Black Hills (9781101559116) (47 page)

That's why he had come, because she needed him. Now, in order to help her, he needed her; he needed her strength. He had always had the ability to concentrate and focus when he was trying to read or study and something else was going on in the room. He needed that now more than ever before. With strong singularity of purpose, he forced himself to concentrate on a memory of her.

With tremendous effort, he strived to block out everything but Lainey. He blocked out his panic. He blocked out his weakness. He blocked out his surroundings. Lainey, with her so-bright white teeth smiling at him through the red hair hanging over her shoulder: always beautiful. Lainey Colleen Nayle at her very best, and Lainey Colleen Nayle's best was simply incomparable.

But that was no good. That wouldn't do it. He needed her anger. He needed her Irish up. He needed her rage. When truly enraged, the fierceness of her fury was a hurricane out of control, and that's exactly what he needed now.

Again he could see her face. She was mad. She was angry. He had pushed her too far. He had teased her too much. He had laughed at her too long, and she was furious! Her face was changing, he could see the softness becoming hard and her cheeks flush.
He concentrated harder, blotting out all that was not Lainey.

Her freckles became pronounced and her ears inflamed. He could see the strength of her savagely bitter fury taking control: her lips tightened, her brow furrowed
.

The numbness locking his muscles was striving to invade and overpower his mind; he had to resist it. Focusing all the strength he could muster, he held on to the image locked in his mind and fought back the terrible numbness. Again he attempted to move, and the pain flooded through him, replacing the peace and comfort, and all three figures disappeared. It was sad to see them leave; they had been somehow familiar. Cormac was confident that he would have been able to recognize them had they only come a little closer.

The pain was excruciating, but it was a feeling, cutting through the numbness, and he heard someone in the distance groaning.

His eyes opened into slits and his fingers trembled. The groaner turned out to be him. He had to move.... He had to get to his feet.

Sweat beaded his forehead, his face grimaced; he gritted his teeth, and strained upward to his knees, reaching out for something—anything. He desperately needed something on which to support himself, concentrating with every bit of strength he had remaining, he remembered.

Cormac's hands clutched a cottonwood tree and managed to get one foot underneath him.

Somehow, he managed to pull himself to his feet.

Eyes shut, grimacing, gritting his teeth, and groaning loudly, he was swaying; his arms wrapped tightly around the tree and holding on for dear life, for Lainey's life. He was swaying. He was swaying, but he was standing, waiting for the dizziness and nausea to pass.

Cormac realized that, in spite of it all, he was smilin'. That girl was pure somethin', she was . . . pure somethin'. He had to keep her safe. He couldn't let her down.

Recognizing the rock face from which the lion had attacked, he knew his stash wasn't far, now if he could only get there. Don't try. . . . Do! With no strength to waste, he ignored the lost gun in favor of trying to get to his stash. Staggering and crawling, he weakly recovered his gun that had been in the lion's mouth, and by leaning heavily on a boulder, struggled again to his feet, but he was too weak to walk, and he fell. He crawled a few feet and collapsed, only managing to get to his hands and knees and continue a few more feet before collapsing again.

Determined, he again forced his mind to focus on Lainey. Lainey was in trouble! Lainey needed help! Lainey needed him! He had to take care of Lainey! If he collapsed, he would stay there forever. He had to continue drawing strength from Lainey . . . protect Lainey!

First, he had to get to his emergency supplies. Unfortunately, to keep them from being found by animals, he had hidden them on a ledge five feet above the trail and covered them with rocks. Crawling, falling, and scrambling agonizingly slowly, his only strength coming from adrenaline, he got up the hill. One of the factors in choosing this location had been a water seep that kept a small natural stone basin filled. He inch-wormed over to it and stuck his face in the water. He needed rest badly, but the holes in him needed to be cleaned and plugged first.

Cormac could just reach the sack. Dragging it to him took long; building the small fire longer. Filling the little pan with water, he placed it in the middle of the fire and, while it was heating, put coffee makin's in the metal cup and set it beside the pan. He needed coffee almost as much as he needed sleep. The best he could tell, he had gotten some deep gouges and scratches and taken six hits, two passed through the flesh at different locations around the edges of his upper body, going in the front and out the back, or vice versa, one through the meaty portion of his right side and one solidly through his left shoulder.

It was good that the bullets were gone, bad that they had opened another hole on the way out. One of the hits must have been a .44 caliber slug, maybe an Army Colt such as his own, that went in small but flattened out to leave an exit hole in his back feeling, to his searching fingers, to be the size of Texas, but fortunately, apparently only taking small bits of flesh with it. Most of the flesh felt like it had mushroomed out like a doughnut around the hole, leaving it available to be pushed back into its original position.

Two bullets, however, were still inside, and Cormac had to get them out or risk lead poisoning. Luckily, they were smaller than the .44, possibly a .38 and one of the cartridge-type bullets used by the Smith & Wesson similar to his own.

