Willow: A Novel (No Series) Read online

“All the same,” Daphne sighed, “the marshal did address the man as Gallagher. I remember that distinctly.”

  The sun was going down; Willow saw shadows creeping across the kitchen floor. “Steven wouldn’t,” she whispered rawly. “I know he wouldn’t.”

  Daphne managed a smile. “You know him and I don’t,” she conceded, “so perhaps that robber wasn’t your brother after all. In any case, he was wearing a mask.”

  “What did he look like otherwise, Daphne?”

  “He was very tall and he had fair hair and blue eyes. That’s about all I can tell you; he was, as I said, wearing a bandanna or something over his face and I was too scared to notice much more than that.”

  Bleak despair thundered over Willow’s spirit in a cruel stampede. Daphne had described Steven.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to drive you into town?” Daphne asked gently, breaking the painful silence. “I think Gideon is right—you shouldn’t be here alone, feeling the way you do.”

  Willow had no desire to go anywhere if she couldn’t go with Gideon to find Steven. She preferred to remain in the privacy of her den, like a wounded beast, to lick her wounds. “I’d rather stay here,” she said.

  Daphne’s reaction was brisk. She stood up and gathered her handbag and her parasol. “In that case, I’ll go back to my hotel, get a few of my things, and explain the situation to Hilda—she’s probably sound asleep, anyway—then I’ll come back here.”

  Having never had a real friend, not one close to her own age anyway, Willow couldn’t quite credit that she’d just made a very good one. “You would do that, a-after everything that’s happened?”

  Daphne smiled. “It isn’t your fault that Zachary and Gideon played that reprehensible trick, now is it? And, besides, I happen to like you very much. So why shouldn’t I spend time with you?”

  “Thank you,” Willow breathed.

  Daphne had only been gone a few minutes when Maria and the judge arrived in the family buggy, both their dear and familiar faces worried and full of pain.

  “You will come home with us,” Maria said firmly, following as the judge climbed down from the buggy and crossed the yard to climb the porch steps and wordlessly pulled his daughter into a gentle embrace.

  “No,” Willow said firmly. “I can’t.”

  Maria and the judge exchanged a look and then Maria nodded. “Sí,” she said, with gentle resignation. “I will make supper, then, and we will decide later what is best.”

  The last thing Willow wanted at that moment was food, but she nodded at Maria in mute gratitude. Her presence, like the judge’s, was a great comfort.

  By the time Daphne returned, with a valise, there was a fine meal on the table.

  Numbly, Willow made introductions, without explaining Daphne’s relationship with Gideon, and then they all sat down to eat their supper, as though this were a party and not a death vigil of sorts. Willow could do no more than trail her fork despondently through her food.

  “Eat,” the judge urged hoarsely, his eyes dark with a pain to match Willow’s own as he watched her.

  “I couldn’t—” Willow began, only to have her words broken off by a shuffling sound just beyond the kitchen door. Automatically, she got up to investigate.

  Steven himself was standing there, in the darkness, pale as a specter. There was a bloody wound in his shoulder and yet he managed a weak smile. “Am I late for supper?” he asked, and then his knees buckled and he slumped, unconscious, to the floor.

  Willow stepped back, staring, but her father overturned his chair in his haste to reach his son. “Jesus God, boy,” he mourned, in a soblike voice, “what happened? What happened?”

  Maria knelt on Steven’s other side and gently opened his shirt. There was a deep, jagged slash in his right shoulder, seeping blood. “Madre de Dios,” she whispered. “We must have a doctor.”

  “No!” Willow gasped, suddenly mobile again. “No, we can’t bring a doctor here!”

  “She’s right,” said Devlin calmly, his eyes at once stern and imploring upon Maria’s face. “The doctor would have to report this. Is it safe to move him, Maria?”

  Maria sighed. “Sí, we must. I will tend the wound myself. But if there is infection . . .”

  Devlin was already hauling the inert Steven to his feet. Together, he and Maria half-dragged him up the back stairs and into the spare room Willow indicated.

  There they laid him out on the narrow bed.

