The Doctor Takes a Wife

by Laurie Kingery

  She felt a pang of grief for the idealistic young Jesse Holt who had gone off to war, promising to marry her and start a family as soon as the war was over, and who had returned as a cold, ruthless criminal. Perhaps it would have been better if he had died in battle as a soldier, his honor intact.

  As the days went on and reports reached them that the Gray Boys had struck ranches in the neighboring towns, Sarah was the recipient of decidedly odd looks from some townspeople she encountered in the street. She knew the gossips were having a field day telling anyone who would listen about the scene in the hotel restaurant between Jesse and herself, and reminding each other that the two had once been engaged to marry. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that some of them actually blamed her for kindling Jesse Holt’s wrath on Simpson Creek by rejecting him.

  The outlaw raiding even managed to cast its shadow over Sarah and Nolan’s burgeoning romance. The influenza epidemic was over, spring was fast approaching and their love was a growing, thriving thing, yet how could they plan a wedding with carefree hearts when the outlaws’ reign of terror over San Saba County continued?

  A very discouraged foursome—Sarah, Nolan, Nick and Prissy—had supper at the sheriff’s office on the first Saturday in March to toss around ideas of how to capture the Gray Boys.

  “Have you questioned Ada?” Sarah asked while she ladled the vegetable soup into bowls and handed them to Prissy to pass out. “Perhaps if she thought she might be arrested as an accomplice, be tried and go to prison if convicted, she’d give up their hideout.”

  Nick steepled his fingers and eyed the ham Sarah was now slicing. “She might well do so, but the problem is finding her. Have you seen her lately?”

  Sarah paused and laid down the knife. “Now that you mention it, no,” she admitted.

  “Neither has anyone else,” Nick said. “‘Neither hide nor hair’ of her, as they say. She seems to have gone missing, though some of her neighbors have reported seeing her coming and going from her house at odd hours. Just the other night, Nolan, Donovan and I paid a surprise visit in the middle of the night after Donovan spotted a light in one of the back windows and summoned me—”

  Sarah looked up, surprised, for Nolan hadn’t mentioned it.

  “—but the place was deserted when we got there.”

  “Yes, there was a pile of dirty laundry on the bed,” Nolan said. “It looked as if she’d come home to fetch more clothes, and left just as quickly.”

  “Apparently she’s come to enjoy the outlaw life,” Nick went on. “The latest reports from the victims of their attacks have mentioned that she’s riding along with them and packing pistols just like the others.”

  Sarah and Prissy stared at one another, horrified. Had it really been less than a year ago when Ada Spencer had been as excited as any of the Simpson Creek Spinsters about meeting a beau through the newspaper advertisements?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “They’re overrunning the lines, heading straight at us!” the sentry screamed, his voice a mere thready cry against the din of booming cannon and the crack of rifles and the frantic whinnying of horses and the shouts of men grappling in mortal combat.

  A trio of frightened-looking boys—surely they were only boys, even if they wore corporal’s insignia on their uniforms—scrambled into the medical tent and huddled in the far corner, trembling. One of them was crying; another yelled “They’re after us! We gotta hide till they go past, Doc!”

  Nolan wrenched up his head from the bloody operative field beneath his hands. He was in the middle of the amputation of a shattered leg of an unfortunate captain whose limb had received a glancing impact of cannon shot just an hour ago. He didn’t have the time to deal with fleeing soldiers using the medical tent as sanctuary—he had time for nothing but the man bleeding and nearly insensible from blood loss and the last of the whiskey.

  The Rebel Yell, the unnerving Confederate battle cry, ululated nearby—too nearby—as pounding feet thudded closer, closer…

  “Turn them—you’ve got to turn them!” he shouted to the sentries crouched at the tent’s entrance.

  One of them ran toward Nolan, screaming, “We can’t! They’re too many of them! They—” And then a bullet struck him in the back with such force that he went down, arms flailing, against the side of a nearby cot, sending a rifle skidding toward Nolan as he collapsed in a welter of blood.

  Wild-eyed men in threadbare, tattered remains of gray and butternut uniforms charged in, bayonets fixed.

