An Outlaw's Christmas Read Free

filled one bucket, and then the other. Her hands ached ferociously as she carried those heavy pails toward the schoolhouse, up the steps, and once inside, she set them both down an instant before she would surely have spilled them all over the man lying in a swoon on her floor.
    There was no time to spare—if there had been, Piper might have had the luxury of succumbing to helplessness and giving herself up to a fit of useless weeping—so she filled a kettle and put it on the stove to heat, right next to the simmering beans.
    With one eye on the inert visitor the whole time, she peeled off her bloody cloak and shawls and stepped out of the boots. Her hands were numb, and she shook them hard, hoping to restore the circulation, which only made them hurt again. When the water was warm enough, she poured some into a basin and scrubbed sticky streaks of crimson from her skin.
    The stranger didn’t stir, even once, and he might very well be dead, but Piper talked to him anyway, in the same brisk, take-charge tone she used when her students balked at staying behind their desks, where they belonged. “You can stop fretting over your horse,” she said. “He’s safe in the shed, with hay and water aplenty.”
    There was no response, and Piper made herself walk over to the man, stoop, and, once again, feel for a pulse.
    It was there, and it seemed the bleeding had slowed, if not stopped altogether.
    She was thankful for small favors.
    Noticing the ominous-looking gun jutting from a holster on his right hip, she shivered, extracted the thing gingerly, by two fingers. It was heavy, and the handle was intricately carved, as well as blood-speckled. She made out the initials S.M. as she held the dreadful weapon in shaking hands, carried it into the cloakroom and set it carefully on a high shelf.
    Heat surged audibly into the water kettle, causing it to rattle cheerfully on the stovetop. Piper moved, with quiet diligence, from one effort to another, emptying the basin in which she’d washed her hands through a wide crack in the floorboards, wiping it out with a rag, settling it aside. She had cloth strips to use as bandages, since one or the other of her pupils were always getting hurt during recess, and there was a bottle of iodine, too, so she fetched these from their customary places in the cabinet behind her desk.
    Her mind kept going back to that dreadful pistol. No one carried guns these days—it was the twentieth century, after all—except for lawmen, like Clay, who was the marshal of Blue River, and, well, outlaws.
    Had the stranger used that long-barreled weapon to hold up banks, rob trains, accost law-abiding citizens on the road? She’d seen no sign of a badge, so he probably wasn’t a constable of any sort, but he might have identification of some kind, in his pockets, perhaps, or the saddlebags, left behind in the shed with the horse and its attendant gear.
    Put it out of your mind, she ordered herself. There was no sense in pandering to her imagination.
    Since she couldn’t quite face searching the fellow’s pockets—it seemed too intimate an undertaking—she turned her thoughts to other things. After collecting a pair of scissors from the drawer of her battered oak desk, Piper undertook the task she would rather have avoided, kneeling beside the man’s prone form and gently rolling him onto his back.
    The singular odors of gunpowder and blood rose like smoke, one acrid, one metallic, to fill her nostrils, then her lungs, then her fretful stomach. She gagged again, swallowed hard, and forced her trembling hands to pick up the scissors and begin snipping away at the front of the man’s once-fine coat.
    The bullet had torn its way through the dark, costly fabric, through the shirt—probably white once—and the flesh beneath.
    When Piper finally uncovered the wound, she was horrified all over again. She slapped one hand over her mouth, though whether to hold back a scream or a spate of sickness she couldn’t