“Where is Lena?” she asked. “She is the healer, is she not?”
“Come. I will show you.”
Carly turned to Ramon. “You had better not come back with the others. It won’t help anyone if you get sick, too.”
He smiled that devastating smile that made her heartbeat quicken. “I have also had the measles,chica.I will get what supplies we can spare and return.”
Carly just stared at him. What kind of an outlaw would help a bunch of sick Indians? No matter how she tried, she couldn’t seem to understand him. Wordlessly, she turned away, following the stoop-shouldered old Indian into one of the dome-shaped huts.
A few feet inside the low round door, a slender woman knelt on the woven reed carpet, dabbing some sort of paste on the stomach of a fussy child. Baskets of seeds, roots, and dried fish sat in one corner, and deer and bearskin blankets formed several more pallets on the floor.
“Lena?” Carly asked, and the slender woman turned. Her features were fine, her brows sleek and arching, her cheekbones well defined. Dark smudges of exhaustion formed hollows beneath her eyes.
“You are the Spaniard’s woman from the camp,” she said.
“I’m the woman you helped when I was sick,” Carly corrected, ignoring an odd rush of heat. “I hope in return that I can help you. Tell me what I can do.”
For the next several hours, she worked beside Lena caring for the people of the village. She spooned in life-giving liquids to fight the dehydration and used the icy water from the stream, the last of the snowpack melting in the mountains, to bathe their faces and fight the raging fevers. They suffered a dry, racking cough and a burning rash that began at the hairline and neck and spread down over their bodies.
Lena brewed a tea of dried boxwood root for the fever and Carly held wooden bowls of the bitter brew to their lips. She helped Lena boil dried cloverleaves into a thick, sticky syrup for their coughs and made an ointment of three-leafed nightshade and lard to spread over the rash.
Ramon returned with blankets and food, with Pedro Sanchez and three of the women: Tomasina Gutierrez, the blacksmith’s wife; Ramon’s housekeeper, Florentia; and a busty, robust woman named Serafina Gomez. All of them worked tirelessly.
And so did Don Ramon.
They labored late into the evening, the women tending the sick, the men helping with the heavy tasks of lifting the patients, chopping wood, fueling fires, and tending the horses. Earlier in the day, they’d made forays into the woods to hunt for game, rabbits mostly, which were dressed and thrown into large iron cooking pots, along with wild onions and herbs.
Sometime during the hours after midnight, Ramon appeared in one of the huts beside her.
“You have done enough for today,” he said. “You will rest now. Come with me.” He caught her arm, but she pulled away and knelt once more beside the boy stretched out on the woven reed mat. He looked no more than thirteen, a gangly youth who smiled in spite of his illness.
“I can’t leave yet. Lena’s brother, Shaw-shuck, Two Hawks, he needs this tea to bring down his fever. He’s burning up. He—”
Ramon took the wooden bowl from her weary, trembling hands. “I will see to the boy.” Setting the bowl aside, he pulled her to her feet. “You need to rest… at least for a while.”
“But—”
“I promise to see that the boy gets the tea.” Drawing her out through the small, low opening of the hut, the don steadied her as she swayed against him, her legs a little shaky from kneeling for so long. He swore softly, fluently, then lifted her into his arms and started walking toward the rear of the village.
“I-I’m all right now, really I am. You can put me down.”
“Hush. Do as I say and put your arms around my neck. I should not have let you stay. You are barely recovered from your own bout of sickness.”
“I’m just tired, is all. Florentia and the others, they’re just as tired as I am.” But she did as he said, clinging to his neck to steady herself as he strode determinedly along. She tried not to notice the thick bands of muscle brushing against her breasts or the sinews in his neck that tightened at the touch of her hand.
He stopped at the edge of the woods and knelt beneath a secluded pine tree, its boughs a canopy of green above them. A few feet away, a small fire flickered in the quiet darkness, and under the tree, a bedroll had been unfurled. The don carefully placed her atop it.
“You must sleep for a while. You will be no use to anyone if you become ill.”
“What about the others?”
“Pedro will see they have a place to rest.”
“What about you? You’ve been working all day, too. Surely you’re just as tired as I am.”
He smiled, a flash of white reflected in the light of the fire. “As I said before, I am a man. It is different for me.”
Maybe it was, but she didn’t believe it. He was stronger, perhaps more determined. Whatever the case, as the moments ticked past and she lay on the bedroll, her eyelids grew heavy and she no longer cared. Soon she fell asleep but during the night she grew fitful, tossing and turning, dreaming of her mother and the ravaging, ugly death from the cholera she had battled in the mine patch. Then something warm curled around her, something solid and strong that laid her memories to rest, and finally she slept soundly.
