Gold Dust (29 page)

Katy thought the baby did look a bit puny, but then, what did she know about babies? “He’s just tired, I’m sure,” she said
inadequately. “You lie down. Maybe you can sleep.”

Camilla wrapped herself in a blanket and lay still, but she didn’t sleep. Katy settled back against one of the bedrolls, rocked
back and forth, and quietly sang a little ditty she remembered her father singing to her and Ellen when they were small. The
song was not a lullaby, exactly. It was a cattlemen’s song, a tune to lull restless cattle on long nights in the saddle standing
watch over a herd. Katy and Ellen had always fallen asleep before the second verse, but Liam was not nearly
as cooperative. If anything, he grew fussier. He squirmed and waved his fists, drooled profusely on Katy’s flannel shirt,
and grew red in the face. Before too much time passed, Katy realized that the flushed skin and the heat radiating from the
little baby was not the result of crying. She felt Liam’s face, his feet, his stomach—everywhere she touched the baby burned.
The fussing had become more a wheeze than a cry.

“Camilla,” Katy called.

Camilla jumped, jolted from a light doze. “What? What is it?”

“Come look at Liam. Maybe he is sick.”

In the blink of an eye Camilla knelt beside Katy and took the baby from her arms. “Oh my dear Lord!” she cried as she brushed
his face with gentle fingers. “God have mercy! My poor baby!”

The sickness wasted no time in tightening its grip on poor Liam and revealing its dread nature. Diphtheria was a familiar
killer. Katy and her sister had suffered and almost died from it when they were twelve. Olivia had saved them; the illness
had been the catalyst that had brought Gabriel O’Connell and Dr. Olivia Baron together. But Olivia was not here to save Liam,
and though an antitoxin had recently been developed to fight the disease, it certainly was not available in the Alaskan wilderness
on the shores of Lake Bennett.

That night was a cold, dark slice of hell. Word traveled quickly in the small tent-town community. Nearly every woman in the
little settlement came by to offer suggestions and sympathy. One told Camilla to hang the baby upside down and tickle his
throat with a feather—her grandmother’s tried-and-true treatment. Another recommended a thimbleful of warm whiskey every hour.
Camilla had enough sense, however, to know that the only treatment possible was constant and patient nursing.

Jonah and Andy came and stayed. Andy fixed hot coffee and tea for Camilla and Katy while Jonah kept a frantically pacing and
quite drunk Patrick out of the women’s way.
Camilla and Katy both worked to keep the infant wiped down with cool cloths, but the fever climbed higher. Liam spit out or
drooled out every drop of lukewarm water that Camilla dripped into his mouth. The disease raced along its course. One so young
and fragile had no defense against it, no reserves to fall back upon, no strength to call up. By midnight, the characteristic
thick rubbery membrane had formed at the back of Liam’s throat. He wheezed for breath and labored to swallow his own saliva,
until his crying became no more than piteous gasping. By two hours past midnight, he was dead.

Camilla didn’t cry. Not right away. She stared at Liam’s lifeless little body with a face grim and cold as stone. She took
no notice of Katy’s hand on her shoulder, but rose and marched from the tent. For a moment she simply stared at Patrick, who
sat by the fire, his head in his hands, his body weaving slightly from the effects of a bottle and a half of whiskey.

“Come look what you have done,” Camilla said quietly, her voice cold and sharp as an icicle. “Come look what you have done,
you and your damned gold fever, Patrick Burke.”

When he didn’t move, she grabbed his arm and yanked him to his feet with a strength that belied her small frame. “Get up,
you no-good, drunken, wandering Irishman! Come look what you have done!”

“Cammie…” Patrick groaned.

“No!” She screamed the denial and covered her ears. “I will not listen to your excuses. You killed my baby as sure as if you
had taken a shovel to his head! You have no thought for anyone but yourself, and now you’ve killed my baby!”

Patrick staggered to his feet. “Cammie… sweetheart, you’re talking crazy. Just settle down.”

