Dark Warrior: To Tame a Wild Hawk (Dark Cloth) (4 page)

Meg yelled at the gathering crowd for the doc.

Mandy knelt over Hawk. There was a bullet in his shoulder, but he also had one that appeared to have passed through his right side, and there was blood everywhere. She brought his head to her lap. “It was McCandle,” she whispered. “He’s been in touch with someone. I’m sorry—I didn’t realize to what extent, until now—I sensed something new in him—but I couldn’t get a clear sense of what.”

Hawk sucked in a breath, belying the depth of his pain. “Be careful, Mandy. You’ll be especially vulnerable now—watch even those you trust, for you do not know who the teacher is.” At the look of worry in her eyes, he added. “I’ll live—” He flinched and took a deep breath, nearly arching from the spasm that tore through his body. “Someone has betrayed us . . . .” He closed his eyes.

Mandy leaned over, close to his ear. “I’ll be careful.” She accepted a blanket from someone in the crowd and placed it under his head. Meg worked to stop the bleeding, pressing one cloth hard to his shoulder wound, the other to the wound in his side.

Meg caught Mandy’s eye. “You work hard to save a man you’ve only just met, even if you do know him from your dreams.”

“So do you,” Mandy challenged.

Meg shrugged. “Like he said, be careful, Mandy.”

Mandy looked up into her friend’s concerned expression. “I will.” Looking down at Hawk, she studied his face. “Do you want me to send for the teachers?”

“No.” He clenched his teeth, opening his eyes and catching hers with a steely gaze. “It would be too dangerous for them. Besides,” he reached up and tugged on one of her loose curls, “I have you.”

Mandy caught herself just short of a full-blown panic. “I’m only an apprentice,” she whispered. “There’s much I don’t know.”

“You know enough.” Hawk drew in a sharp breath, then mercifully he passed out.

Cord shouldered his way through the growing crowd with more cloth in his hands. “Sheriff Tucker is going to want a good explanation for this,” he muttered in an undertone. “And when he finds out Hawk was hunting McKinney . . . .”

Mandy caught his meaning, but Doc appeared before she could reply.

Seeing Hawk’s face, Mandy heard him mutter an oath of surprise. He quickly assessed Hawk’s wounds. He put a finger in the shoulder wound, then the wound that passed through Hawk’s side, moving it this way and that. “Lucky,” she heard him mumble. “He’ll be a mite sore, but the bullets didn’t hit noth’n vital.” He lifted the cloth and looked again. “Yep, damn lucky.”

Mandy didn’t know why, but she didn’t like the fact he had put his finger in Hawk’s wound like that. Still, she was relieved the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. She breathed in such a sigh of relief, he looked sharply at her. She ignored the questioning look in his eyes. “What about the one that hit his side? How do you know it didn’t hit anything?”

“Passed clear on through, plenty of damage, but it’ll mend. Important thing is, it went out the other side—and it missed his guts. Seen all kinds of damage done when the bullets hit the guts. Lucky,” he muttered again, then dropped his voice to a near whisper. “Better we get him out of these clothes.”

Mandy searched his face for an explanation, but he said no more.

“You boys,” he pointed out four good-sized men, “carry him to my office. Man’s lost enough blood as it is. That’s the biggest danger to him right now, he can’t afford to lose much more.”

When they reached the office, Doc Mallory barked out orders. Hot water, bandages, needles and thread. Laudanum, alcohol and clean cloth. It was the longest hour of Mandy’s life. She didn’t want to examine why; this morning, she had almost hoped he would go and let her find another way to deal with McCandle. Now, she felt as though her life’s breath would leave her if he were to die.

There was so much blood; the wound in his shoulder was so deep. Doc had warned her of fever. And Hawk had said she couldn’t endanger the teachers by sending for them.

He had proven to be a quick, deadly gunman, but that wasn’t his true power.

Trickster coyote.

Doc Mallory, true to his word, had immediately disposed of Hawk’s clothes. She closed her eyes and felt the shock of knowing that the man in her dreams, the white Indian dressed in white man’s clothes, was now lying, shot, in the next room. She sensed the danger, clear to her core. His gun-hand was convenient for her revenge—but it wasn’t the reason she wanted him to live. She sensed the whirling emotions lying close to her breast—felt the pounding of her heart deep in her chest.

