Marks stays to herself. And if you happen by and surprise her, you might get a load of buckshot in you.”
Nelson stifled a smile at the image of the small-framed woman with a big rifle in her hands. “Doesn’t encourage me to visit her anytime soon. Where’s the boy’s father?”
“I heard he took off a few months before the boy was born and never came back. Carl says he died, but knowing Carl, that’s not necessarily true.”
Nelson absorbed that bit of information, feeling more and more like he was prying instead of gathering facts that might help him provide better medical care for the pair. He withdrew a few bills from his inside vest pocket. “Well, what do I owe you here?” Once he’d paid, he picked up his books and headed for the door.
Henry followed him outside to the boardwalk. “This came for you too.” He handed him a letter.
Nelson glanced at the return address. Boston. His parents. A weight dropped in his stomach. What could they possibly want?
He tucked the letter inside his vest pocket. “Thanks, Henry.”
“The train is due in tomorrow from Bridgeport. More women wanting to marry are arriving. Are you going to the station to look them over?”
“I didn’t fare so well the first time.” By the time he’d made up his mind which bride he wanted from the first train, he was too late. Mary McCary would have been a suitable fit. She knew how to cook and she had displayed a caring attitude toward the injured cook out at Putnam’s ranch. It was too bad that spending all that time with Steve Putnam had turned her head toward the rancher. They seemed satisfied with each other. More than satisfied. He was happy for them. It was just that he was left high and dry.
He nodded a goodbye to Henry and started for his house.
Although he had sworn off matrimony after his short-lived engagement, he figured in a small town it was the only course to take. People here tended to trust a married family man more than they would a bachelor and he also needed the help in his medical practice.
What he really wanted was a nurse—not necessarily a wife. Yet he couldn’t very well advertise for one. Any woman would cringe at the thought of traveling so far from her home for a mere nursing position. And no marriageable woman of good character would agree to spend constant time at his side without a ring on her finger. Tongues would wag in this little town where there were so few women. Even if he did find one to employ as his nurse without making her a missus, it wouldn’t be two months before another man would woo, marry and whisk her away.
His only other option was to hire a widow twice his age. He’d been on the lookout for just such a woman. Unfortunately, in the two years he’d lived here, even the older women quickly became brides again or left Oak Grove.
No. His only choice was marriage—preferably to a woman who could look after herself and not throw a fit if he missed supper now and then. Doctoring was more than a job to him, more than a profession. It had become his passion, a calling as much as any parson’s call to the cloth was a calling, and it took as many or more hours in a day. He needed a wife who would understand and be of help to him. Someone practical.
He stepped up on the porch and entered his office. Passing through the front room that served as his parlor and waiting room, he strode back to his office and set the journals and the letter on his desk. He wanted to delve right into the journals, but the letter was another matter. Word from home was seldom happy. He wished he could leave it for another day.
The address was written in his mother’s script. Nothing unusual about that. His father had never written to him. He heard from his mother only when there was something important to pass on—once a year at the most. He broke the fancy seal and unfolded the letter, then paced the length of the small room while he read.
And came to a standstill.
His parents were coming to visit.
Stunned, he reread the letter. Not once before had they visited him. Once they had stuck him in boarding school, it was he who did the traveling to see them, not the other way around. Not even when he graduated from medical school did they make the effort. This was unprecedented. They would arrive in two weeks. He turned the letter over once more, inanely hoping he’d find more written somewhere else on the page. He wished he could read between the lines.
What was really going on?
“But it hurts!” Wiley Austin mumbled to his older brother, Kade. His eyes started to tear again as Nelson probed the boy’s thumb with the end of a needle. The large splinter had embedded itself under several layers of skin.
“Toughen up,” Kade said as he looked on. “Quit your slobberin’.”
“I ain’t slobberin’.”
“Are too.”
“Ain’t neither!” Wiley wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand.
“You’re doing fine,” Nelson murmured, concentrating on the splinter.
“Ouch!” Wiley jerked away.
Nelson straightened and stretched his back. “Shake it out and we’ll try again in a minute.” The grandfather clock in the hotel lobby chimed three times, reminding him that the train carrying the brides would be arriving at any moment. After a busy morning in the office, he’d finally made up his mind to be there...until Wiley’s splinter happened. “Ready to tackle this again?”
The boy wiped his nose again and stepped closer, holding out his hand. It shook slightly.
“I’m almost there.” Nelson pressed against the far edge of the splinter with his thumb, picked up his tweezers and eased the splinter out. He held it up. “That’s a big one. You were brave. Not every six-year-old could handle such a big operation.”
Wiley let out a huge sigh of relief.
Nelson dabbed at the drop of blood with his handkerchief and then slathered a small bit of unguent on the nearly invisible exit hole.
The train whistle blew once more and with it came the last chug and wheeze as the wheels slowed to a stop. Shouts sounded from the street as men headed toward the station.
“Thank you, Dr. Graham,” Sadie Austin said as she descended the steps from the second floor. “I just had to get the last of the rooms ready for the women and Wiley wouldn’t stand still for me to help him.”
“Not a problem, Mrs. Austin. Glad to help out.”
“Ma! Can me and Wiley go meet the train?”
Mrs. Austin hesitated a moment and then nodded. “We’ll go together. I can’t have you two anywhere near the tracks or the train’s wheels. Your father would have a fit. Now, you take hold of your brother’s hand, Kade.”
“Aw!” Wiley whined.
“I mean it!” she said.
Nelson settled his Stetson on his head. For a woman who had never had children of her own, Mrs. Austin was doing a fine job of mothering the two boys. “Going there myself, ma’am. I’ll walk with you.”
She grabbed her shawl from the table in the entryway as they headed out the front door of the hotel. “I’m glad to see you still here in Oak Grove.”
“Still here,” he said. People here had worried he would pull stakes and head back East when things didn’t work out with the first set of brides that rolled into town nearly a year ago. What they didn’t know was that the words he’d had with his father before leaving home for good had left a gaping chasm in their relationship—one not easily bridged. The only way he would consider going back to Boston would be if he received a heartfelt “I’m sorry” from his father. Unless their visit had something to do with that argument, he didn’t