“I’ll Pay You Back When I Grow Up,” Girl Told Mountain Man — 15 Years Later, He Remembered
Chapter 6
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Silence fell over the clearing. It was profound and heavy, broken only by the whistling of the wind through the pines.Inside the cabin, Gideon sat in his armchair. His vision was swimming. His right arm was swollen to twice its size, the skin hot and angry, streaks of dark red creeping up his neck. He was burning up with fever, hallucinating wolves and dead men.But that voice... it cut through the haze of the gangrene. It was sharp, demanding, and utterly fearless.He leaned forward, groaning as the agony ripped through his shoulder. He reached out with his left hand, grabbing the heavy wooden bar resting across the doorframe. He pulled it up. The effort nearly made him black out. The bar hit the floor with a heavy thud.The door pushed open.Clara stepped into the dim, foul-smelling cabin. It smelled of stale sweat, copper, and dying flesh. She saw him sitting in the chair, a rifle sliding off his lap onto the floorboards. His hair was streaked with gray, matted with sweat. His face was gaunt, his eyes sunken and glassy with fever.But the structure of his face—the hard jaw, the deep-set eyes—was exactly as it had been.He looked at her. He saw a woman in a tailored coat holding a leather medical bag. But in the set of her jaw, in those dark, unyielding eyes, he saw the freezing child from the wagon."Clara," he breathed. A dry, humorless chuckle escaped his cracked lips. "Your boots dry?""Yes, Mr. Hayes," she said, her voice softening just a fraction as she dropped to her knees beside his chair and snapped her medical bag open. "My boots are dry. Now shut up and let me work."The smell of necrotic tissue was something Clara had learned to endure in the damp, crowded charity wards of St. Louis, but in the close, overheated confines of the mountain cabin, it was suffocating.She stripped off her heavy wool coat, tossing it over a crude wooden chair, and rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse. She didn't hesitate; she didn't ask for permission. She took her leather medical bag to the scarred dining table and began laying out her instruments on a clean cloth: a scalpel, forceps, a dark amber bottle of carbolic acid, a heavy roll of clean cotton bandages, a curved suture needle.She walked back to Gideon. He was watching her through half-lidded eyes, his breathing shallow and rapid, his chest rising in jerky, uneven spasms. She pulled a small, sharp knife from her bag and slit the bloody, stiff fabric of his shirt, peeling it back from his right shoulder.