Banner O'Brien (31 page)

She slid from the horse’s damp, heaving back and raced toward the scene, stumbling on loose rocks and upraised roots as she went. “Stop!”

An old woman looked up from the blaze, keening mournfully, as the others did. Then, with placid movements that made a ludicrous contrast to her cries, the squaw took up a red hot stone, using bits of tanned hide to shield her hands, and started toward the hut.

Banner searched her mind for a viable word of Chinook, but all she could remember was
kloochman—
“woman” or “wife.”

“This is bad medicine!”

The squat woman waddled to the doorway of the hut, pushed aside the buckskin covering, stooped to go in.
There was a loud sizzling sound as the stone was dropped into ice cold water.

Clearly, the Klallum weren’t going to listen to Banner the way they did to Adam; except for the old man striding toward her, the tribe seemed bound to ignore her completely.

“You must stop this now!” she enjoined the emissary, who wore white man’s trousers and a buckskin shirt. “This is very bad medicine—”

“Doctor’s
kloochman?”
asked the elderly man, somewhat archly. “Where Big Doctor?”

Banner sighed, drew a deep breath, brushed a tendril of dark red hair back from her forehead. “Big Doctor is very sick.”

The man spoke loudly, to be heard over the cacophonious grief of his tribe. “We have sickness here. Death. Big Doctor come, make better.”

“Big Doctor cannot come,” Banner argued patiently. “I am here to help you, but you must make that woman stop carrying those stones into that hut!”

The Indian man spread his hands. “Do this to kill bad
tamanous.”

Tamanous.
Now there was a word Banner recognized. “The disease your people are suffering from does not come from an evil spirit—it is a virulent bacteria.” A virulent bacteria.

Banner could almost hear Adam laughing at her choice of words. Are you addressing an Indian, O’Brien? he would say, Or an assemblage of medical students?

She was comforted, just by imagining that Adam was beside her now, sure and strong and full of gentle irony. “There is no bad
tamanous,”
she began again. “Not at the moment, anyway. I am Big Doctor’s
kloochman.
I make better.”

The Indian looked skeptical, even testy. “Fire-hair go home to own lodge.
That
make better.”

Banner flushed. “I will not go home until you stop what you are doing! I—”

The woman came out of the steam hut then, carrying a limp, half-dressed child in her arms. She marched toward the frigid waters of the sound, and Banner stumbled after her, grappled for the tiny, sore-covered form she held.

“Stop—give me that child!”

“Kill bad
tamanous,”
muttered the squaw, tears rolling down her wide red face.

“No!
Don’t you see—it’s the
child
you’ll kill—”

Banner’s words were broken off by the crack of a rifle shot, as was the wailing of the tribeswomen. The squaw stood stock-still, and the only sounds in the next few moments were those of restive horses and the tide on the nearby shore.

Slowly, Banner turned to face what she knew she must—the cold, quiet rage of her brother-in-law.

He looked like a giant, Jeff did, sitting atop his great, dark horse, and his breath came in ominous plumes from his nostrils, giving him a satanic appearance. The leather of his saddle creaked as he bent to replace his rifle in its scabbard and then dismount.

With him were two other men, probably crewmen from the
Sea Mistress,
but they remained on their horses, watching the peaceful Klallum with wary eyes.

The tribe seemed to know Jeff, to be in awe of him as they were of Adam. The man Banner had been arguing with was the first to rush toward the imperious, rock-jawed visitor, babbling in petulant Chinook, but the others followed, adding their own unintelligible complaints to the uproar.

Jeff answered them in the jargon, his fair head towering above their dark ones.

At some order from him, two very young braves caught Banner’s arms at the elbows and began propelling her toward one of the long wooden lodges she had
been so curious about during her first visit here, with Adam.

She was too stunned and frightened to protest in earnest, but she did fling one look back over her shoulder and see that Jeff was striding along behind, through the waves of annoyed and chattering Indians, his face set and hard.

Banner was flung past a mangy bearskin that served as a door and into the close, smelly darkness of the structure. There was a firepit in the center of the dirt-floored lodge, but the embers glowing there gave off very little light.

Outside, there was another swell of angry voices, Jeff’s among them, and then the bearskin moved and she knew that he had come in.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” her brother-in-law growled, keeping his distance.