  “Bring hot water and some cloth,” Devlin said to a stricken Willow. And, as Steven moaned and stirred on the guest room bed, he added, “Whiskey, too, if you’ve got it.”

  Daphne was already at the stove, putting water on to heat, when Willow reached the kitchen and began gathering her pretty new dish towels, bought from Mr. McCullough at the general store just a few days before. Clutching them to her breast, Gideon’s one bottle of liquor in hand, Willow forced herself to meet her new friend’s gaze.

  “It wasn’t him,” Daphne confided.

  “What?” Willow breathed, hardly daring to hope.

  “This is not the man I saw onboard the train today, Willow. It was someone else, someone thinner and not as tall.”

  Willow’s heart pounded with hope. “You’re sure?”

  Daphne nodded. “Do you want me to bring this water upstairs when it’s hot?”

  Willow couldn’t move. Biting her lower lip, she looked toward the door, then back at her friend. “Daphne, you wouldn’t—?”

  “No,” broke in her friend, with good-natured impatience, “I’m not going to go racing off to town and tell everyone that your brother is here. Stop worrying.”

  “If Gideon comes back—”

  Daphne grinned wanly. “If Gideon comes back, I’ll keep him busy by listing all the wrongs he’s done this innocent maiden. Go to your brother, Willow.”

  Thinking what a fine thing a friend was, Willow bolted back up the stairs with the dish towels and the bottle of liquor.

  In the little bedroom at the opposite end of that hall from the one Willow and Gideon shared, Steven was writhing on the blankets and murmuring in delirium. Devlin was holding his hand and looking down at his son in a way that said he’d give his soul to change places with him, and bear the pain in his place, while Maria held a needle over the flame in the bedside lamp.

  “Was he shot?” Willow dared, drawing nearer to Steven.

  “No,” answered her father, without looking up. “Looks to me like somebody used a knife on him.”

  Willow shuddered with revulsion and hatred, but then promptly took herself in hand. He had managed to escape the person who attacked him. Perhaps he’d had to kill to do it. “Will he die?” she whispered brokenly.

  “No,” said Maria, when the judge didn’t respond. “Steven will not die.”

  A few minutes later, Daphne arrived with the hot water and Maria began cleaning Steven’s wound. That done, she threaded the needle she had been holding over the lamp flame and began to stitch the sundered flesh neatly back into place. Though he was still unconscious, Steven groaned and tossed so violently on the bed that Devlin had to use all his strength to hold the patient still.

  When the last stitch had been tied off, Maria drenched a cloth with whiskey from the bottle Willow had brought and began saturating the wound with it.

  Steven gasped as though he had been touched with fire, tossing his head back and forth on the pillow, making a low, garbled sound in his throat. The judge held him firmly, and shameless tears trickled down his face as he spoke to Steven in hoarse, tender words.

  Willow paced back and forth across the small room long after both Daphne and Maria had retired to some other part of the house, leaving the judge and his daughter to keep the vigil.

  Finally, Steven awakened. He looked at his father and sister in surprise and swore under his breath.

  “What happened?” the judge demanded instantly, his voice roughened by the long hours of anxiety. “Steven, did you rob that train?”

  “W
hat train?” countered Steven, looking bewildered and sick. He was ghostly pale, almost gaunt, Willow thought.

  Devlin made an exasperated sound and turned away from the bed, but Willow drew nearer and took Steven’s hand in her own. “A Central Pacific was robbed yesterday, Steven,” she said. “A man was killed.”

  “Dear God,” breathed Steven.

  “Did you do it, damn you?!” demanded the judge, tormented.

  “No, he didn’t!” shouted Willow before Steven could answer. “Daphne saw the bandit and she said it wasn’t Steven!”

  “But they’re blaming me, aren’t they?” Steven guessed, in a weary tone.

  “Yes,” answered Devlin harshly. “And if you aren’t guilty, how did you happen to be wounded?”

  Steven laughed raggedly without amusement and fixed his eyes on the shadowed ceiling. “I was in the mountains, in the Shoshone camp. We were gambling and I won.”