  Nolan lay down his scalpel as carefully as his shaking hands allowed. “Get out! This is a medical tent! By all the laws of war and decency, you have no right to be here, interfering while we’re trying to care for the wounded!” Nolan thought the unkempt fellow at the head of the pack would surely raise his rifle and silence him with a single shot, but the latter paused only long enough to spit in contempt.

  “We saw them yella belly Yanks runnin’ in here, lookin’ for their mamas, prob’ly!” he shouted back. “You jes’ let us have them and we’ll let you tend to your business!”

  He couldn’t let them shoot at the boys where they crouched, not only for their sake but also for the sake of the wounded men lying on pallets and on the bare ground inside and outside, awaiting their turns for surgery. Flying bullets were no respecters of canvas barriers. Grabbing for the rifle the sentry had dropped, he raised it and shot the man, but too late to prevent the invader’s round from striking one of the huddled corporals. The boy screamed; the rebel fell in a heap in the aisle between the operating tables.

  Sentries and Yankees whose wounds were not too disabling ran in now, and used their rifles as clubs and fired their pistols at the rebels. The yells of the combatants rose to a cacophonous din as the air grew thick with smoke and the bitter smell of gunfire.

  And still the surviving rebels kept shooting, and many of the previously wounded died like lambs in a slaughterhouse.

  A red mist of rage swam in front of Nolan’s eyes. Not pausing to reload, he tightened his grip on the fallen rebel’s rifle and with a roar of fury, charged the rest of the attackers with the bayonet, skewering one man, then yanking the blade free to go after another.

  It took only moments to kill the rest of the invaders, but as Nolan trudged back to the operating table, heart pounding and hands shaking, he saw that death had claimed one more victim. The soldier would not need his leg amputated after all, for he had bled to death while the battle raged around him.

  Nolan awoke from the nightmare with a jerk, his entire body bathed in the cold sweat of horror. What battle had that been—Petersburg? Spotsylvania? It didn’t matter; by the time the war was nearing its end, they had all blurred together.

  Another man might have conceived a deeper hatred for the enemy after this attack; in Nolan it resulted in a more fervent desire to defeat death no matter which color uniform its victims wore.

  As a physician, he was still fighting death, he thought as he lay there feeling his pulse return to normal. Was his dream prophetic? Was he being warned that even though the war was over, violence committed by outlaws such as the Gray Boys still took a toll on lives?

  “Let us rise and sing our closing hymn, ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God,’” Reverend Chadwick said with upraised palms, and the congregation stood as one. “And while we are singing it, let us remind ourselves that He is indeed a ‘mighty Fortress,’ no matter what brand of troubles are besetting us, whether it be Comanches, as it was last fall, or an epidemic, as we have just been through, or the depredations of outlaws, as we are currently experiencing. Let us pray together that God will enable our acting sheriff, Nicholas Brookfield, and his posse, who are at this very moment patrolling the countryside, to apprehend the outlaws who are endangering our peace. The army has been requested to aid us. In the end the Lord will enable us to triumph over all these trials, beloved, never doubt it.”

  Before opening his mouth to sing with the rest, Nolan added a silent amen to the preacher’s prayer. If only
he didn’t feel so personally helpless in this matter. He, along with Sarah and the other “Spinster Nurses” had been instrumental in turning the tide against the influenza epidemic, but now he could only tend his patients, when they needed him, while other men rode out in pursuit of the gang.

  Yes, medicine was his profession—it was up to him to help patients amid the “mortal ills prevailing” that the hymn spoke of, but in the midst of this crisis, it no longer seemed enough. His protestation to the mayor that he could not serve as the sheriff now seemed like a mere excuse to him to stay in his office, safe and secure, while other men risked their lives.

  His gaze fell on Sarah as her fingers coaxed the melody of the majestic hymn from the old piano and those around him sang the age-old words of faith. Just to think that this lovely, talented lady loved him gave him a thrill each time he looked at her. He wanted to set a date for their wedding, to plan their future, yet there was no peace while these outlaws, led by one who had once been the center of Sarah’s life, preyed on the people of Simpson Creek.