Camilla went for him, flailing like a madwoman. Her fists hammered his head, shoulders, and chest, and her feet kicked at
his shins. When he instinctively drew his arm back to return a blow, Jonah grabbed him.

“Don’t even think about it,” Jonah warned.

Meanwhile, Katy managed to pull Camilla away from her
husband. Her fit of violence over, the Irishwoman collapsed against Katy, weeping so desperately she could scarcely catch
a breath. Patrick twisted away from Jonah and went into the tent. He came out a moment later, his face chalky, his hands shaking.
If he could have beaten on himself, Katy guessed, he would have done it, but he merely shook his head and went searching for
a bottle.

Katy sat with Camilla the rest of the night while Jonah dealt with the little body and made arrangements for a burial the
next morning. With the aid of a healthy dose of Patrick’s whiskey, Camilla finally succumbed to uneasy sleep. Katy stayed
awake, sitting on the tent floor beside Camilla’s bedroll, in case the Irishwoman should wake and need her. Not that she could
have slept anyway. The unfairness of Liam’s death ran restless circles in her mind. She had known the infant a very short
time, but the little one had wormed his way into her heart all the same. Babies were like that, she reflected. Nature made
them irresistibly endearing. Otherwise, with all their spitting up, crying, and messing, babies would be the last thing any
woman in her right mind would want to put up with.

In the dark silence of the night, Katy remembered Liam’s gurgling smiles, his little fists flailing in an infant tantrum,
his wide-eyed fascination at the funny noises Jonah sometimes made for him. Jonah—who had assumed the sad tasks that should
have been Patrick’s. All the times Katy had seen Jonah with Liam flashed through her mind—holding him, playing with him, rocking
him to sleep as if caring for a baby was second nature to him. The memories focused her sadness and made it sharper. Resting
her head upon her drawn-up knees, she gave in to tears, crying silently for Liam’s loss, for the ache in her heart that encompassed
the baby, Camilla, and Patrick, and for a loneliness that she was loath to acknowledge, a loneliness that wore Jonah Armstrong’s
face.

Almost every person at Lake Bennett was in attendance early the next morning as little Liam Burke was laid to rest in a peaceful
clearing a few minutes walk from the lakeshore. Few in the crowd were acquainted with Camilla and Patrick, but the death of
an infant touched everyone. The few women in the tent town closed around Camilla in a circle of comfort, decent women and
whores alike. Where babies were concerned, women were simply women, and no lines were drawn between the virtuous and the fallen.
They shared stories of their own babies, some of them so sad that Katy wondered how women could bear to have children at all—such
fragile things babies were, and so entwined in a woman’s heart that the loss tore at the soul as nothing else could.

Katy stood a bit apart and listened to the women talk, feeling out of place—like a child looking on at an adult gathering.
These women far surpassed her in both experience and courage, Katy reflected. She might be able to shoot the eye from a squirrel
at a hundred paces, fight like hell, outsharp cardsharps, and ride circles around most cowpokes she knew, but these women
who closed ranks around Camilla possessed a less flamboyant courage that was deep and firm as the very roots of the earth.
They seldom received credit for it. Katy
herself had scoffed at womanly accomplishments time and time again as she was growing up.

“Katy, are you all right?”

The unexpected concern came complete with a comforting hand on her shoulder. Katy looked up into Jonah’s dark blue eyes, and
her heart jolted. “Of course I’m all right.”

Jonah regarded her with a slight smile and shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look quite so done in.”

Katy made an effort to straighten her shoulders and raise her chin, then decided the attempt was hopeless. “I’ll miss Liam.
I feel really sad for Camilla. I can’t imagine birthing a baby, nursing and caring for it night and day, and then losing it.
Why do women ever take the risk of having children?”

“Because they have a lot more courage than men do,” Jonah answered. “The Good Lord knew if he gave men the job of birthing
kids, this old world wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Katy heard no hint of teasing in his voice. Tears blurred her eyes—tears for Liam, for Camilla, and for her own suddenly obvious
inadequacy.

