An Outlaw's Christmas. Linda Miller Lael

a frenzy of strength, she dragged man and quilt as far as the steps, but there was no getting him up them. She had no way of knowing how long he’d been lying in the schoolyard, injured, and frostbite was a serious possibility, as was hypothermia.

      She gripped him by his shoulders—they were broad under her hands, and hard with muscle—and shook him firmly. “Mister!” she yelled, through the raging wind. “You’ve got to rally yourself enough to get up these steps—I can’t do this without some assistance, and there’s no one else around!”

      Miraculously, the stranger came to and gathered enough strength to half crawl up the steps, with a lot of help from Piper. From there, she was able to pull him over the threshold onto the rough-plank floor, where he lay facedown, bleeding copiously and only semiconscious.

      “My horse,” he rasped.

      “Bother your horse,” Piper replied, but she didn’t mean it. The stranger, being a human being, was her first concern, but she was almost as worried about that frightened animal standing outside in the weather, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to ignore it.

      “Horse,” the man repeated.

      “I’ll see to him,” Piper promised, having no real choice in the matter. She collected another blanket from her quarters, covered the man, and steeled herself to hurry back outside.

      Ever after, she’d wonder how she’d managed such an impossible feat, but at the time, Piper worked from a sense of expediency. She got hold the horse’s reins and somehow led him around back, through what seemed like miles of snow, and into the dark shed. There, she removed his saddle, the blanket beneath it, and the bridle. She spread out some hay for him and found a bucket, which she filled with snow—that being the best she could do for now. When the snow melted, the creature would have drinking water.

      The horse was jumpy at first, and Piper took a few precious moments to speak softly to him, rubbing him down as best she could with an old burlap sack and making the same promise as before—he would be all right, and so would his master, because she wouldn’t have it any other way.

      On the way back to the schoolhouse, she fought her way into the woodshed and filled her arms with sticks of pitch-scented pine.

      The stranger was still on the floor, upon her return, lying just over the threshold, either dead or sleeping.

      Hastily, murmuring a prayer under her breath, Piper dumped the firewood into the box beside the stove, went back to the man, pulled off one ruined mitten and felt for a pulse at the base of his throat. His skin was cold, a shade of grayish-blue, but there was a heartbeat, thank heaven, faint but steady.

      There was still water to fetch—why hadn’t she done this chore earlier, in the daylight, as she’d intended, instead of starting a pot of pinto beans and reading one of Sir Walter Scott’s novels?—and Piper didn’t allow herself to think beyond getting to the well, filling a couple of buckets, and bringing them inside.

      She marched outside again, moving like a woman floundering in a bad dream, taking the water buckets with her. Just getting to the well took most of her strength and, once there, she had to lower the vessels, one by one, by a length of rope.

      She’d discarded her mittens by then, and the rough hemp burned like fire against her palms and the undersides of her fingers, but she lowered and 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 have said.

      The deep, jagged hole in the flesh of the stranger’s shoulder began to seep again.

      Piper shifted her gaze to the supplies she’d gathered, now resting beside her on the floor—a basin full of steaming water, strands of clean cloth, iodine—and was struck by their inadequacy, and her own.

      This man needed a surgeon, not the bumbling first aid of a schoolmarm.

      She raised her eyes to the night-darkened window and the huge flakes of falling snow beyond, and mentally calculated the distance to Dr. Howard’s house, on the far side of Blue River.

      At most a ten-minute walk away, in daylight and decent weather, Doc’s place might as well have been on another continent, for all the chance she had of reaching it safely. Furthermore, the man wasn’t a physician, but a dentist, albeit a very competent one who would definitely know what do to in such an emergency.