The Promise of Jenny Jones (28 page)

"Wipe her nose, will you?" Jenny said in disgust. She took another deep swig from the mouth of the tequila bottle.

"For Christ's sake, Jenny. This is too much to ask of a kid. I'll do it," Ty growled, fumbling in the saddlebags for the sewing kit.

"Fine," she said, glaring. "Give the kid your pistol and let her serve as lookout. Tell her to shoot the third cousin if he comes in here looking for us." She knew she'd made her point by the frustration drawing his face.

"If the man on the depot platform boarded the train, don't you think we'd have seen him by now?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he's biding his time, waiting for the next stop."

His face darkened, and he turned his gaze to Graciela. "I'm sorry, honey. I don't like this any more than you do, but it looks like you'll have to do the sewing."

Graciela had both small hands clamped to her cheeks and was crying and shaking her head. "I can't! I can't!"

"Listen to me," Jenny said, speaking quietly. Gently, she pulled one of the kid's hands into her own, leaving a bloody smear. "If we don't stitch the wound, it won't stop bleeding. It won't start to heal." She gazed into Graciela's wide wet eyes. "If we don't stop the bleeding, I'm going to be in real trouble. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"I can't stick a needle into…" A shudder twitched down the kid's body. Her face had turned the color of whey.

"Yes, you can. Hide is tougher than cotton, it's like stitching leather. But you can do it. You just have to push the needle a little harder."

Graciela dropped her head on Jenny's shoulder. Her back shook. "It'll hurt you."

"Oh yeah. It's going to hurt like a son of a … gun. I'll try not to scream if you won't."

"The train is shaking too much!"

Jenny lifted a hand and stroked the kid's hair, wondering what had happened to Graciela's hat. "I trust you to do the best you can."

Graciela pulled back and stared into her eyes. "You trust me?" she whispered.

"I'm trustingyou with my life, kid." Jenny stared back. "And that's okay. See, I figure you owe me. I took care of you when you were sick, now it's your turn to do something for me. I was there for you, now you have to be here for me. The fact is,you've got it easy. I'd rather sew a few stitches any day than mop up buckets of vomit. God!"

Graciela wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, something she wouldn't ordinarily have dreamed of doing,then she slid a glance toward the sewing packet Ty was kneading between his fingers. "Can I have a taste of tequila?"

"Hell no." Jenny scowled. "If you start drinking next, so help me I'm going to have to smack you bad." She closed her eyes, took a couple of deep breaths,then looked at Ty. "Give her the sewing packet." To Graciela, she added, "Pick the strongest thread and double it. Tie off each stitch. And Graciela?"

The sewing packet was shaking in her hands. "Yes?"

"If I should faint, don't stop sewing. In fact, if I faint, you sew as fast as you can, understand?"

Ty muttered a string of curses,then stood in the aisle with his back to them, his angry stance daring anyone to approach. Jenny flicked a glance at him,then motioned to Graciela to kneel in front of her.

It took several tries before Graciela picked up the rhythm of the train's sway and was able to thread the needle. Her hands shook so badly that the thimble continued to fall off her finger. Jenny took a long hit from the tequila bottle,then she and Graciela stared at each other.

"We've been through a lot," Jenny said quietly. "What we're doing now is just one more thing. No harder than anything else."

"Does it hurt?" Graciela whispered, her eyes wide, the needle trembling between her fingers.

"Hurts a lot." The wound hurt like a son of a bitch, and she wanted to say so, but she didn't. She was as proud of her restraint as she was of anything she'd ever done.

Marguarita, I hope you are fricking paying attention. If I ever had reason or provocation to spit out some choice cursing, now's the time, by God. I hope to hell you're noticing what a good example I'm setting here.

"Are you going to cry?"

"I might. I would hate for you to notice, so don't look up." She peeled back the bloody tequila-soaked cloth to expose the wound and heard Graciela suck in a sharp, hissing breath. "When you're finished, pour more tequila on it." Closing her eyes, clutching the blouse up out of the way, she leaned against the seat back and tried to hold her breathing steady and regular.

The first jab was no more than a pinprick, enough to get her attention but too tentative to penetrate skin. So was the second jab.