  After church, they took a picnic lunch across Simpson Creek, and sure enough, they found the first bluebonnets peeking up in their striking blue, white-topped glory from the tender new grass in the meadow where he had so recently asked Sarah to be his wife. They reminded him of the bigger lupines he had seen in Maine, but these were more vivid, more brave somehow, blooming before the calendar had officially decreed spring.

  “Sarah, during church I was thinking—”

  Once again they were interrupted by the sounds of approaching horsemen, and both of them went still, only to relax when they recognized the returning posse. But all was not well; Nick cradled in his arms Pat Donovan, the deputy sheriff. Donovan was unconscious, his face pallid, his trousers and the lower part of his coat saturated in blood.

  “We ambushed them by Barnett Springs—almost had them, too, but they shot Pat’s horse out from under him and then shot Pat in the thigh,” Nick called, even as Sarah and Nolan rushed forward. “He’s lost a lot of blood…passed out on the way back…”

  “Get him to my office,” Nolan shouted, gesturing in that direction, as he and Sarah ran for the buggy. His heart sank, for he knew the man was already doomed, but he had to try.

  Thank You, Lord, for this dauntless woman. Sarah didn’t have to be asked to help him. Once they ran into his office, she just rolled up the sleeves of her Sunday-best dress, threw on the heavy canvas apron he tossed her and began scrubbing her hands and arms with soap before rinsing them in carbolic.

  Half an hour later, Sarah stared at Nolan from the other side of his exam table, her eyes wide with wordless grief as Nolan pulled a sheet over the deputy’s face.

  “He lost too much blood before he got here,” Nolan muttered dully, wiping his hands on a towel. He wasn’t sure if he spoke aloud or not. “If I’d been with them, maybe I could have saved him….”

  “Nolan, you mustn’t blame yourself,” Sarah said gently, shrugging off her crimson-stained apron and coming around the table to take him in her arms, heedless of the tears that bathed her cheeks. “You did all you could….”

  “I have to do more.” He hugged her for a moment, then loosed her and pushed open the office door where Nick and the rest of the men waited.

  “I couldn’t save him,” he announced. Some of the men stared at him, others dropped their gazes to their boots. “Nick, I want to take his place, till this is over. Swear me in.”

  “Nolan, no!” Sarah cried.

  “Nolan—Dr. Walker—that’s not necessary,” Nick began. “The town needs a doctor, and only you can do that.”

  “I might have saved Donovan if I’d been along,” Nolan said. “If I’d been there to staunch the bleeding, apply a tourniquet… No, my mind’s made up, Brookfield,” he added as Nick opened his mouth again. “You’re a rancher serving as a lawman, I’m a doctor and I can help you. I can shoot. My buggy horse is trained to the saddle, too. I’ll pack the medical supplies that might be useful in my saddlebags.”

  He walked Sarah home after that, Donovan’s tin star pinned to his coat.

  “Nolan, I wish you wouldn’t do this.” Sarah’s voice was choked with unspent tears. “I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you….”

  “I’ll be all right. Don’t you see, I have to do this, sweetheart,” he said, his arm around her waist as they walked toward the cottage. “Doesn’t the Bible say there’s a time for war and a time to heal? Right now I have to be willing to fight so I can go back to being a healer, and we can go on with our lives in peace. It’s not the first time I’ve had to put my scalpel down and pick up a gun,” he added, and told her about the day he’d done so in the medical tent.

  She was wide-eyed when he finished. “Dear me. And yet the man you tried so hard to save, Jeffrey Beaumont, was a rebel.”

  “I had nightmares for months about the face of the man I had to shoot,” he told her, not mentioning the fact that the nightmare had come again last night. “I think that’s why I was so determined to save Jeff, to atone for it, even though I’d done what was necessary to save the others.”

  They had reached the cottage. “You will be careful?” she begged, worry creasing her lovely brow.

  He nodded, and pulled her into his arms again, kissing her tenderly. “Of course.” Then he had another thought. “Perhaps I should teach you to shoot, as well? I’ll be away some with the posse—I don’t like the idea of leaving you defenseless in case Holt takes a notion of trying to ‘persuade’ you to come with him again.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not necessary, Nolan. Papa made sure both of us girls learned how to shoot a pistol in case we met up with a rattlesnake or something on the ranch. I have a derringer in the cottage—Milly made sure I brought it, just in case.”

