The McKettrick Legend Read online

  The sensation triggered something in Sierra, but she was too distraught to know what it was.

  “I’ll be right back,” he promised.

  And he was.

  Sierra snatched her bag from his hands, scrabbled through it to find her wallet. Found the insurance card Eve had sent by express the same day Sierra agreed to take the McKettrick name and spend a year on the Triple M, with Liam. She might have kissed that card, if Travis hadn’t been watching.

  The clerk nodded a little nervously when Sierra walked up to the desk and asked for the papers she needed to fill out.

  Patient’s Name. Well, that was easy enough. She scrawled Liam Bres—crossed out the last part, and wrote McKettrick instead.

  Address? She had to consult Travis on that one. Everybody in Indian Rock knew where the Triple M was, she was sure, but the people in the insurance company’s claims office might not.

  Occupation? Child.

  Damn it, Liam was a little boy, hardly more than a baby. Things like this shouldn’t happen to him.

  Sierra printed her own name, as guarantor. She bit her lip when asked about her job. Unemployed? She couldn’t write that.

  Travis, watching, took the clip board and pen from her and inserted, Damn good mother.

  The tears came again.

  Travis got up, with the forms and the clip board and the insurance card, in scribed with the magical name and carried them over to the waiting clerk.

  He was halfway back to Sierra when the doctor re appeared.

  “Hello, Travis,” he said, but his gaze was on Sierra’s face, and she couldn’t read it, for all the practice she’d had.

  “I’m Sierra McKettrick,” she said. The name still felt like a garment that didn’t quite fit, but if it would help Liam in any way, she would use it every chance she got. “My son—”

  “He’ll be fine,” the doctor said kindly. His eyes were a faded blue, his features craggy and weathered. “Just the same, I think we ought to send him up to Flag staff to the hospital, at least over night. For observation, you understand. And because they’ve got a reliable power source up there.”

  “Is he awake?” Sierra asked anxiously.

  “Partially sedated,” replied the doctor, exchanging glances with Travis. “We had to perform an intubation.”

  Sierra knew how Liam hated tubes, and how frightened he probably was, sedated or not. “I have to see him,” she said, prepared for an argument.

  “Of course” was the immediate and very gentle answer.

  Sierra felt Travis’s hand close around hers. She clung, in stead of pulling away, as she would have done with any other virtual stranger.

  A few minutes later they were standing on either side of Liam’s bed in one of the treatment rooms. His eyes widened with recognition when he saw Sierra, and he pointed, with one small finger, to the mouth piece of his oxygen tube.

  She nodded, blinking hard and trying to smile. Took his hand.

  “You have to spend the night in the hospital in Flag staff,” she told him, “but don’t be scared, okay? Because I’m going with you.”

  Liam relaxed visibly. Turned his eyes to Travis. Sierra’s heart twisted at the hope she saw in her little boy’s face.

  “Me, too,” Travis said hoarsely.

  Liam nodded and drifted off to sleep.

  The doctor had ordered an ambulance, and Sierra rode with Liam, while Travis followed in the truck.

  There was more paper work to do in Flag staff, but Sierra was calmer now. She sat in a chair next to Liam’s bed and filled in the lines.

  Travis entered with two cups of vending-machine coffee, just as she was finishing.

  “Thank you,” Sierra said, and she wasn’t just talking about the coffee.

  “Wranglers like Liam and me,” he replied, watching the boy with a kind of fretful affection, “we stick together when the going gets tough.”

  She accepted the paper cup Travis offered and set the ubiquitous clip board aside to take a sip. Travis drew up a second chair.

  “Does this happen a lot?” he asked, after a long and remarkably easy silence.

  Sierra shook her head. “No, thank God. I don’t know what we would have done without you, Travis.”

  “You would have coped,” he said. “Like you’ve been doing for a long time, if my guess is any good. Where’s Liam’s dad, Sierra?”

  She swallowed hard, glanced at the boy to make sure he was sleeping. “He died a few days before Liam was born,” she answered.

  “You’ve been alone all this time?”

