Death. It hovered close, waiting for him. Betsy knew. She had felt it before. She’d been there when it had stolen her husband away.
But this man, he had no woman to mourn him. He lived alone. If he were to die, then how sad that was. With no one to miss him, then it would be as if his life never was. He didn’t deserve that. Nobody did. She brushed her fingertips along the stubbled curve of his jaw. She stared into the shadows that were growing darker as the sun sank in the sky. The silence seemed to grow and lengthen. The small animals of the forest were hiding from the hungry creatures that watched and waited.
She had to prepare for the worst. She retrieved the handgun from where it had landed in the tall grass and checked the chambers. Five shots were left. She closed the chamber and cocked it.
Thank goodness she’d grown up with four brothers. She’d been around guns all her life. She took some comfort in that. The weapon was ready to fire and she was confident she could use it. If only she felt as confident with her aiming ability.
“Don’t worry.” She let her hand brush across his hairline and along his temple. She hoped if he was somehow aware of what was happening, that she could give him some comfort. “I promise, whatever happens, I’ll stay right by your side.”
There was no answer. She didn’t expect one.
Because the sun was slipping behind the tall trees, it felt as if the day were almost over. Long shadows crept across the ground, chasing back the scant amount of sunlight. The wild sunflowers with their petal faces began to bow.
It was as if the entire mountainside waited.
She had to move him, but memories haunted her—of the doctor and Charlie’s brother moving him from the barnyard to the house. That’s when the wounds had broken open again and there’d been no stanching the blood loss. Charlie had been dead less than five minutes later.
She thought she spotted a movement in the shadows. The glint of luminous yellow eyes behind a fern leaf, and then only shadows.
She had a small length of thread left. She’d work until it was gone and then she’d have to move him.
He didn’t know how it happened, but he was back in the quarry. The sun blistered his skin and burned through flesh and bone until he was on fire from the inside out. His eyes stung from the salty sweat pouring down his face and pain was a living enemy that could not be killed. The places where his flesh gaped open from the lash of the foreman’s whip throbbed fiercely. He was beyond exhaustion and thirst. Hunger and hope.
He heaved the rock from the ground into the wagon behind him again and again. Minute after minute, hour after hour without end. The sun was motionless in the cloud-streaked sky.
It was his second day as a guest of Montana territory. His second day serving time. The prison clothes were scratchy and too tight at the shoulders. His stomach twisted in nausea from the morning’s gruel. Although nearly ten hours had passed since he’d eaten, his breakfast remained a sour lump in his gut.
He left bloody prints on the twenty-pound boulder he heaved into the wagon. As he stepped back, his chains jangled and tore at the raw flesh above his ankles. The boulder, gaining momentum, rolled over the pile, bounced off the railing on the other side and sailed over the edge.
The quarry silenced. Duncan read the faces of the men surrounding him, chained as he was, and saw the knowledge of what was to come. He was not surprised by the piercing sting of the bullwhip or the burst of pain spraying across his shoulders. He stumbled beneath the force of the next blow; sagged against the wagon, clinging to the rail boards as the whip snaked and hissed and sliced.
“Maybe that’ll teach ya,” a hate-filled voice growled out. “Now git back to work.”
His vision was hazed. Dark spots swirled before his eyes and shock rolled through his body. He fought nausea and dizziness to kneel and heft another boulder into the wagon.
Across the rails, there was a hard thud. The boulder that had fallen was back in the pile, as it should have been, lifted into place by a man who was also bleeding. Duncan realized that he’d not been the only one punished for his mistake.
A week ago at this time of day, he’d been getting ready to close up his shop. He’d have been thinking ahead to getting supper over at the hotel—it was usually fried chicken on Fridays with fluffy biscuits and fresh buttered peas and mashed potatoes. As he did every evening, he would have followed the meal with coffee and a slice of pie and, content with his life, he would have settled down at his lathe to work before bedtime.
It seemed impossible that he’d lived that life, that it had ever been real. Now it seemed like a dream, Duncan thought hours later, when twilight fell. His old life was as if it had never been.
At the workday’s end, when the last light was wrung from the sky and it was nearly ten o’clock, Duncan stumbled along the path through the quarry and into the prison yard, where he lined up among the other men waiting to enter the dining hall. How was he going to eat feeling the way he did?
“Hey, you.” It was the man who’d returned the fallen boulder to the wagon. The whip’s lash across his forehead had clotted and left a rough black-red streak between his eyes.
Duncan didn’t see the first blow. It had come from another direction. The second punch had his knees knocking and he fisted his hands, but it was eleven men to his one, and he didn’t have a chance. He choked on blood as he fought off one blow after another until he caught a right hook beneath his jaw and landed face-first in the dirt. A kick struck him in the gut. The beating continued until the line moved forward, and he was left to huddle, bleeding and vomiting.
The young man he’d been had died in the dark prison yard that evening, wearing prisoner’s garb and a convict’s ankle cuff. The man who’d risen from the ground and wiped the blood from his eyes was someone else. There’d been no softness or emotion in the cold-eyed figure that took his place in line. Who’d turned his back on the small glimpse of sky above the high walls.
Like a dead man, he’d had no feelings, no dreams, no needs.
He was made not of flesh and bone, but of iron and will.
It was that iron will that remained as the pain changed and he fought to open his eyes. It was twilight. He was bloody and hurting. But he was not trapped in the nightmare.
He was in a forest, gazing up at a woman. Her features were blurred because he couldn’t see clearly. He hurt everywhere, as if he’d been lit on fire, but that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the woman. Who was she?
“Don’t you dare die on me, do you hear? Not that men ever listen to a woman, no, they wouldn’t dream of doing that, but don’t let me down, Mr. Hennessey. Stay alive for me, all right?”
Lustrous curls tumbled around her face, tangled and wild, and her sweet heart-shaped face was familiar. Worry crinkled the corners of her eyes and emphasized the dimple in the center of her delicate chin. She was a petite thing, and she smelled good. Like sunshine and clover and those little yellow flowers that used to grow on the fence in his mother’s backyard.
Pain scoured his chest. His thoughts cleared and he knew where he was. The dark shadows were his trees and it was his laundry lady kneeling over him with her riot of dark gold curls bouncing everywhere, thick and lustrous and rippling from the wind’s touch.
Another wave of pain crashed through him. He was here, in the present, the past vanishing like fog.
Her eyes, so blue and gentle, gleamed with an unspoken kindness. “Oh, thank Heaven. I knew you were too ornery to die on me.”
But the way she said it wasn’t harsh. No, it was tender, as if she didn’t think he was ornery at all. And he was. All he could think about was how he despised women like her, so delicate and soft and sheltered.