  “It certainly looks like it,” rasped the judge, with bitter sarcasm.

  “I did. Got all of Red Eagle’s horses and his woman, too. He didn’t take very kindly to the loss.”

  Willow drew in her breath, horrified.

  “I was leaving camp with everything but the woman and Red Eagle came after me. We fought.” Steven paused, sighed philosophically. “I lost and Red Eagle took everything back, except for his hatchet . . .” There was another pause and Steven’s lips twisted into a wry grin. “He left that with me.”

  Willow reached out and touched his damp, tangled hair. “You fool. Don’t you know better than to gamble with Red Eagle? He’s a bad loser.”

  Steven grimaced. “That he is, little sister. Could I have a shot of that firewater?”

  Willow followed his eyes to the bottle and nodded. “I’ll get you a glass.”

  “Never mind the glass. Just give me the bottle.”

  She complied.

  “Where were Coy and Reilly during all this?” the judge asked, drawing close to the foot of the bed. Now that the crisis was past, he looked as though he might be wishing that Steven were a few years younger, so that he could haul him off to the woodshed.

  Steven shrugged, then winced at the pain the motion stirred in his bandaged shoulder. “I don’t know,” he answered. “But I sure hope I find them before little sister’s husband does.”

  “Don’t we all,” sighed the judge, and, since it was a statement and not a question, no one answered.

  10

  He was sleeping, or so it appeared to Daphne. Wanting a closer look at a man who could run afoul of the law and still be so thoroughly and completely loved by his family, she crept nearer the bed, holding her breath, and bent to look into the face of Steven Gallagher.

  His frame, only half-covered by the tangled bedsheets, was long and lean, yet incredibly muscular. His hair appeared, in the shadows, to be roughly the color of raw honey.

  Daphne found herself wishing that he would open his eyes so that she could see into them. That was, she had found in her eighteen years, the easiest way to get the true measure of another person.

  Steven stirred on the narrow bed and something inside Daphne moved in response. The feeling so alarmed her that she took a step back from the bedside and let her breath out in a long, soft sigh.

  This man was a desperado, she reminded herself, even though she was certain that he was not the same person who had robbed the train the day before. Steven Gallagher had a price on his head; Willow and the Mexican woman, Maria, had said so. And yet he did not have the look of an outlaw; indeed, to Daphne, he resembled the storybook princes of her childhood fancies.

  Slowly, Daphne turned, her skirts whispering as she moved, to make her way out of the little room. Mercy, she thought, if one could bring a specimen like that into existence by kissing toads, she’d get nothing else done for raiding lily pads.

  * * *

  Willow was standing at the well when Gideon rode in, and the quiet despondency in the angle of her head and the set of her shoulders caused him a tender sort of despair.

  As Willow looked up and saw him, he felt her brace herself against him, somewhere deep in her spirit, and was doubly wounded. Had he, between Daphne and the pursuit of Steven Gallagher, driven some eternal wedge between himself and this woman? Opened a breach that could never be closed?

  Dismounting, Gideon held the reins of his horse in one hand and walked slowly toward his wife. In the three days spent apart from her, he’d learned the painful truth: a world without Willow was a world without air, sunshine, or music.

  “Willow,” he said, because everything else was beyond him. His search for Steven had been fruitless, as she no doubt knew, and his face was scratchy with the stubble of a beard. Every muscle in his body ached from sleeping on the hard ground. He wanted to eat, to bathe in a tub filled to the brim with hot water, to die, and then come to life again in the arms of this woman.

  The golden eyes were remote as they touched on him. “Did you find him?” she asked.

  Gideon’s voice was like gravel in his throat. “You know I didn’t.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a small nod.

  He took the water bucket from her hands and carried it inside, into the quiet, spotless kitchen. “You’ve seen Steven, haven’t you?” he asked, injured by the space she kept between them.

  “He was here,” she said, with a slight tilt of her obstinate little chin. “How do you like that, Marshal Marshall? While you and your posse were scouring the hills, Steven was here under your very own roof.”