  “No,” Sierra said, stiffening a little on the inside, where it didn’t show. Or, at least, she hoped it didn’t. “I had Liam.”

  “You know that isn’t what I meant,” Travis said.

  Sierra looked away, made herself look back. “I didn’t want to—complicate things. By getting involved with someone, I mean. Liam and I have been just fine on our own.”

  Travis merely nodded, and drank more of his coffee.

  “Don’t you have to go back to the ranch and feed the horses or something?” Sierra asked.

  “Eventually,” Travis answered with a sigh. He glanced around the room again and gave the slightest shudder.

  Sierra remembered his younger brother. The wounds must be raw. “I guess you probably hate hospitals,” she said. “Be cause of—” the name came back to her in Eve’s telephone voice “—Brody.”

  Travis shook his head. His eyes were bleak. “If he’d gotten this far—to a hospital, I mean—it would have meant there was hope.”

  Sierra moved to touch Travis’s hand, but just before she made contact, his cell phone rang. He pulled it from the pocket of his western shirt, flipped open the case. “Travis Reid.”

  He listened. Raised his eyebrows. “Hello, Eve. I wouldn’t have thought even your pilot could land in this kind of weather.”

  Sierra tensed.

  Eve said something, and Travis responded. “I’ll let Sierra explain,” he said, and held out the phone to her.

  Sierra swallowed, took it. “Hello, Eve,” she said.

  “Where are you?” her mother asked. “I’m at the ranch. It looks as if you’ve been sleeping in the kitchen—”

  “We’re in Flag staff, in a hospital,” Sierra told her. Only then did she realize that she and Travis were both wearing the clothes they’d slept in. That she hadn’t combed her hair or even brushed her teeth.

  All of a sudden she felt in credibly grubby.

  Eve drew in an audible breath. “Oh, my God—Liam?”

  “He had a pretty bad asthma attack,” Sierra confirmed. “He’s on a breathing machine, and he has to stay until tomorrow, but he’s okay, Eve.”

  “I’ll be up there as soon as I can. Which hospital?”

  “Hold on,” Sierra said. “There’s really no need for you to come all this way, especially when the roads are so bad. I’m pretty sure we’ll be home tomorrow—”

  “Pretty sure?” Eve challenged.

  “Well, he’ll need his medication adjusted, and the inflammation in his bronchial tubes will have to go down.”

  “This sounds serious, Sierra. I think I should come. I could be there—”

  “Please,” Sierra interrupted. “Don’t.”

  A thoughtful silence followed. “All right, then,” Eve said finally, with a good grace Sierra truly appreciated. “I’ll just settle in here and wait. The furnace is running and the lights are on. Tell Travis not to rush back—I can certainly feed the horses.”

  Sierra could only nod, so Travis took the phone back.

  Evidently, a barrage of orders followed from Eve’s end.

  Travis grinned through out. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I will.”

  He ended the call.

  “You will what?” Sierra inquired.

  “Take care of you and Liam,” Travis answered.

  1919

  That morning the world looked as though it had been carved from a huge block of pure white ice. Hannah marvele
d at the beauty of it, staring through the kitchen window, even as she longed with bittersweet poignancy for spring. For things to stir under the snow bound earth, to put out roots and break through the surface, green and growing.

  “Ma?”

  She turned, troubled by something she heard in Tobias’s voice. He stood at the base of the stairs, still wearing his night shirt and barefoot.

  “I don’t feel good,” he said.

  Hannah set aside her coffee with exaggerated care, even took time to wipe her hands on her apron before she approached him. Touched his forehead with the back of her hand.

  “You’re burning up,” she whispered, stricken.

  Doss, who had been re reading last week’s newspaper at the table, his barn work done, slowly scraped back his chair.

  “Shall I fetch the doc?” he asked.

  Hannah turned, looked at him over one shoulder, and nodded. If you hadn’t insisted on taking him with you to the widow Jessup’s place, she thought—

  But she would go no further.

  This was not the time to place blame.

  “You get back into bed,” she told Tobias, briskly efficient and purely terrified. The bout of pneumonia that had nearly killed him during the fall had started like this. “I’ll make you a mustard plaster to draw out the congestion, and your uncle Doss will go to town for Dr. Willaby. You’ll be right as rain in no time at all.”

