Fired Up

by Mary Connealy

  “Good night, Mrs. Greer.”

  Glynna decided to wait until the morning to correct Lana about the name—if the woman was still here.

  The next morning, when he ducked out of the buffeting wind and into Glynna’s diner, Dare almost tripped over his own feet.

  It smelled like heaven. The place was packed, even for Glynna, who always did a bustling business.

  Men were actually swallowing the coffee with not a single shudder.

  Then Dare saw the eggs. They were yellow; he’d expected something a bit darker. One plate had the eggs with the yolks all together, surrounded by the whites. Since when did Glynna know how to do that? Maybe she’d finally learned how to use the stove.

  Glynna stepped out of the kitchen carrying a coffeepot, and men everywhere extended their cups.

  Dare found a seat at the corner of one of the tables. Vince was here, but there was no open seat near him. Dare had slept on the floor at Vince’s house last night and awakened to find Vince gone.

  Jonas was at another table, and he glanced up at Dare, waved, then went back to reading something.

  Glynna smiled at Dare and came to him with her pot and a tin cup.

  Paul came out of the kitchen carrying plates piled with fried potatoes, bacon, and eggs. Not a one of those things was black. On each of Paul’s four plates sat a golden biscuit. It looked like the crown on top of a royal feast. Dare’s mouth watered. The boy was busy waiting tables; so was Glynna. Was it possible Janet had learned to cook?

  Dare got his plate and tore into the hearty meal. A few of the lingering men had moved on—and of course he did some lingering of his own. A chair beside Dare opened up. Vince walked over and sat beside him.

  “What!” Jonas rose so suddenly he tipped over the bench, which was now empty except for him. He stared wide-eyed at the paper in his hands. He ran one hand deep into his red curls without tearing his eyes away from the letter.

  “Bad news?” Dare knew Jonas had family back East—a little sister and maybe an aunt.

  “It’s . . . it’s . . .” Jonas fell silent as he read it again. “It’s impossible.”

  “Did someone die?” Vince went to Jonas and, with a firm hand, guided Jonas over to Dare’s table. He had to apply some force, but he got Jonas to sit down.

  Jonas’s mouth opened and closed like a landed catfish.

  Finally, because he always thought he knew best, Vince snatched the letter out of Jonas’s white-knuckled grip. It was only one page. A second page or two or three was left behind at the spot where Jonas had been eating. It had to be from Jonas’s baby sister. The girl was famous for her long letters. This page was clearly about something that was not good news.

  Vince gave a bark of laughter and shoved the paper back at Jonas. “Your little sister is coming to live with you?”

  It was bad . . . for Jonas. Dare didn’t figure it would bother him overly. It wasn’t his sister. Of course, this land could be hard on women. Glynna’s husband had almost killed her. Ruthy had been nearly drowned and involved in a land war. Lana Bullard was crazy. The Kiowa woman Anemy had watched half her village die.

  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—”r />
  “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.

  Chapter 9

  “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 t
he 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.