Jenny pried open her jaws. "For God's sake, are you going to sew or are you going to just torture me? Do it and get it over with."

On the kid's fourth try, the needle went in, and Jenny fainted.

CHAPTER 14

T y made a pillow out of the saddlebags,then covered Jenny with her shawl when she curled down on the seat. Kneeling beside her, he studied her flushed face, hoping she wasn't feverish. "Is the bandage too tight?"

"Feels like a corset."

"Do you want more tequila?" He smoothed a length of sweat-damp hair back from her forehead. "We have more tortillas if you're hungry." She shook her head. "All right, get some rest. Sleep is the best healer."

He eased back on the seat beside Graciela and lit another cigar to occupy his hands. Outside, the light was starting to shade toward evening. Long shadows pointed away from the cacti, which were taller now than those growing deeper in the wastelands. If he'd been on horseback, he would have noticed the northern incline of the land, but the motion of the train distorted such observations.

Smoking, seething with anger and concern, he studied Jenny's pale face. The way her lashes curved in a coppery crescent on her cheek, the way her lips parted slightly.

It should have been him. Not her. Hell, she'd already been shot. If someone had to get wounded, it was his turn. Frowning, he glared out the window over Graciela's head.

Marguarita might have chosen her daughter's protector hastily, but she had chosen wisely. She must have sensed Jenny's fearless persistence, her stubborn and dogged commitment to a promise once given. So far, she'd received a blackened eye, a cracked lip, a shot-up arm, and a slashed stomach. And they weren't yet out ofMexico.

Gradually he became aware of Graciela's low murmur beside him. "What did you say?"

"I'm praying," she answered in a choked voice. "I'm telling God that I didn't mean it about making Jenny bleed."

"Listen." He dropped an arm around her shoulders and let her burrow into his side. "What happened to Jenny wasn't your fault."

"I asked God to punish her," she mumbled against his waistcoat.

Instantly the conversation tumbled into deep water. Ty drew on the cigar, searching for answers as ephemeral as smoke, not sure if he could shape them into the form his niece needed to hear. If someone had inquired, he would have said he was a spiritual man but not religious. To him, God was a spark within every living thing, an artist who painted with sunset clouds and ocean mist, a sculptor shaping human clay, earthly soil, and distant stars. The way he saw things, God was the creator. Any dogma beyond that was nitpicking.

Never would he have believed that he might be called upon to interpret God for a child. He wondered if Robert had any inkling of how parenthood was going to change his life.

"Well, God doesn't grant unjust requests." All he could do was hope for the best. "You wanted Jenny punished for killing your mother, and that was wrong. So God ignored that part of your prayers."

Graciela peered up at him. "But she did get punished. She got shot, and she got knifed."

"Well, I know that," he said, floundering. "All right, just for the sake of discussion, let's suppose that God punished Jenny because you asked him to." Now what? "Did you tell God that you'd changed your mind? You did change your mind, didn't you?"

She nodded solemnly, her gaze fastened on his face.

"Well, then. There you are. God turned things around by letting yoube the person to save Jenny's life."

Graciela's eyebrows soared. "I saved Jenny's life?"

"She would have bled to death if you hadn't sewed her up."

She relaxed against his body like a dog he'd had once, going hot andlimp on his chest. After several minutes of silence, she lifted her head. "Uncle Ty?"

"What?" He gazed at Jenny over her head.

"Sometimes I like Jenny," she whispered.

"So doI ." The object of their discussion was snoring slightly, moaning softly every now and again. Smiling, he decided that any man who hankered after Jenny Jones lusted for reality, not fantasy.

"When I like her, it makes me feel bad inside because of my mama."

With one sentence, she tossed him back into the deep water. Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder to soften his words. "Honey, you know Jenny didn't kill your mother. You know that. Your mother explained it, Jenny's explained it,I've explained it. You've got to stop blaming Jenny. It isn't fair to her." Oh God, he'd made his niece cry again.

"Listen, it's all right for you to like Jenny." Pulling off his scarf, he pushed it into her hands. "Wipe your eyes. And your nose. It's better if you like Jenny, because…" His mind jumped around like spit on a griddle, searching for a reason. "Because you own her now. She's your responsibility." And he'd been the one telling Jenny not to expect too much of a kid. Damn.