“I had to come,” said Banner, with tremulous dignity, straightening her cloak and squaring her shoulders. “How is Adam?”

“What do you care?”

“I care a great deal, Jeff Corbin! Adam is my husband, and I love him very much!”

“I can see that,” mocked the captain, in a sardonic drawl. “No doubt he’ll be thrilled to learn that you’ve left him to walk into the middle of a smallpox epidemic! Banner, the Klallum have been a peaceful tribe for generations, but you have them ready to take scalps and wear warpaint—”

“You make it sound as though I insulted them!”

Jeff drew nearer, to stand at the edge of the firepit. The crimson light moved on the planes of his face, giving him a forbidding, pagan look. “They
are
insulted, Banner. The chief, in fact, wants you properly beaten.”

Alarm leaped in Banner’s throat, and she retreated a step. “Beaten?” she echoed.

“I wouldn’t do that, of course—though I can’t speak for my brother. Adam may be moved to violence when he hears about this.”

Banner was still reeling from his earlier statement. “They sent you in here to
beat
me?”

“Or otherwise subdue you. You see, Banner, things are quite different here. Brothers share their women. Therefore, I have as much right to deal with you, in their view, as Adam would.”

“You—you wouldn’t . . .?”

“Of course not. But we’re going to have to make them think I did. Which will it be, Banner? Do we convince them that I’m beating you, or—”

Banner blushed and hugged herself, snapping, “Well, we’re certainly not going to pretend that we’re making love!”

A grin lifted one corner of Jeff’s heretofore taut mouth. “Darn,” he said. “I
knew
you’d choose the beating.”

“This is ridiculous! I came to try to avert disaster, not stand in this wretched, smelly lodge and playact! Don’t you understand that those—those people out there are parboiling
children
in that hut of theirs? And do you know what they’ll do after that,
captain?
They’ll plunge the poor little things into the water!”

Jeff shook his head slowly, smugly. “No, they won’t. I told them that Adam had threatened to conjure up a very big, very bad
tamanous
if they proceeded, and they believed me.”

Banner sighed. She had tried to reason with the Klallum, to no avail. But one word from Adam—even secondhand—and the purpose was accomplished!

Jeff seemed to be reading her mind. “Does it matter what made them stop, Banner?”

Slowly, she shook her head. “There are still patients to see to—”

“I’m afraid not, Banner. While the Klallum might let
you help if Adam were here, they’re not about to permit it now. The medicine man is raising hell.”

It seemed that Banner was to be thwarted at every turn. A tear slid down her cheek and her knees quivered, as though they might give out. “Well, then,” she sighed, with resignation, “let’s go home. I want to see Adam.”

Incredibly, Jeff was removing his belt. He chuckled as Banner’s eyes widened, then indicated a shadowy heap of something near the lodge’s rear wall.

“Timing is all, Mrs. Corbin,” he said. “Every time I strike those hides with the belt, you holler.”

Color ached in Banner’s face. “Oh, Jeff, I couldn’t—”

“It’s that or the real thing, sweetness. In another minute, the chief and half his braves will be in here, demanding that their honor be satisfied.”

“Honor?
What honor is there in beating a woman?”

Jeff shrugged. “None. The right or wrong of it is irrelevant, Banner—and things could get very nasty if we force them into insisting.”

“Y-You mean they’d—they’d want to watch?”

“Or participate.”

Banner closed her eyes. “Let’s get it over with, then,” she said.

Jeff shouted something, probably a severe reprimand, in Chinook, and the belt struck the hides with a hard
thud.

On cue, Banner shrieked.

“That was pretty good,” remarked Jeff, in a whisper, “But you’re supposed to be suffering, not finding a mouse in the potato bin!”

Banner recalled what Sean had done to Adam, and this time, when she cried out, there was much pain in the sound.

Twice more, Jeff assaulted the hides, twice more Banner whooped in theatrical agony.

Finally, her brother-in-law caught her elbow in his hand and started toward the door of the lodge. “Keep your head down,” he ordered in a brisk undertone. “And try to look submissive and meek.”

“Eat a root,” Banner whispered back. “There is a limit, you overgrown—”

“Banner.”

