Dorothy Garlock Read Free

Rosalee had to give up. The only other thing she could do was squeeze water from a cloth into the woman’s mouth. It was a slow process.
    When Logan Horn came down from the loft he was wearing duck trousers, a cloth shirt, and low-cut leather moccasins. He spread his wet clothes on a bench beside the fire and came to hunker down beside the bunk.
    “She’ll die,” he said softly. He gazed intently at his mother’s still face.
    “Oh, no! Maybe . . . not,” Rosalee said, but knew he spoke the truth.
    “She’ll die,” he said again and the back of his fingers stroked the hair at her temple. “She was only waiting for me to come and I came too late.”
    “If we can break the fever . . .” Rosalee’s voice trailed off.
    “No.”
    “We can’t just give up and let her die!”
    “She wants to die. It’s her time. I shouldn’t have taken her from her people.”
    “Then why did you? The trip and the rain . . .”
    “I was angry. They had cast her out because all the men in her family were dead and she had no one to bring meat to her lodge.”
    “I’ve heard that they do that. It’s mean and cruel.”
    “It’s their way of surviving. She understood.” He turned his face away and coughed.
    “You’re sick, too. Pa’s got a dab of whiskey.”
    She spoke to the back of his head, then continued to look at him when he turned his face once again to look down at the woman on the bed. She noted the smooth broad expanse of forehead; the black-lashed, hooded eyes beneath strongly arched brows; the straight nose, wide mouth; the thick, faintly waving hair that framed a wholly arresting face that demanded attention, but gave away nothing at all.
    Logan was aware the girl was studying him. She had been kind; kinder than he had expected a white family to be after being roused in the middle of the night. Yet she made him self-conscious, and he shifted his feet and turned his body at an angle away from her.
    “I’m so sorry there’s nothing I can do for her.” She wanted to cry for the big man and his pathetically thin mother.
    He turned back as if surprised by her words. His eyes were two mirrors of misery. “You have given her a place to die. She would not have asked even that of you.”
    Tears sprang to Rosalee’s eyes and he turned his gaze away from them. As she moved from the bunk and carried the washpan back to the shelf, she whispered to her father that the woman was dying and then urged Odell up the ladder to sleep in Ben’s bed. Charlie had settled down beside the door and Ben had placed the six-gun on the mantel beside the clock. She suggested to Grant that he go back to bed, and after awhile he did. Ben sat in Grant’s chair and was soon asleep.
    Rosalee moved quietly. She added more wood to the cookstove and ladled water into the black iron teakettle. When it boiled, she opened the can with their precious supply of tea, put two pinches in the crockery pitcher, filled it with boiling water, and sat a wooden plate on top of it so it would steep.
    Logan Horn was sitting on the edge of the bunk. He held one of his mother’s thin hands in his. He was angry at himself. He had waited too long to come back for her. While he was fighting to free the slaves, his mother’s people had been massacred at Sand Creek. She had fled north with her relatives to the Yellowstone. It had taken him two years to find her.
    Morning Sun, his mother, was once the beautiful daughter of Running Wind, a Cheyenne chief. A white man had married her in an Indian ceremony; it had been his means to get her into his bed, to use her during his short stay with her people. When he was ready to leave, he divorced her. He “threw her away” at a tribal ceremony called the Omaha Dance. Playing the irate husband, he danced alone with a stick in his hand. He struck a mighty blow on a drum with the stick, threw it into the air, and shouted, “There goes my wife.” Morning Sun had felt much shame at being discarded in such a manner.
    Someday