At least it wasn’t the only reason.

Chapter Four

M
andy slid down into her seat in the tiny waiting room. She looked down at the blood splattered on her bodice. Damp tendrils of hair escaped their confines and now clung to her neck and forehead. She leaned back in the cane chair.

Four chairs sat against one wall, next to a desk that sat by the front door. Four more chairs sat across from her. The room where the doctor did surgery was off to her right. Next to the surgery room, a staircase led to rooms upstairs, where patients who were recovering were kept.

Mandy glanced up as the sheriff entered. She’d heard he’d just ridden in from the trail, where he’d been following some cattle rustlers for the last two days.

Sheriff Tucker was a man who was once bigger than life. Now he was gray years ahead of his time. Losing his wife seemed to take all the life out of him. Her heart clenched at the thought of all the pain he’d suffered. There was something odd about his wife’s death—she wouldn’t rest if McCandle had his hands in this, too.

Lines of exhaustion etched deep tracks into his face. Dust lay in the crevices of his buckskin jacket. He moved with the precision of a man impatient to know why someone had shot up his town while he’d been absent.

He wasn’t going to like this.

He stared down at her face for a long moment before raking a hand through his hair. “Hate to put you through anymore, Miss Kane. Need to hear your version of what happened.” He nodded towards the sleeping man in the next room.

Mandy wanted to laugh. Sheriff Tucker, for the kind way he’d asked that, looked as though he wanted to throttle her.

Tucker had come to know her pretty well in the past two years, since McCandle had first started coming after her father’s ranch. She knew he considered her to be trouble. Folks around town made innuendos about her being a witch. She knew this infuriated the sheriff. She bit her lip. She wasn’t about to go down without a fight, and she couldn’t change. Poor Tucker. She’d made things hard on him. She hadn’t meant to. But to get to McCandle—she’d had no choice but to side-step the sheriff.

Mandy had been thinking about Cord’s warning throughout the surgery. She wasn’t about to let the sheriff chase Hawk out of town. Not now. The
Grandmothers’
words kept ringing in her ears. Whatever happened, no matter her reservations about the marriage to take place, she knew that she would follow the path set before her. So she’d tell the truth—but only in part.

She slipped on the familiar mask of the young, white woman in a town out west. “I came into Cord’s Mercantile to get a few things I had forgotten. That awful man Hawk shot . . . .”

“Hawk?” he interrupted with raised eyebrows. His gaze quickly swung to the sleeping form in the next room and back to her. “Heard it was him, just didn’t believe it.
Do you realize who Hawk is?
He’s the white Indian who grew up with the Lakota!”

“Yes, of course I know who he is. Who from around here wouldn’t?” she snapped. She rubbed her damp palms through the folds of her dress, centering herself, restoring calm to the rapid tempo of her heartbeat.

Not even paying attention to her temper, the sheriff sat down heavily on a cane-back chair across from her, setting his Stetson on his knee. Wearily, he shook his head and muttered, more to himself, “I thought he was dead, or at least long gone from these parts.”

Mandy swallowed again through the lump in her throat that wouldn’t go down. “Is he wanted for something, Sheriff?”

“No.” He gave her a hard look. “No, I wish that were so.” His eyes narrowed on her.

“Well.” Mandy smiled, relief flooding her body, then she sobered. “That man he shot, he—grabbed me. He told Cord he was going to—was going to . . . .” She put her hands over her hot cheeks.

He raised an eyebrow in Meg’s direction. “Is that what you’d say, Miss Anderson?”

Meg pushed herself away from the doorjamb she’d been leaning against.

Mandy took a deep breath. She hadn’t realized Meg was there. That rattled her. She never allowed herself to be so unaware of her surroundings. She caught the questioning look in Meg’s crystal-blue eyes.

At length, Meg answered the sheriff. “That’s what happened, Sheriff. He was going to hurt Mandy—if you know what I mean. If Hawk, there,” she nodded toward the room where Hawk lay, “hadn’t come in when he did . . .” her voice trailed off.

