I think she needs to.”

“That's a stupid thing to say,” Vince whispered back. He could've probably spoken right out, as weeping was a noisy business. “No one
needs
to cry.”

“I think maybe they do.”

“They don't and that's that. I'm not listening to hogwash about needing to cry from a man too lazy to go to doctoring school.”

Finally the crying quieted and the woman regained control of herself. Shuddering as she straightened, her eyes glowed with gratitude. “You saved my son, Dr. Riker. He would have died without you.”

Vince looked at the tent Dare had erected around the boy, the steaming kettles to make the air humid. Dare had coaxed medicine down the boy's throat, which he'd been lucky to find in the general store, Dare's own medicine supply having burned. There had been warm liquids that the boy had resisted swallowing, including beef broth that
Vince had fetched from the diner with a sense of wonder that it wasn't crispy, a chest plaster that Vince remembered his nursemaid used to make, and constant bathing with cool cloths.

Dare had indeed saved this boy.

Frowning, Dare said, “Ma'am, it's important that I tell you I'm not a doctor. I worked with a doctor in the war, but I've had no schooling for this.”

“You are in every way a doctor, sir.” Melanie dabbed at her eyes with a kerchief she pulled from her sleeve, and then her eyes glinted as if she would fight anyone to the death who challenged her on that. Except the only one challenging her was Dare himself, and she wasn't about to kill him.

“No, I can't let you think that. I've got some healing skills, but to present myself as a doctor is wrong.”

And since Dare had been presenting himself as a doctor ever since he'd come to town, Vince hoped it wasn't all the way wrong. Did they arrest people for impersonating a doctor?

How about a lawyer?

His eyes went to his copies of Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
. Reading them, and a whole lot of other books, was all he had in the way of schooling. He'd never exactly been asked to do any lawyering of a complicated nature, so it'd been sufficient. Probably illegal but sufficient. Especially sufficient in a miserable little town in the middle of Indian Territory.

“Should we send for the doctor, then?” Melanie asked. “Why didn't we call him in earlier?”

Silence fell over the room. The woman, and Vince too, wondered what Dare would say to that.

“There isn't a doctor in town, ma'am,” Dare said.

“Are you saying you wish you'd let my son die rather than present this masquerade of being a doctor?” She sounded genuinely offended, and Vince couldn't blame her.

“I'm just trying to be honest with you. I don't hold with lying, and to let you go on thinking I'm a real doctor is a low-down lie.”

The woman, her eyes red and swollen from tears, smiled. “You are what the good Lord gave me today when my son needed help, and you'll always be Dr. Riker to me. God bless you.”

Vince thought the tears were starting up again and prepared to put on his high boots to escape the flood. Instead, the woman squared her shoulders and lifted her chin in a show of good sense. “I believe I mentioned that my husband, Gil, and I are here in response to a letter sent to us by Luke Stone. Do either of you know him?”

“We do indeed, ma'am,” Vince said. He welcomed the change of subject to—he hoped—one less likely to bring on another bout of soggy caterwauling. “He's a friend of ours. He got his ranch back from Flint Greer, and he's trying to restore the land Greer stole from others.”

Scowling, Melanie said, “That Flint Greer was an awful man. My husband left to fight for the North, and before he got back, his father died and his mother went back East. His mother said Greer killed Gil's pa, but there was no way to prove it. There was no home for Gil to return to. We
were married and living a hardscrabble life when Luke's letter came. We decided we should come home to Texas.”

“Well, I'm Luke's lawyer. He's spoken fondly of your husband and the time they spent running the hills as children. I have a list of who all he contacted. I know your house is still standing on your property. You can go on out to it right now and settle in.” Vince really wished she'd go. Her eyes were still a little watery.

“I need to stay with my boy.”

Of course she does,
Vince thought.

