Cora dropped the gun and crawled to her father, pressing her ear to his chest. His heartbeat was faint, weakened, but undoubtedly present. “Thank you, God,” Cora cried, pressing down on the cloths Roy had pressed over the bullet wound, ensuring they were secure, and no more blood could escape. He could not afford to lose any more. They needed Dr. Davenport right away.
“Are you going to kill me, Burns?” Alfred asked as Roy kept the gun fixed at point-blank range near his head, his voice shaking. “Why don’t you go ahead and do it? Come on, what’s stopping you?”
Roy’s upper lip curled while his hand remained steady. His finger was on the trigger, but he didn’t pull back on it. Cora could tell he was wrestling with himself—fighting between his primal instincts to eliminate the threat and his spiritual instincts to uphold the values of his faith. Alfred must have seen this internal battle in Roy’s face, too, because he goaded him even more fervently.
“You can’t kill me, can you?” he said, and although his shoulders had dropped and his chest had caved, exposing his cowardice, his voice maintained its villainous taunt. “You may think you’re some tough guy working on a ranch in the big bad town of Wheats Ridge, but just like when we were in school, you’ll always just bea little preacher boy.”
The vein in Roy’s jaw twitched, and Cora was sure that Alfred had pushed Roy over the edge. She pressed her hands hard against her ears and ducked her head, bracing herself for another explosion. But it didn’t come.
“Cora, you need to run,” Cora heard Roy say through her muffled, covered ears firmly. She looked up at him and he nodded that she’d heard him correctly, never taking his eyes off Alfred. “Go get Dr. Davenport and Deputy Lawrence. I’ll hold him here.”
Cora almost wanted to protest, hesitant to leave Roy alone with Alfred, but she knew her father needed medical attention and they needed backup from law enforcement. She grabbed her father’s gun and took one last look at Roy. He was standing over Alfred with authority, his feet planted firmly on the ground and his grip tight around the gun. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Alfred, who was crouched down on his knees at Roy’s feet, trembling like a mean dog trapped in a snowstorm. At the end of the day, Alfred was nothing but a coward.
Cora flung the front door open but paused on the porch. There was no place in her dress, now stained with her father’s blood, to store a gun. She quickly used her hands to dig a hole in the soil of the garden in front of her house and buried the gun there. She did not want to cause alarm running through town holding a gun in the open, nor did she want to risk anyone finding it, as Cora had no way of knowing for sure if one of Alfred’s henchmen would come looking for him.
As soon as the gun was properly hidden and buried, Cora untied Iggy from the wagon and mounted him, steering him toward the quarter of a mile down the road to the street that held both the police department and Dr. Davenport’s clinic.
When she reached the tall, two-story building that housed the police station, jailhouse, and local court on the second floor, she jumped off the horse and ran to the entrance, yanking open the heavy oak doors. She immediately saw Deputy Eddie Lawrence, a thin, blond-haired man about a decade younger than her father, sitting at the desk in the entrance. The place was quiet, and the jail cells lining the back of the room were empty. As far as anyone else in Lakewood was concerned, today had been a normal, quiet day, free of anything out of the ordinary and quiet from criminal activity.
Deputy Lawrence was leaning back in his chair, feet propped up on the desk, reading from a tattered copy of a Jules Verne novel. When he saw Cora, he righted himself in the chair, his eyebrows furrowed, his face etched with concern.
“Cora? What’s the matter? Your father already went home about—”
“He shot him!” Cora cut him off, not wasting any time. “Alfred Mills. You have to come now!”
“Slow down,” Deputy Lawrence said, although he was already on his feet, his hand traveling to the gun in his holster as if he was making sure it was there and ready. “Your father left here about an hour ago. Alfred shot him in that time?”
“He must have already been at our house waiting for him—or waiting for me, he wanted us all dead, me, Pa, and Roy. We got there and found him lying on the floor with a gunshot wound in his chest, up near his right shoulder. He’s alive, but he’s lost a lot of blood, and I’m not sure how much time he has left.” Cora was speaking quickly, realizing that time was of the essence but knowing that the deputy needed all the information. She wasn’t even sure how much she was saying was intelligible, as her words seemed to be strung together in her hysteria. “We tried to help Pa, but Alfred was still in the house. He tried to shoot Roy, but he was able to get his gun and hold him off. They are all at the house now. Please, hurry!”