The easy wounds, such as those on his legs that bled a lot but really only grazed the surface, he washed and patched first: a three-inch shallow graze above his left ear reminding him of the earlier wound he had taken when his family was killed, another deeper groove on the right side of his neck from which he bled like a stuck pig, and three minor scratches. One of the bullets remaining inside had rotated during flight and had entered his body sideways, penetrating only about a half inch and stopping when it hit a rib, making removal relatively easy. However, the other was deep in his left shoulder and would require a more serious operation. A solemn sounding word: operation. He was going to operate on himself.

“This is goin' to be great fun,” Cormac said to himself as he prepared for the operation. “Real easy to get out . . . sure.”

After pouring a hefty amount of whiskey in the coffee, he drank it first, then, after another good belt for courage, splashed some on the knife blade, and went to work. Biting on a piece of wood to keep from screaming and attracting unwanted company, he dug, passing out from the pain, reawakening to dig some more and passing out again, repeating the process over and over several times until both bullets were out. He finished up by rinsing the wounds one last time with whiskey and packing them with whiskey-soaked clean moss from the water seep as he had been told was done by Indians.

All in all, dying would have been easier, all of these holes in him were downright incommodious, and he was not even finished. He had sterilized the large wound in his back and pushed all of the protruding flesh back inside but it had yet to be cauterized as he had seen done to a man wounded in a mining accident. Cormac had placed the blade of his pa's knife in the fire, and it was heating.

“It's me again, God; this is the best I can do,” he said weakly, looking up into the sky. “The rest is up to you, but I'm asking you to help me help Lainey . . .
please
. She's a really good person, and she's in trouble she doesn't deserve.”

With that, Cormac removed the knife from the fire, clamped down his teeth on a fresh stick, hesitated, took a deep breath, and in a sudden move, slapped the side of the knife flat against the wound for the few seconds that he could take before passing out.

Lainey Nayle had eventually fallen asleep only to be re-awakened by the sound of horses coming in on the hard-packed trail toward the cabin. At first surprised that they were being allowed to get so close, Lainey remembered that Shank had quite a few drinks before turning in, and the others, who had been out patrolling, had gotten in late.

Lainey hurriedly put on her robe and grabbed a pistol from the shelf on the way to the door, through which she stepped quickly and then to the side into the shadows as the riders neared the porch. Shank's voice cried out to the other hands to wake them, and Lainey could hear feet running toward the house when the horses had come to a stop.

“Hello the house,” the rider called urgently out of the darkness. “Hello the house!”

Lainey's voice was calm, and she let them hear the hammer of her pistol clicking into firing position.

“What do you want?”

It turned out to be one rider and one packhorse. Shank and her men surrounded the rider and pulled him to the ground before he had a chance to answer.

“Miss Nayle,” Shank asked, “can we get a light on so we can see what we got here?”

The rider spoke up. “It's Miss Nayle I need to talk to!”

“There will be plenty of time for that after we have a look at you,” Shank replied, pushing him through the door. Lainey touched a match to the wick of the coal oil lamp, placed the glass chimney around it, and adjusted the wick to halt the black soot rolling up into the air. Holding the lamp above her head so as not to blind herself, she turned, allowing the light to illuminate the prisoner.

What she saw was a man of about her own age in normal cowhand attire, most likely clean shaven normally but now sporting what looked to be a two-day growth of beard. He didn't look like a mean man, although his physique said he probably could be if riled. He wasn't riled, and Lainey realized that he also wasn't frightened. He was wisely not resisting, apparently just waiting for the chance to tell whatever it was that he had come to tell them. Could this be her hero? No. He was full-sized, but could not be described as a big man.

“Let him loose, Shank. He doesn't appear to be dangerous. I see you have his gun. Let us all sit down and find out what he has to say. In fact, the fire has burned down, but I'll bet the coffee sitting beside it is still hot. Since it doesn't appear we are going to get anymore sleep tonight, let's pour ourselves some to drink while we are listening to whatever this gentleman has come to tell us.”

“But, Miss Nayle,” the prisoner began.

“Just wait a minute, please. Whatever it is that you have come to tell us, I am reasonably certain, can wait a couple more minutes.”

When all were holding steaming coffee cups, he asked, “Now?”

“Now would be fine,” Lainey answered, still in her robe, looking over her shoulder and smiling at him through some tumbled-down hair. She could have asked him to ride through hell in a hand basket, and he would have gone searching for a basket.

“Well?” Lainey asked when he hesitated, trying to restart his brain.

“Uhh . . . uh . . . Well, I . . . I used to ride for Lambert. My name is Bert Tayman, and I think you need to know what happened this afternoon, ma'am.”

A murmur of surprised anger made its way across the room.

“Wait, please,” he said with his opened hands held palms out in the traditional signal to stop. “Hear me out please. I said I used to work for Lambert. I just quit. I would like to change sides, if you will have me . . . and I need to tell you that Mackle is bad hurt.”