She sniffled in a threatening manner . . . well, at least Vince felt threatened. He hadn't considered it, but for certain she needed to stay in town with her ailing boy. It was at that moment he realized he was going to get thrown out of his own house with its one small bedroom upstairs.

That didn't suit him, especially when there was a much better idea close at hand.

“I'll go tell your husband to head on out to your place for the night.” Vince didn't bother to mention his other errand to any of these home invaders.

“Thank you.” The woman's eyes filled with tears. Probably tears of gratitude, yet that didn't make it any easier to take.

Dare woke up when Vince came in on a blast of cold air. It was full daylight, and Dare didn't even remember going to sleep.

It'd taken some wrangling, but he'd convinced Mrs. Foster to go upstairs and lie down. Vince hadn't been there to
ask. Dare hoped he didn't mind. Then Dare had watched over his patient until the youngster fell into a natural sleep. His breath still rattled in his chest and the danger hadn't entirely passed, but the fever had left the boy, a good sign.

Dare had sat down next to his patient, thinking to just rest his eyes for a few minutes. Now here he was, how many hours later, waking up.

“Is Mrs. Foster bedded down upstairs?” Vince pulled his coat off and hung it up.

“Yep, she was asleep on her feet and I finally persuaded her to rest.” Dare considered things through a daze of exhaustion. “Where'd you spend the night?”

“I've been working as hard as you. Maybe harder.” Vince arched a brow to let Dare know Vince had caught him sleeping. “I haven't gotten a minute of sleep.”

“Doing what?” Dare rubbed his aching head, wishing for coffee. That really good coffee they'd had at the diner yesterday. That'd make his brain start functioning again.

“It's a long list, and I don't have time to run through it all. For now, I set up that house behind the diner as a new doctor's office.”

“I told you, I'm through being a doctor. I'm gonna buy Flint Greer's old place—as soon as I can get Glynna to take money for it—and then I'm gonna become a rancher.”

Vince flashed a smile at Dare that, for some reason, set Dare's teeth on edge. Vince had always been a hard one to manage.

“Don't be a doctor, then. But I set up an empty house for you to live in when and if you decide to help out the ailing folks in Broken Wheel.” Vince jerked his head at
the boy, who was swathed in a white sheet rigged like a tent. “You're never gonna be able to say no to someone in need, and Greer's old place is a ways from town. You can't do any doctoring from out there—if you ever decide to do any, that is.”

Dare scrubbed his face with both hands. He needed to be a lot wider awake to win an argument with the Invincible Vince Yates.

“How cold is it out there?” Dare asked, changing the subject. “Can we move the boy safely?” He'd felt a blast of cool air when Vince came in, but he'd barely noticed it, what with being asleep and all.

“If we wrap the boy up tight, we can move him just fine.” Vince seemed overeager to get his house back, and Dare couldn't blame the man for that. “There were a few things left behind in your new house—not much, but enough to get you started again. I've been cleaning and making it livable. I even moved a bed into one room on the main floor that will make a good doctor's office.”

It wasn't much fun having someone take over managing his affairs. It made things easier, though. Dare's stomach growled. “I need coffee. And breakfast. I haven't eaten since yesterday morning.”

“Sure, you did,” Vince countered. “I brought meals in twice for you and Mrs. Foster.”

Wrinkling his brow, Dare reflected back on yesterday. He did have a vague recollection, come to think of it. “Beefsteak and biscuits?”

“That was supper. Glynna has added an evening meal to her diner. The noon meal was a roast beef sandwich
you swallowed almost whole while you worked on the boy.”

Dare shook his head, then looked around the room. Little Elias was resting quietly on top of Vince's desk. There were things piled everywhere—sheets and medicine bottles, basins and kettles—whatever Dare had needed, Vince or Mrs. Foster had somehow found. Now Elias needed a real bed, and Dare needed more space. It sounded like Vince had found that, too.

He hated waking Mrs. Foster, though. The woman had been near the end of her rope. Then a footstep creaked overhead.