The Indians were waiting, their dark eyes avid, their faces full of grim satisfaction. Suddenly, Banner found it very easy to lower her head and look as though she’d just been soundly disciplined by her husband’s brother.

In a way, she had.

*  *  *

Adam had prevailed upon the stable hands to move him, board and all, to his own bed, according to Maggie, and he was looking wan and impatient and very angry when Banner reached him.

“O’Brien,” he began in a low, ominous rumble.

Banner sighed and tried to rub away the headache that was pulsing beneath her wind-chapped temples. “Not now, Adam. Please.”

He subsided slightly, intertwined his fingers on top of his neatly bound rib cage. The bruise on his eye was an angry purple, and the stitches in his lip and on the side of his head looked garish against his paper-white flesh. “What happened?”

“I tried to stop the Klallum from using the steam hut.”

“And?”

“And they wouldn’t listen to me. They listened to Jeff, though—of course.” Banner put down her bag and began untying the ribbons that held her cloak closed. “As for the patients, I wasn’t allowed to go near them. Jeff and I had to go through this whole charade in the lodge—” She paused, blushed profusely. “We had to pretend that he was beating me.”

Adam chuckled.

“It isn’t funny!” cried Banner, incensed. “Adam, there are sick children in that village!”

“Don’t worry, O’Brien. I had Jenny wire a friend of mine, in Providence. He’s coming over as soon as he can make steamer connections.”

“A doctor, I presume?” Banner retorted dryly. “And a man, no doubt.”

“Oh, Griffin is both,” said Adam. “I can depend on him to set things right in the camp.”

Banner hurt, inside and out. “As you can’t depend on me, I suppose?”

Adam looked annoyed. “Oh, I can depend on you, all right, O’Brien. If anything is going well, you’ll botch it for sure. What the hell were you thinking about, running off in the middle of the night like that? What if you’d found yourself face to face with Sean Malloy?”

“I didn’t, so why make such a fuss now?”

“Because I love you, O’Brien,” he snapped. “Because I need you. Because if Malloy or anybody else hurt you, I don’t know what I’d do!”

She came to the side of the bed, knelt, touched Adam’s battered and fervent face tenderly. “You’re the one who has been hurt,” she said, and tears smarted in her eyes because she could not take his pain and bear it herself.

With great effort, Adam brought one hand to her cheek, smoothed it with a gentle thumb. “Get some sleep, Shamrock. You look exhausted.”

Obediently, Banner rose, undressed to her camisole and drawers, and started to curl up in a big chair, meaning to cover herself with a knitted blanket and sleep there.

“Here,” Adam argued softly, sternly. “Beside me.”

Banner came to the bed, crawled in beside her husband, careful not to jar him. Within minutes, she was sound asleep.

The room was shadowy and still when she awakened,
shooting upright, her breath hot and raw in her throat, her forehead beaded with perspiration. Sean had been there, standing at the foot of the bed, mocking her, threatening.

Adam groaned beside her, and the sound brought a rush of bittersweet reality. She fell back to her pillows, dizzy with relief: she’d been dreaming. Only dreaming.

“O’Brien?”

“My name is Corbin,” Banner argued, only half teasing.

“Yes,” grumbled Adam, “But if I called out ‘Corbin’ every time I wanted you, forty-three people would answer.”

Banner giggled. “I suppose you’re right. How do you feel, by the way?”

“Terrible. How about you, Shamrock?”

“Scared—I feel scared.”

“Don’t. Nobody is going to hurt you.”

“It isn’t myself I’m worried about, Adam. Sean is a brutal, ruthless man.”

“Do tell.”

Banner giggled again, but this time there were tears in the sound. “What were you thinking about, to let Sean take you by surprise that way?”

Adam laughed. “All the things I meant to do to you when I got back to our bed. The next thing I knew, the side of his boot was in my face.”

“That’s Sean. He’d probably be afraid to fight you in a straightforward fashion.”

“Salving my wounded ego, are you, O’Brien?”

“Does it need salving?”

“Yes. I feel like a damned fool, and a weakling in the bargain.”

Banner raised herself on one elbow, carefully, so that she would not cause Adam pain by the motion. “You’re neither a fool nor a weakling, Adam Corbin,” she said.

“No?”

“No.”