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“You hurt yourself.”

“Not badly.”

Nate made an exasperated sound. “I will determine that.”

Bass came back into the doorway. He had lost his hat somewhere and had a split seam in his coat. “Whit has Crowley under guard. The commotion out front was a diversion. Someone broke the window and ran. Tater fired after him, but he got clear.”

“So they meant to draw you outside,” Eden said.

Bass nodded. His gaze dropped to her torn sleeve. “He touched you?”

“He caught my arm. I’m not seriously hurt.”

Bass’s expression darkened. Eden was beginning to understand how much trouble one man could cause with a silent face.

“Crowley called me Miss Whitcomb,” she said.

Bass and Nate exchanged a glance.

“How does he know your name?” Bass asked.

“I don’t know.” She thought of the telegram brought to the mercantile, the stranger who had spoken to Papa near the mill road in Missouri, and the question she’d sent home. “People know I’ve come from Willow Bend. He could have heard it here.”

“Or someone told him,” Bass said.

Jesse was watching her. “That man in Missouri?”

“I can’t say it was Crowley. I never saw his face clearly.”

“Then don’t decide it was,” Bass said. “Whit will ask him.”

Eden appreciated that. Suspicion was not proof, no matter how frightening the pieces had become.

Outside, a wagon rattled past the clinic, wheels hissing through mud. Ordinary life was already trying to resume. Eden wondered how anyone managed it after a man walked into a room with a knife.

Bass paused beside Jesse’s bed. “You gave us the warning we needed. Again.”

Jesse glanced at the broken cup on the floor. “Wasn’t much of a warning.”

“I heard you clear through the front room.” Bass’s expression softened. “Whit heard you name him. That’s more than we had before.”

Jesse nodded once, accepting it without argument. That alone told Eden how spent he was.

“I’ll see what Crowley says,” Bass told them. “Whit won’t let him slip away.”

He left with Nate, who intended to find a clean basin and examine the broken window. For the first time since the attack, the room was quiet.

Eden righted the chair and sat beside Jesse, careful of her bruised wrist.

He held his left hand out to her.

She took it.

His fingers closed gently around hers. “You stayed.”

“Where would I have gone?”

“Out the front. Away from him. Away from all this.”