  The words were intended to nettle him, he knew, but he felt nothing beyond the faintest sting; he was numb. It would have been better, he thought, if Willow had flung herself at him in a screaming rage. “And now he’s gone again, like any good outlaw,” he guessed calmly.

  “Long gone,” said Willow. “And Steven didn’t rob your damnable train, either, Gideon Marshall.”

  Gideon’s shoulders ached as he reached for the bright new coffeepot that sat on the back of the stove. “What makes you so sure of that?” he asked evenly.

  “He was wounded in a fight with an Indian. If you talk to the Shoshone, you’ll find that Steven was in their camp when the train was stopped.”

  Gideon froze. “Wounded? Steven is wounded?”

  Willow’s eyes were shooting topaz fire now. “Do you imagine that that will make him easier to find? Don’t delude yourself on that score.”

  “How was he hurt?” Gideon insisted, hoping that the pain her words and bearing caused him didn’t show.

  “Steven was gambling with Red Eagle. He won the warrior’s horse and woman.”

  “Naturally,” rasped Gideon, annoyed.

  “The Indian came after him, they fought, and Steven was the loser.”

  “That’s novel,” said Gideon wryly. “What transpired then, pray tell?”

  “Red Eagle struck Steven with his hatchet and left him to die.”

  Gideon turned a chair around and sat astraddle it, his weary arms braced across its back. Thoughtfully, he sipped his coffee. “A fact that no doubt dooms a certain ill-guided redskin to the wrath of the close-knit Gallagher family.”

  “We look after our own,” she said, again with that provocative lift of her chin.

  The statement excluded Gideon; he knew that and was hurt, though he hid his inward reaction. “I suppose it would be foolhardy of me to ask you to heat water for a bath?”

  “Heat your own water, Gideon Marshall. Fix your own breakfast, too.”

  Philosophically, Gideon finished his coffee and strode outside to the well. When he returned with the first bucketful of water, he found that the washtub had been set in the middle of the kitchen floor. Willow was in some other part of the house, probably feeding the fires of a never-to-be-forgotten sulk.

  Almost forty-five minutes later, the tub was full of hot water; Gideon stripped off his clothes and sank into it. Damnit, it was almost funny—he’d been riding all over the foothills for three days and all the time the object of his search had been r
ight here in his own house. The irony of it brought a grim smile to his lips.

  Presently, Willow swept in, her full lips drawn into a tight line. Her expression said all too clearly that she hadn’t forgiven him, but what she did next shocked Gideon anyway.

  She strode to the side of the tub, which was much too small for anyone over the age of three to bathe in, pulled off the simple wedding band Gideon had given her the day he’d brought her to this house, and dropped it into the water.

  “Good-bye, Gideon Marshall,” she said, and then she turned on her heel to march out of the kitchen.

  With one straining grab, Gideon caught her skirts in his hand. “Wait a minute!” he barked, holding on as if for dear life. “What the hell do you mean, ‘good-bye’?”

  “It’s a simple word, Gideon,” she answered, too damned stubborn to turn around. “It means I’m leaving you. Now, if you’ll just let go of my dress . . .”

  A thousand courses of action whirled through Gideon’s mind, but none of them was workable. If Willow wanted to go he couldn’t keep her; that was the dismal fact of the matter. He opened his hand and her skirts fell into place, stained by soapy water. “Where will you go?” he asked, summoning up every shred of dignity he possessed.

  “To my father’s house,” she snapped back. “Where else?”

  “Hell, how would I know? Devoted sister that you are, you might have been planning to join your brother in a life of crime and become the next Belle Starr.”

  She stepped out of reach and turned to face him, her arms folded, her face flushed. “I was a fool to come here with you, when I knew that you wanted to be Daphne’s husband and not mine. I was even more the fool to think there could ever be any sort of peace between you and Steven.”

  “Willow—”

  “Don’t say anything more, Gideon. You’re free now. You can court your Daphne, though I must say that I don’t think you’ll have much luck. And you can hunt Steven till your hair turns gray. But know this, Gideon Marshall: it won’t be an easy task, because they don’t call him the Mountain Fox for nothing. Furthermore, I will do anything in my power to stop you.”