Night Shift(48)

“You had a gunfight,” Olivia had said, her eyes wide. “Like the OK Corral!”

“Those damn Earps,” Lemuel said, shaking his head. “One as bad as another. No, ma’am. I was a good shot, but no gunslinger. I got wounded in the crossfire between Donald Lee Coe and the marshal, Harvey Burns. The town was quite a bit south of here. It was the closest town to our ranch, and it was called Baileyville.”

“Wounded where?” Olivia had a professional interest in wounds.

He pointed to his left side. “Took out a hunk of meat,” he said. “But it was the infection that got me. After a day, I was nigh unto death.”

“Your first death. Who caused your second?”

“My wife, Mabel.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I would never make this up, Olivia.”

“How did she—? How had she changed, herself?”

“While I was lying in town in the back room of the saloon, bleeding all over a table, Mabel had a visitor at the ranch. He’d come from town to tell her about my mishap, you see, and as soon as he told her he had news of me, why of course she invited him in.”

“And he was the same kind of vampire as you are?”

“Yes. Blood or energy. Like a hybrid car,” Lemuel said. It was his favorite joke since he’d learned that such cars existed. “So he bit my wife, and bid her bring me the favor of life, as he put it. She was knocked sideways by the whole experience, since she had never heard a story about such a thing, and it was outside her Christian thinking and her education.”

“I understand,” Olivia said.

“But she felt that God had planned this rescue for me and she must be the one to deliver it, as the Indian had bade her. So into town she comes at night, though she had to wait for the three days to rise again, and then she had to kill the ranch hand to get her some strength. By which time I was as good as dead.”

“And then?”

“And then she told the ‘doctor,’ who was really a quack who pulled teeth and suchlike and had this awful patent medicine that was nothing but alcohol and worse things, to get out of the room, that she wanted to tell me farewell in privacy. Since there was nothing more he could do for me—and he’d already done plenty in the way of drugging me—he left. Mabel had had the foresight to pay for a round of drinks, so we were left alone for quite a time. She related to me what the Indian had done to her. I could scarcely understand it, what with the drugs and the illness and the pain, but I agreed to her proposition. Though it was mighty painful, it wasn’t that much more painful than the gunshot and the infection, and it was over quicker.”

“And then?” Olivia was so wide-eyed she’d looked like an owl.

“And then, she went out into the saloon and told them all that I had died, which was no surprise to anyone. And she told them she would take me back to the ranch to be buried, which was also no surprise, since many people did that. They helped her out by tying me over her horse. The horse, though mighty skittish, got us back to the ranch that night.”

“People didn’t think it was strange she wanted to ride at night?”

“She told them that in the daytime, with the sun, I would be bloated by the time we reached our place.”

Olivia nodded. “So, when you got back to the ranch . . . ?”

“She buried me, as she had to. There was no ranch hand to help her! And when I came out of the ground she was waiting. One of the men in the bar had ridden out to see how she was faring, and perhaps to see if he could console a grieving widow. She had kept him alive for me.”

“But what happened to Mabel after that? What did you do during the Civil War?” Olivia asked.

“Enough history for tonight,” Lemuel replied.

She wondered if she’d been insensitive, asking questions about events so long past. “Does it hurt to remember?”

He thought about that. “Not exactly. But it’s not comfortable, either. And I don’t always remember clearly.” He shrugged. “It’s been a long time.”

Now, as Lemuel pored over books, he was grateful to Mr. Middleton for teaching him to read. Even Mr. Middleton could not have imagined that the man he’d known as Bart Polson would be able to read an ancient language. In truth, Lemuel’s progress was tedious and slow. He was always aware that time was ticking away at the crossroads. He felt it, like a heavy hand on his shoulder, resting heavier and heavier as the nights passed.

Slowly, he translated a sentence out loud. “And when he rises, he will have help by powerful creatures, because he can talk to them while he is still confined. To others, he is silent.” Lemuel thought that over. It seemed ominous, and he began to worry even more whether Midnight could survive the crisis that was surely coming. He bent back over the book, hoping to find another passage that would explain this cryptic sentence, which was in the middle of a paragraph he couldn’t crack.