The Scout's Bride

“I’ve seen worse,” Injun Jack answered for her.

Rebecca started at the unexpected voice behind her.

“How bad, angel?” Teddy pressed, struggling to stay awake.

“The cut is deep, but it’s clean and closed now,” she replied cautiously, “If there’s no infection—”

His eyes glittering with fever and the drug, Teddy strained to see the scout. “Promise you won’t let Doc cut my leg off, Jack.”

“Rest easy, boy. He isn’t coming near you with a saw,” the big man vowed, glowering at the woman as if daring her to object.

Placing a wet cloth on the soldier’s forehead, she urged soothingly, “Just rest now.” But the red streak on his leg concerned her.

She beckoned a nurse, but the man halted twenty feet away and would come no closer. Unwilling to awaken the entire ward, she went to him. “Please bathe Private Greeley,” she instructed, picking up a change of undergarments from a stack on the dispensing table. “And dispose of his old clothes while I fetch something for his fever.”

“Injun Jack won’t let me get that close, ma’am,” the nurse protested, “not without sliding his pig-sticker between my ribs.”

“He didn’t stab me,” she pointed out, shoving the long johns into his hands. “He didn’t even try.”

“No, but—”

“Tell him I told you to make Teddy more comfortable.”

“Yes’m.” The nurse trudged toward the sickbed, glancing back at her unhappily when the scout reached down to reclaim his knife from the floor. “Miss Rebecca says I’m to bathe Private Greeley.”

Injun Jack regarded him through slitted blue eyes for a long moment, then resheathed his knife. “Don’t hurt him,” he grunted, sliding down on the bed and covering himself with a blanket, “or I’ll have to skin you alive.”

Rolling her eyes in exasperation, Rebecca left the rattled nurse to his duties.

Injun Jack lay still, listening to the howling wind. His arm throbbed and he was tired, so tired, but he could not sleep yet.

From behind a fringe of dark eyelashes, he watched Teddy’s Yankee angel at work. Her eyes modestly averted from her patient’s bath, she mixed a concoction for him. Slender, erect and not very tall, she moved with quiet competence, her glossy brown braid slapping between her shoulder blades with every move.

When she turned to dip whiskey from the crock, Jack glimpsed her profile. Her delicate features reminded him of a brooch his mother had worn. But unlike the cameo, her face was animated and expressive.

He judged her to be about twenty-five and pretty enough, but too prim and proper for his liking. She did have a nice mouth and a dimple when she smiled, but when she was riled, her stare could stop a bull buffalo in a dead run.

He closed his eyes wearily. Fatigue was making him foolish… foolish over a woman. But her eyes were beautiful. He wished he could remember what color they were.

Rebecca was relieved to find Injun Jack asleep when she returned to Teddy’s bedside. The patient was clean and quiet, but still unclothed. His new undergarments lay neatly folded at the foot of the bed, and the nurse was nowhere to be seen.

Though she knew it was silly, she ducked to peer beneath the beds. As she straightened, she found herself staring into Injun Jack’s blue eyes.

He grinned lazily. “If you’re looking for your nurse, you won’t find him there.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Not a thing,” he protested, the picture of innocence.

With a sniff, Rebecca turned her back to him and lifted her patient’s head. Holding the cup to his lips, she coaxed, “Drink this, Private.”

The groggy Teddy took a sip, his cooperative stupor ending when he tasted the medication. Shoving the cup away, he gagged, “Jehoshaphat, she’s tryin’ to poison me!”

“That’s not so.” She retreated, half expecting Injun Jack to leap from his bunk and cut her to pieces, but he did not move.

“Pass me your flask quick, Jack,” the young man appealed with a horrible grimace.

His benefactor was unsympathetic. “Soon as you finish what you’ve got there.”

“What I’ve got here is rotgut,” Teddy complained.

“It’s more quinine than whiskey. For fever…” Rebecca’s defense trailed off when he fixed her with a baleful stare.

“I could live through a fever, ma’am. I’m not sure about the whiskey.”

“Drink it, boy,” the scout commanded.

With a distasteful scowl, the soldier took the cup. “Your day is comin’, Jack,” he muttered. “Soon. You show her your arm?”

“What happened to your arm?” She glanced at the other man.

“Got in the way of an arrow.” Covered with a blanket, he made no move to reveal his injury.

“He was shot as he came for me,” Teddy elaborated.

“I wouldn’t have, if I had known you weren’t going to take your medicine.”

Holding his nose, the private drained the cup. “Now give me some good bourbon,” he panted, “and let her look at your arm.”

When Injun Jack threw off his blanket and sat up, Rebecca saw that his right arm hung limply at his side. Fishing a tarnished silver flask from inside his shirt with his left hand, he passed it to Teddy. “Take it easy. You’ve probably had too much already.”

After the young man drank and lay back on his pillow, Injun Jack plucked the flask from his hands and saluted the woman with it. “Your health, Miss Rebecca. That is your name, isn’t it?”

She nodded. His face was pale under his tan and a fine sheen of perspiration coated his forehead. The glaze in his eyes had more to do with fatigue and pain than with the whiskey he swigged. “I could look at your arm, if you’d like,” she suggested kindly.

“No, thanks.” Slumped against the bedstead, his big body hid the injured limb from view and made it virtually unreachable. “O’Hara treated it in the field.”

“This Mr. O’Hara is a doctor?” she inquired crisply.

“This Sergeant O’Hara is a ham-fisted Irishman who did what needed to be done.” He gripped the edge of the mattress to steady himself. “You’ll understand my reluctance, however, to have anyone else poke around in me after he finished.”

Rebecca regarded the scout appraisingly. He had threatened, bellowed and bullied, but he had not hurt anyone yet. Surely he would not harm a woman. “I must insist on examining your arm,” she said quietly.

Amusement glinted in his blue eyes. “You have a lot of stubborn for such a little gal.”

“And you have little sense for such a big man,” she retorted. “Are you going to let that arm become infected?”

“No, ma’am.” Docilely, he extended his right arm. The sleeve of his buckskin shirt had been split up to his shoulder and a dust-caked yellow scarf encircled his bare bicep.