Sheriff Tucker looked back at Mandy, concern evident in his eyes. “Did he harm you, Miss Kane?”

Mandy let out the breath she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding, and whispered a promise to up above that she would let Meg know more of what the
Grandmothers
had to say.

“No. Thanks to . . . Thanks to . . . .” Mandy nodded towards the bed where Hawk laid, a delayed reaction to everything causing her voice to shake.

Meg glanced at her, a worried frown on her face. “Cord told him to leave her alone,” Meg told the Sheriff. “But McKinney . . . .”

“McKinney!” Tucker’s face showed more than a little surprise.
“The
McKinney?”

“Yes,” Cord answered him from the doorway, where he was toweling his hands,
“the McKinney
. He stuck a gun to Mandy’s head, said he was going to have some fun with her.”

Tucker turned to him. “You heard what these ladies were telling me?”

Cord’s brow furrowed. Throwing the towel aside, he scratched his jaw. “Most of it.”

Tucker stood to face Cord, leaning his thigh against the desk where the doc greeted his patients. He dropped his hat on the desk, and folding his arms across his chest, he waited, finally glaring at Cord with impatience. “Well, do you have anything to add?”

Cord stood a moment, hands on hips, and met the sheriff’s glare with an unconcerned look and a deep frown on his face. “Just that, if Hawk hadn’t come when he did—Hawk told him to let her go, and there was a lot of gunfire. When McKinney was dead, Hawk went outside, and there was a bunch waiting to jump him. They must have taken him by surprise—because he had to use his horse for a shield.”

Mandy winced at his words. Out here, a man’s horse oftentimes became his best friend. Some treated their horses better than they did themselves. They really couldn’t afford to do less. A man’s horse meant his life. Without it, he could well be dead. That still didn’t stop some from abusing theirs.

“Did Hawk recognize McKinney?”

“Yes,” Mandy answered, wincing when she realized what she’d revealed. She was glad he hadn’t been looking at her when she’d said it. She was sure her face had given her thoughts away.

“How did Hawk know McKinney?” Tucker rounded on her, hitting uncomfortably close to the truth.

Without glancing at Mandy, Cord answered evenly, “I guess a warrior like Hawk would make it his business to know.”

“Yeah.” Tucker’s steely gaze moved over Hawk, still as death under some blankets on the surgery table in the next room. “I imagine so.” He looked at Mandy. “You reckon that’s what you’d say?”

Mandy glanced at Cord, then back at the Sheriff. “Seems right.”

“Then, how come I didn’t recognize him under all that trail dust—and hair?”

Mandy didn’t back down. “Maybe Hawk had the bad luck to cross McKinney’s path before?”

“I suppose.” Tucker rubbed two days’ growth of stubble on his face. “But, I’ve seen McKinney before, and he didn’t look noth’n like the man I saw outside, laid up in that pine box.” His eyes narrowed on Mandy. “Heard a tale.” He scratched the stubble on his face again. “Heard, wherever you see Hawk, you see this one particular gunman.” He watched Mandy’s face closely.

This time she was ready—and she revealed nothing in the steady gaze she returned.

Tucker half smiled. “I don’t cotton much to tales.” He moved to the door. “If you think of anything else?” he eyed the three of them.

Mandy answered first, “Of course, Sheriff. You’ll be the first to know.”

The sheriff picked up his Stetson, his eyes on her; studying her for another long, uncomfortable moment. Then, doffing his hat, he walked out the door, slamming it behind him and sending the doorbell jangling.

The three of them let out a collective breath.

“The man’s too sharp.” Cord sank onto the same cane-back chair the sheriff had occupied moments before. “I’d say he missed his calling. He should have been a lawyer.”

Meg sat down beside Mandy, studying her face for a moment. “What are you up to?”

Mandy closed her eyes. When she opened them, she stood on a prairie.

A small child stood screaming and a young boy stood to help her, but, in the next instant, a bullet struck her down. The boy’s knees buckled and he sank to the ground in a heap. Open-mouthed, he stared at the man who held the gun. “Papa,” he mouthed. Paralyzed, he watched him rack another bullet into the chamber. His father lifted the rifle and took aim. He followed the direction his father pointed it in.