"What?" Wadding up his scarf, she pressed it against her wet eyes.

In for a penny, in for a pound. He drew a breath. "Not far from the ranch where your daddy lives, there's a big town calledSan Francisco. InSan Francisco, there's a lot of Chinamen."

"What's a Chinaman?"

"Men who used to live inChina. Across the sea. Never mind that part. These Chinamen believe if you save a person's life, then you're responsible for that person forever after, sort of like you own them." Maybe it wasn't the Chinamen who believed that, he wasn't sure, but he'd heard it somewhere. "The important thing is,it's good that you like Jenny. It's all right to like her. It's a lot better that way since you own her now."

She hid her face behind his scarf, and he could almost hear her thinking. When she lowered the scarf, she was frowning. "Do you and Jenny own me? Because you saved me from my cousins with the snakes?"

This was getting complicated, and he wished he'd never mentioned it. "I suppose we do," he conceded uneasily, irrevocably linking the three of them in her mind. This was a problem he'd worry about later.

When the train stopped to take on more passengers, he bought bowls of fiery stew for their supper, a loaf of fresh dark bread, and he refilled their canteens. After the train moved out again, Graciela wet a strip of her torn nightgown and gently wiped the sweat from Jenny's face. Jenny roused briefly, murmured something,then slept again. Ty watched his niece adjust the shawl around Jenny's shoulders and decided Jenny had been right and he had been wrong. Six-year-olds were capable of much more than he would ever have believed.

Graciela lifted his arm and nestled beneath it, resting her head on his chest. "Tell me a story."

His eyebrows rose toward his hat brim, and he cleared his throat. "I don't know any stories."

"Tell me about when you and my daddy were little boys."

"You don't want to hear about that." But she did, so hesitantly at first,then with growing pleasure, he told her about the time he and Robert had tried to steal Don Antonio Barrancas's prize bull and how he'd gotten gored for his trouble. "Right in the butt," he said, laughing. "Couldn't sit for a week." Then he told her how his mother had always baked an extra cherry pie because she knew her boys would steal one, and about the time he and Robert had sneaked out their bedroom window to sleep in the haystack but Cal caught them and blistered their behinds. He might have talked untilmidnight, remembering himself and Robert, except he noticed that she'd fallen asleep.

Trying not to wake her, he lit another cigar and gazed out the window as the train rolled through the desert night. Graciela was not his daughter, and Jenny was not his woman. But it felt good to watch over them while they slept as if they were his. He would have torn the limbs off anyone who came near them.

For the first time in his life, Ty glimpsed why a man might choose the aggravation of a family.

* * *

Jenny struggled to sit up, blinking at the morning sunlight. Across from her, Graciela still slept, her head in Ty's lap, but Ty was awake, watching her.

"Mornin'," she said, pulling her shawl down over her bloodied blouse. "Did you get any sleep?"

"Some. How are you feeling?"

"I'd have to say I've felt better. This damn train is shaking me to pieces. Can I have some water, please?" Their fingers brushed when he handed her the canteen, and she glanced at him, frowned, then poured water on a strip of Graciela's nightshift and washed her face and hands.

The desert outside the window was a sun-baked sand and alkali plain, but here and there she spotted a few bony, mean-looking cattle. She wondered what they found to eat out there.

After running her tongue around her teeth she drank deeply from the canteen,then replaced the cap. "We're almost clear of the wastelands. We'll start seeing farms and ranches soon." Leaning, she scanned the western horizon, spotted towering cacti and low brown hills curving against the morning sky. She'd made the El Paso-Chihuahua freight run enough times to recognize the terrain.

"We need to hole up for a few days," Ty announced quietly, watching her comb her fingers through her hair. "Give you a chance to mend and get your strength back."

Slipping a band beneath her shawl, she gingerly explored with her fingertips, tracing the bandage that Ty and Graciela had wrapped around her waist. She couldn't decide if the pain was less or about the same as yesterday. Pain was a hard thing to remember, hard to define by degrees.

"The cousins are going to find the bodies we left behind," she pointed out, resting against the hard seat back. "Luis is still out there. He's going to come after us."

"Chihuahuais big enough that we could stay there a month, and they'd never find us."