Deputy Lawrence was already headed toward the door—Cora realized he must have started that way somewhere in the middle of her explanation. “I’m on my way,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Go fetch Dr. Davenport!”
Cora followed the deputy out of the station, watching him jump on the horse and take off flying down the road with the police wagon. Relieved that help was on the way, she took off next in the direction of the doctor.
If he had already closed up shop, Cora knew she would be able to find him at his house just next door, but thankfully, when she approached the clinic, Dr. Davenport was standing just outside the door, locking up.
“You have to come quickly!” she yelled, repeating a shorter version of the account she had given Deputy Lawrence, emphasizing the amount of blood loss. Dr. Davenport’s eyes widened in fear—being a doctor in a sleepy town like Lakewood, Cora knew that he wasn’t accustomed to dealing with gunshot wounds. He was trained to treat them, certainly, having served as a field doctor during the Colorado War of 1864, but in the six years since, his practice had become quiet, as Lakewood was not known for violent crime. Cora was now asking him to walk into a situation where a dangerous man was, she hoped, still being detained.
But after his initial expression of shock, Dr. Davenport immediately jumped into action, reopening the door of his clinic and taking next to no time at all to grab his emergency doctor’s satchel. Cora had already mounted Iggy, and Dr. Davenport jumped on behind her.
Cora nearly burst into tears of relief when, as soon as her house was in sight, she spotted Deputy Lawrence leading Alfred out of the house in handcuffs, shoving him into the police wagon. Alfred’s greasy hair was hanging in front of his face as his head was bent downward. He shook his shoulders back, as if trying to push him off and enter the wagon on his own, perhaps to maintain some semblance of dignity. But in the end, his posture was subdued, his expression ugly, but he was compliant.
Now that Alfred was secured in handcuffs and in police custody, Cora had the urge to scream at him, to give him a piece of her mind, to shame him for his atrocious actions. But she couldn’t focus on her energy on Alfred when her father’s life still hung in the balance.
She climbed off Iggy and ran through the already-open door of her house, Dr. Davenport at her heels. Roy was back by her father’s side, a pile of blood-soaked cloths beside him. He looked up at Cora with an expression of apology and despair.
“It just started up again… I can’t stop it…” he trailed off, holding open his bloodstained hands as if in apology. Cora rushed toward him and pulled him to his feet, throwing her arms around him. It was a complicated feeling—to be so scared for her father’s life while so relieved that Roy was safe, that he had faced down the barrel of a gun and come out alive. She didn’t know how to manage these feelings, so she just held tight to Roy, burying her face in his chest and finally releasing the sobs that she had been holding back through the entire ordeal. Meanwhile, Dr. Davenport tended to Sheriff Williams, who was applying fresh bandages to the wound and applying firm pressure.
“The bleeding is slowing down,” Dr. Davenport said, and Cora sighed with relief into Roy’s chest, who pulled her in tighter. “But the next few hours are going to be critical. Once I’m sure that the bleeding is under control, we’ll move him to his bed. Then I can proceed with sutures.”
Cora released her hold on Roy and kneeled back down beside her father. Roy kneeled behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, and she acknowledged it by reaching behind for it and squeezing it. She wanted to pray, but for the first time that she could remember, she couldn’t find her voice. It was a hopeless feeling, wanting to call out to God but being lost for words. After a moment of silence, Cora heard Roy lift his voice up in prayer.
“Father God, please hear our desperate plea for help in this difficult moment. Please bring Your healing touch to Sheriff Williams, a father and public servant who serves this town with dedication and courage. We know that Your wisdom surpasses our understanding, and we ask that You intervene in this moment. Please bring peace, comfort, and healing to this household.”
“Amen,” Cora whispered, her voice choked with emotion. That was the first time she had ever heard Roy pray out loud.
“I think we can move him to his bed now,” Dr. Davenport said softly. “Roy, would you assist?”
Roy nodded and stood, following the doctor’s instructions. Sliding their hands beneath his shoulders and knees with a secure and supportive grip, Dr. Davenport counted to three, and then they began to lift him slowly and steadily. Careful not to jostle the sheriff and disrupt the wound, the two men carried him toward his bedroom. Cora watched as the muscles in Roy’s arms flexed under the weight of her father, who was still unconscious and unable to shift his weight; she knew the physical strain was hard on Roy’s leg, the one that never healed properly after his horse accident, but he gave no indication of any difficulty, his resolve focused on caring for her father.
