“Pa?” He couldn’t believe his eyes. Had he died after all?
“I’m here, Lloyd. Your mother is here too. We’ll get you through this.”
“Pa?” the boy repeated. “How did…you…find me?”
“That doesn’t matter right now. The point is we’re here.”
Lloyd noticed his father was bleeding. He knew Latimer had a lot of men. How had Jake gotten through them? “Latimer…” he muttered.
“Latimer’s dead. So are the rest of them.”
Lloyd’s eyes teared. As much as he must have hurt the man, thought he hated him, here he was. He must have risked his life to get here, his mother too! “I’m…sorry, Pa,” he whispered, too weak to find his full voice.
“Don’t be sorry, son. There’s no sense in anybody being sorry anymore.”
Lloyd’s body jerked in a sob. “Hurts…everything…hurts.”
“I know. I’ve felt the pain.” Jake sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, facing the boy. He leaned over and drew him up so that Lloyd’s head rested against his chest. Lloyd grabbed at one of his father’s arms, breaking into deep sobbing.
“Pa,” he repeated. “Don’t let go.”
“I’ll never let go, son. You’re not alone, Lloyd. You’ve never been alone, even when we were apart.”
Thirty-four
Miranda was not sure from where she drew the strength to bear the emotional drain the next several days presented to her. She had to remove two bullets from her own screaming son while Jake held him down. She was soon out of laudanum, and Jake had refused to let Lloyd drink any whiskey for the pain.
“He’s got to get off the stuff,” Jake had insisted. “I don’t care what he has to suffer to do it.”
She knew it was tearing Jake apart. Lloyd begged for a drink, suffered terrible fits of tremors and periods of hallucination, screaming that snakes were crawling on him. He shouted obscenities at his father, calling him every horrible name he could think of, including murderer and rapist and bastard. Jake refused to buckle, but Miranda knew the words gouged deep into his soul, in spite of the fact that he knew they were spoken only because of Lloyd’s desperate need for whiskey. Along with a cleansing of Lloyd’s body of the need for whiskey, there also seemed to be a cleansing of the soul for both Lloyd and Jake.
It was four days before all three of them enjoyed a solid night’s sleep. Charlie had buried Hank Downing the day of the shooting, and over the last few days more men from Hole-in-the-Wall had shown up out of curiosity, having heard that Jake Harkner had gone after Jube Latimer. They helped Charlie bury Latimer and his men, and Miranda did not doubt that word of what had happened here would be on the lips of men in these parts for a long time to come.
On their fifth morning at the ranch, Miranda awoke and stretched to realize it must be later than she usually awakened. She was surprised she had slept so well. Jake and Charlie had brought in cots from the bunkhouse for her and Jake to sleep on in the main room of the house so that they could be close to Lloyd. Jake had not really slept much since finding his son, had spent most of the last three days and nights watching over Lloyd. Often Miranda would wake up in the night to catch him smoking in the dark. She knew the worry over Lloyd that kept him awake was only enhanced by the painful back wound from the pitchfork that had left a deep cut across his shoulders, so that every arm movement was agony.
At last, this morning, Jake still slept. She looked over at him, hoping it would not be long before they could all just go home. Jake was only now beginning to return to the gentle, loving Jake who did not have that awful look in his eyes. It had taken the man time to control the rage he had felt over what had happened to his son, to calm the fierce temper that had given him the edge he needed to take on Latimer and his men. Right now he looked more peaceful than she had seen him look in years. She wanted to touch him, hold him, but she did not want to wake him. God knew he needed the sleep.
She rose quietly and went to check on Lloyd, surprised to find him wide awake and looking out the window. He turned to meet her eyes, and she saw in that moment her real son, the one she had known before Jake was arrested. He looked better today, and she realized he had actually slept all night for the first time since they’d found him, without waking up and yelling for a drink. He smiled with a hint of sadness. “Hi, Ma.”
Miranda moved closer, sitting down on the edge of the bed. “How do you feel?”
He sighed. “Weak. But the pain isn’t so bad anymore.” He looked her over. “I can’t believe you and Pa came here looking for me. You especially. You could have been killed, or something worse.”