“Shall I fetch the doc?” he asked.
Hannah turned, looked at him over one shoulder, and nodded. If you hadn’t insisted on taking him with you to the widow Jessup’s place, she thought—
But she would go no further.
This was not the time to place blame.
“You get back into bed,” she told Tobias, briskly efficient and purely terrified. The bout of pneumonia that had nearly killed him during the fall had started like this. “I’ll make you a mustard plaster to draw out the congestion, and your uncle Doss will go to town for Dr. Willaby. You’ll be right as rain in no time at all.”
Tobias looked doubtful. His face was flushed, and his night shirt was soaked with perspiration, even though the kitchen was a little on the chilly side. The boy seemed dazed, almost as though he were walking in his sleep, and Hannah wondered if he’d taken in a word she’d said.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Doss promised, already pulling on his coat and reaching for his hat. “There’s whisky left from Christmas. It’s in the pantry, behind that cracker tin,” he added, pausing before opening the door. “Make him a hot drink with some honey. Pa used to brew up that concoction for us when we took sick, and it always helped.”
Doss and Gabe, along with their adopted older brother, John Henry, had never suffered a serious illness in their lives, if you didn’t count John Henry’s deafness. What did they know about tending the sick?
Hannah nodded again, her mouth tight. She’d lost three sisters in child hood, two to diphtheria and one to scarlet fever; only she and her younger brother, David, had survived.
She was used to nursing the afflicted.
Doss hesitated a few moments on the threshold, as though there was something he wanted to say but couldn’t put into words, then went out.
“You change into a dry night shirt,” Hannah told Tobias. His sheets were probably sweat-soaked, too, so she added, “And get into our bed.”
Our bed.
Meaning Gabe’s and hers.
And soon, after they were married, Doss would be sleeping in that bed, in Gabe’s place.
She could not, would not, consider the implications of that.
Not now. Maybe not ever.
She was like the ranch woman she’d once read about in a Montana newspaper, making her way from the house to the barn and back in a blinding blizzard, with only a frozen rope to hold on to. If she let go, she’d be lost.
She had to attend to Tobias. That was her rope, and she’d follow it, hand over hand, thought over thought. Hannah retrieved an old flannel shirt from the rag bag and cut two matching pieces, approximately twelve inches square. These would serve to protect Tobias’s skin from the heat of the poultice, but like as not, he would still have blisters. She kept a mixture on hand for just such occasions, in a big jar with a wire seal. She dumped a big dollop of the stuff on to one of the bits of flannel, spread it like butter, and put the second cloth on top, her nose twitching at the pungent odors of mustard seed, pounded to a pulp, and camphor.
When she got upstairs, she found Tobias huddled in the middle of her bed, and his eyes grew big with recollection when he saw what she was carrying in her hands.
“No,” he protested, but weakly. “No mustard plaster.” He’d begun to shiver, and his teeth were chattering.
“Don’t fuss, Tobias,” Hannah said. “Your grand father swears by them.”
Tobias groaned. “My Montana grandfather,” he replied. “My grand pa Holt wouldn’t let anybody put one of those things on him!”
“Is that a fact?” Hannah asked mildly. “Well, next time you write to the almighty Holt McKettrick, you ask. I’ll bet he’ll say he wouldn’t be without one when he’s under the weather.”
Tobias made a rude sound, blowing through his lips, but he rolled on to his back and allowed Hannah to open the top buttons of his night shirt and put the poultice in place.
“Grandpa Holt,” he said, bearing the affliction stalwartly, “would probably make me a whisky drink, just like he did for Pa and Uncle Doss.”
Hannah sighed. Privately she thought there was a good deal of the rough neck in the McKettrick men, and while she wouldn’t call any of them a drunk, they used liquor as a remedy for just about every ill, from snake bite to the grippe. They’d swabbed it on old Seesaw’s gashes, when he tangled with a sow bear, and rubbed it into the gums of teething babies.
“What you’re going to have, Tobias McKettrick, is oatmeal.”
He made a face. “This burns,” he complained, pointing to the mustard plaster.
Hannah bent and kissed his forehead. He didn’t pull away, like he’d taken to doing of late, and she found that both reassuring and worrisome.
She glanced at the window, saw a scallop of icicles dangling from the eave. It might be many hours—even tomorrow—before Doss got back from Indian Rock with Dr. Willaby. The wait would be agony, but there was nothing to do but endure.
When Tobias closed his eyes and slept, Hannah left the room, descended the stairs and went into the pantry again. She moved the cracker tin aside, looked up at the bottle of whisky hidden behind it, gave a disdainful sniff, and took a canned chicken off the shelf instead. It was a treasure, that chicken—she’d been saving it for some celebration, so she wouldn’t have to kill one of her laying hens—but it would make a fine, nourishing soup.
After gathering onions, rice and some of her spices—which she cherished as much as preserved meat, given how costly they were—Hannah commenced to make soup.
She was surprised when, only an hour after he’d ridden out, Doss returned with another man she recognized as one of the ranch hands down at Rafe’s place. She frowned, watching from the window as Doss dismounted and left the new comer to lead both horses inside.
That was odd. Doss hadn’t been to Indian Rock yet; he couldn’t have covered the distance in such a short time. Why would he ask someone to put up his horse? Puzzled, impatient and a little angry, Hannah was waiting at the door when Doss came in.
“Bundle the boy up warm,” he said, without any preamble at all. “Willie’s going to stay here and look after the horses and the place. Once I’ve hitched the draft horses to the sleigh, we’ll go overland to Indian Rock.”
Hannah stared at him, confounded. “You’re suggesting that we take Tobias all the way to Indian Rock?”
“I’m not ‘suggesting’ anything, Hannah,” Doss interposed. “I met Seth Baker down by the main house, when I was about to cross the stream, and he hailed me, wanted to know where I was headed. I told him I was off to fetch Doc Willaby, be cause Tobias was feeling poorly. Seth said Willaby was down with the gout, but his nephew happened to be there, and he’s a doctor, too. He’s looking after the doc’s practice, in town, so he wouldn’t be inclined to come all the way out here.”
Hannah’s throat clenched, and she put a hand to it. “A ride like that could be the end of Tobias,” she said.
Doss shook his head. “We can’t just sit here,” he countered, grim-jawed. “Get the boy ready or I’ll do it myself.”
“May I remind you that Tobias is my son?”
“He’s a McKettrick,” Doss replied flatly, as though that were the end of it—and for him, it probably was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Present Day
TRAVIS WAITED UNTIL SIERRA HAD DRIFTED off into a fitful sleep in her chair next to Liam’s hospital bed. Then he got a blanket from a nurse, covered Sierra with it and left.
A few minutes