“Come on.” Jonah led her to a moss-covered log that offered a bench at the edge of the trees. “Sit down. Everything seems
worse when you’re tired.”

“I’m sorry,” she said as the tears overflowed. “This is stupid.”

“Crying for a baby is stupid?” Jonah took a scarf from one pocket of his trousers and dabbed at her cheeks.

“I should be helping Camilla.”

“Camilla has plenty of help. Maybe a good gullywasher of a cry would make you feel better.”

She stubbornly sniffed back her tears.

“Don’t you ever let yourself cry?” Jonah asked gently.

“No.”

He smiled. “Only us sissy greenhorns get to cry, huh?”

A soft chuckle bubbled through Katy’s tears. “You’re not a sissy, Jonah Armstrong. Not much of a greenhorn anymore, either.”
She let herself look at him for a moment. Even
blurred by her tears, his strong features seemed sharper than they had been when they’d parted. His hair was an uncombed tousle.
The line that cut from nose to mouth was more deeply etched. The fan of creases at the corners of his eyes looked more like
tired lines than laugh lines.

“You were great last night, Jonah. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

“You were great yourself.”

Inexplicably, the affectionate tenor of his words brought more tears to Katy’s eyes. “Do you mind if I go ahead and have that
cry?”

“Be my guest.”

He held her during the storm of weeping, his fingers combing gently through her hair and stroking her back. Katy soaked his
shirt with her tears, crying until she no longer knew what she cried about. The thud of Jonah’s heart beat a steady, comforting
rhythm next to her cheek. His hard chest was a rock that anchored her against the chaotic pull of her emotions. His arms wrapped
her in a cocoon of warm affection that she couldn’t resist. When the storm had finally passed, she left the safe harbor he
provided with great reluctance.

“Now I really feel stupid,” she admitted, pushing back from his embrace.

Jonah smiled. “You look like someone dumped you in the creek and wrung you out to dry.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

They were alone now. During Katy’s bout of weeping everyone had headed back to the lake, leaving little Liam to the peace
of the forest. The clearing was indeed peaceful. Birds whistled down at them from their perches in the trees. A breeze sighed
sadly through the spruce needles, sounding like the very breath of the earth. A surprising sense of quietude soothed Katy’s
soul. Jonah was right. A good gully-washer of a cry did make the world seem brighter.

She sniffed and wiped her nose on the scarf Jonah handed her. “My sister Ellen sometimes cries at the drop of a hat,” Katy
said with a small smile. “I always teased her for it.”

“You have a sister?” Jonah slipped to the ground and sat with his back propped against the log.

“A twin sister.”

Jonah rolled his eyes toward the blue sky. “There’re two of you in the world.”

Katy laughed. “Ellen is nothing like me. She’s very quiet, but you have to watch out for her. When you’re least expecting
it, she’ll slip something by that you never saw coming. She’s going to medical school to become a doctor.”

Jonah raised a brow.

Katy guiltily studied the ground. “My… uh… parents took her out to Cornell a few months ago.”

The brow arched higher. “Are these the same parents who’re so sadly dead and gone.”

“Yeah. Well, I lied a bit.”

“Just a bit?”

“I said they were gone,” Katy reminded him. “I never said they were dead.”

Jonah laughed. “Katy O’Connell, you are a devil. Not that I believed you in the first place.”

“You didn’t?”

“Hell no. You can’t outslick a city slicker.” His blue eyes twinkled up at her. “Is Katy O’Connell your real name?”

“Yeah. Although I’ve used others.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Jonah wondered aloud.

“When my pa was running from the law, we used his mother’s name—Danaher. And then, there’s the name my mother’s uncle gave
me when I was born. White Horse Woman. He named me after his favorite horse.”

“His horse?”

“Among the Blackfoot, such a name is an honor,” Katy informed him. She’d always been proud of her Indian name.

“Your mother’s people were Blackfoot?”