  “Then promise me you’ll keep it handy.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Prissy flushed pink with pleasure as Major McConley, riding at the head of a score of cavalry soldiers, tipped his cap at them as he trotted past. She rewarded him with a flirtatious smile.

  “I’m so glad I wore my new bonnet,” she said. “The major has such a cute dimple when he smiles, doesn’t he? Sarah, do you suppose he’s a bachelor?” Her gaze followed the disappearing cavalry detachment. “Perhaps we should issue an invitation to him—and the others in his regiment who are unmarried too, of course—to a Simpson Creek Spinsters’ Club event. I might like to be a major’s wife, I think.”

  Sarah thought it would be a long time until they’d be able to plan any more Spinsters’ Club parties, but she had to smile at her friend’s obvious attempt to distract her from her anxiety about Nolan. Only this morning the bell had tolled at the church—the signal for the posse to assemble there. Nolan had ridden eastward with Nick and the rest to investigate a report that the outlaws had been sighted camping on the banks of the Colorado River.

  “Prissy Gilmore, living in a stockade, miles from the nearest stores?” Sarah teased. “I can’t imagine it.”

  “You think I’m just a frivolous flibbertigibbet, don’t you? I’ll have you know I would make a very good soldier’s wife. I’d organize tea parties for the wives, regimental balls… And just imagine the wedding—with his men crossing swords to form an arch over us as we left the church.” She sighed dreamily. “But since you’ll obviously be married before I will—to your handsome, brave doctor/deputy—perhaps we should ride out to see Milly. She’s probably bored to tears with Nick away. I’m sure she’d help you design a wedding dress fit for a princess, then sew it for you.”

  “I’d love to go see her—I don’t like her being out on that ranch without her husband there, even though the hands are sticking close to the house—but you know Nolan advised us not to ride out of town without him along until they’ve caught Jes—I mean the rustlers.” She winced inwardly as she imagined the man she had once loved dying in a hail of bullets, or being marched up a gallows to be hanged.

  “Well, we can at least look at the fabrics in the me
rcantile, and peruse their latest copy of Godey’s,” Prissy said.

  Sarah gave in with a nod. Maybe it would keep herself from fretting about Nolan. She needed another sack of flour and a couple pounds of sugar, anyway, or she wouldn’t be able to bake tomorrow.

  “My, look at the time,” Prissy exclaimed as they left the mercantile, peering at the delicate gold watch pin that had been her mother’s. “Four o’clock already. I had no idea it was getting so late, but didn’t we have fun?”

  Sarah had to admit poring over fashion designs and bolts of fabrics had been a pleasurable way to pass the afternoon. She’d found an exquisite ivory silk broche and Mrs. Patterson had agreed to put it in the back room for her until she could show it to Milly. And Prissy had gone ahead and bought a dress length of hussar blue cotton which she planned to pay Milly to sew into a party dress for when they invited the bachelors of the Fourth Cavalry to a Spinsters’ party, saying, “Won’t it look gorgeous against the darker blue of the major’s dress uniform?”

  Soon it would be time to go up to the big house for supper with Prissy’s father, and with any luck Nolan might return to town in time to join her there. She hoped he would bring good news at last.

  Crossing the street and entering through the massive gates to the Gilmore grounds, they walked to their cottage. Once inside, Sarah went into the kitchen with the staples she’d bought, while Prissy walked down the hall to her room to put her bonnet back in its hatbox.

  Perhaps tomorrow she’d try the new recipe Caroline Wallace had given her for Washington pie. She liked to experiment with new things, and it was probably a wise idea to vary the fare she sold at the hotel and mercantile. It wasn’t long before she would be able to get fresh peaches, and—

  “Sarah, could you come here please? Quickly?” Prissy called from her room. Her voice sounded strained, unnatural, but Sarah only smiled, for it was the same tone she’d used before when she’d been startled by a mouse scurrying across the room to disappear into a crack in the wall.