  Tobias looked doubtful. His face was flushed, and his night shirt was soaked with perspiration, even though the kitchen was a little on the chilly side. The boy seemed dazed, almost as though he were walking in his sleep, and Hannah wondered if he’d taken in a word she’d said.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Doss promised, already pulling on his coat and reaching for his hat. “There’s whisky left from Christmas. It’s in the pantry, behind that cracker tin,” he added, pausing before opening the door. “Make him a hot drink with some honey. Pa used to brew up that concoction for us when we took sick, and it always helped.”

  Doss and Gabe, along with their adopted older brother, John Henry, had never suffered a serious illness in their lives, if you didn’t count John Henry’s deafness. What did they know about tending the sick?

  Hannah nodded again, her mouth tight. She’d lost three sisters in child hood, two to diphtheria and one to scarlet fever; only she and her younger brother, David, had survived.

  She was used to nursing the afflicted.

  Doss hesitated a few moments on the threshold, as though there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t put into words, then went out.

  “You change into a dry night shirt,” Hannah told Tobias. His sheets were probably sweat-soaked, too, so she added, “And get into our bed.”

  Our bed.

  Meaning Gabe’s and hers.

  And soon, after they were married, Doss would be sleeping in that bed, in Gabe’s place.

  She could not, would not, consider the implications of that.

  Not now. Maybe not ever.

  She was like the ranch woman she’d once read about in a Montana newspaper, making her way from the house to the barn and back in a blinding blizzard, with only a frozen rope to hold on to. If she let go, she’d be lost.

  She had to attend to Tobias. That was her rope, and she’d follow it, hand over hand, thought over thought. Hannah retrieved an old flannel shirt from the rag bag and cut two matching pieces, approximately twelve inches square. These would serve to protect Tobias’s skin from the heat of the poultice, but like as not, he would still have blisters. She kept a mixture on hand for just such occasions, in a big jar with a wire seal. She dumped a big dollop of the stuff on to one of the bits of flannel, spread it like butter, and put the second cloth on top, her nose twitching at the pungent odors of mustard seed, pounded to a pulp, and camphor.

  When she got upstairs, she found Tobias huddled in the middle of her bed, and his eyes grew big with recollection when he saw what she was carrying in her hands.

  “No,” he protested, but weakly. “No mustard plaster.” He’d begun to shiver, and his teeth were chattering.

  “Don’t fuss, Tobias,” Hannah said. “Your grand father swears by them.”

  Tobias groaned. “My Montana grandfather,” he replied. “My grand pa Holt wouldn’t let anybody put one of those things on him!”

  “Is that a fact?” Hannah asked mildly. “Well, next time you write to the almighty Holt McKettrick, you ask. I’ll bet he’ll say he wouldn’t be without one when he’s under the weather.”

  Tobias made a rude sound, blowing through his lips, but he rolled on to his back and allowed Hannah to open the top buttons of his night shirt and put the poultice in place.

  “Grandpa Holt,” he said, bearing the affliction stalwartly, “would probably make me a whisky drink, just like he did for Pa and Uncle Doss.”

  Hannah sighed. Privately she thought there was a good deal of the rough neck in the McKettrick men, and while she wouldn’t call any of them a drunk, they used liquor as a remedy for just about every ill, from snake bite to the grippe. They’d swabbed it on old Seesaw’s gashes, when he tangled with a sow bear, and rubbed it into the gums of teething babies.

  “What you’re going to have, Tobias McKettrick, is oatmeal.”

  He made a face. “This burns,” he complained, pointing to the mustard plaster.

  Hannah bent and kissed his forehead. He didn’t pull away, like he’d taken to doing of late, and she found that both reassuring and worrisome.

  She glanced at the window, saw a scallop of icicles dangling from the eave. It might be many hours—even tomorrow—before Doss got back from Indian Rock with Dr. Willaby. The wait would be agony, but there was nothing to do but endure.

  When Tobias closed his eyes and slept, Hannah left the room, descended the stairs and went into the pantry again. She moved the cracker tin aside, looked up at the bottle of whisky hidden behind it, gave a disdainful sniff, and took a canned chicken off the shelf instead. It was a treasure, that chicken—she’d been saving it for some celebration, so she wouldn’t have to kill one of her laying hens—but it would make a fine, nourishing soup.

  After gathering onions, rice and some of her spices—which she cherished as much as preserved meat, given how costly they were—Hannah commenced to make soup.

  She was surprised when, only an hour after he’d ridden out, Doss returned with another man she recognized as one of the ranch hands down at Rafe’s place. She frowned, watching from the window as Doss dismounted and left the new comer to lead both horses inside.

  That was odd. Doss hadn’t been to Indian Rock yet; he couldn’t have covered the distance in such a short time. Why would he ask someone to put up his horse? Puzzled, impatient and a little angry, Hannah was waiting at the door when Doss came in.

  “Bundle the boy up warm,” he said, without any preamble at all. “Willie’s going to stay here and look after the horses and the place. Once I’ve hitched the draft horses to the sleigh, we’ll go overland to Indian Rock.”

  Hannah stared at him, confounded. “You’re suggesting that we take Tobias all the way to Indian Rock?”

  “I’m not ‘suggesting’ anything, Hannah,” Doss interposed. “I met Seth Baker down by the main house, when I was about to cross the stream, and he hailed me, wanted to know where I was headed. I told him I was off to fetch Doc Willaby, be cause Tobias was feeling poorly. Seth said Willaby was down with the gout, but his nephew happened to be there, and he’s a doctor, too. He’s looking after the doc’s practice, in town, so he wouldn’t be inclined to come all the way out here.”

  Hannah’s throat clenched, and she put a hand to it. “A ride like that could be the end of Tobias,” she said.

  Doss shook his head. “We can’t just sit here,” he countered, grim-jawed. “Get the boy ready or I’ll do it myself.”

  “May I remind you that Tobias is my son?”

  “He’s a McKettrick,” Doss replied flatly, as though that were the end of it—and for him, i
t probably was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Present Day

  TRAVIS WAITED UNTIL SIERRA HAD DRIFTED off into a fitful sleep in her chair next to Liam’s hospital bed. Then he got a blanket from a nurse, covered Sierra with it and left.

  A few minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his truck.

  The roads were sheer ice, and the sky looked gray, burdened with fresh snow. After consulting the GPS panel on his dash board, he found the nearest Wal-Mart, parked as close to the store as he could and went inside.

  Shopping was something Travis endured, and this was no exception. He took a cart and wheeled it around, choosing the things Sierra and Liam would need if this hitch in Flag staff turned out to be longer than expected. He’d spent the night at his own place, a few miles from the hospital, showered and changed there.

  When he got back from his expedition—a January Santa Claus burdened down with bulging blue plastic bags—he made his way to Liam’s room.

  Sierra was awake, blinking and be fuddled, and so was Liam. A huge teddy bear, holding a helium balloon in one paw, sat on the bedside table. The writing on the balloon said Get Well Soon in big red letters.

  “Eve?” Travis asked, indicating the bear with a nod of his head.

  Sierra took in the bags he was carrying. “Eve,” she confirmed. “What have you got there?”

  Travis grinned, though he felt tired all of a sudden, as though ten cups of coffee wouldn’t keep him awake. Maybe it was the warmth of the hospital, after being out in the cold.

  “A little something for every body,” he said.

  Liam was sitting up, and the breathing tube had been removed. His words came out as a sore-throated croak, but he smiled just the same, and Travis felt a pinch deep inside. The kid was so small and so brave. “Even me?”

  “Especially you,” Travis said. He handed the boy one of the bags, watched as he pulled out a portable DVD player, still in its box, and the episodes of Nova he’d picked up to go with it.

  “Wow,” Liam said, his voice so raw that it made Travis’s throat ache in sympathy. “I’ve always wanted one of these.”

  Sierra looked worried. “It’s way too expensive,” she said. “We can’t accept it.”