Wildflower Harvest: Includes Bonus Story of Desert Rose Read online

  Yet across the grassy plains, beyond the distant mountains, the unseen hamlet of Antelope in all its wildness had already staked a claim in his heart.

  I will probably be the only doctor for hundreds of miles, he admitted. How can I care for patients in such circumstances? He had prayed that his skills might be used. If all he expected came to pass, God’s answer to his prayer could be overwhelming!

  Even while Adam glued his gaze to outside the window, his mind and heart remembered Red Cedars. There was Ivy Ann, shallow but charming. Did a sound, true heart beat underneath all the frills? He closed his eyes and a rosy vision danced before him. A man could find excitement enough for a lifetime if he could get beyond the Southern belle pose and reach Ivy’s heart.

  An involuntary smile crossed his face at the thought of Laurel. At first he had found her a quieter version of Ivy Ann. Adam shook his head. Laurel’s passionate outbursts about leaving all to cleave unto her mate had turned her glowing dark eyes to almost black. A lot of banked fire burned within the sometimes-overlooked twin. What if Thomas and Sadie answered the call of the West? Thomas’s excitement when they discussed it betrayed an untamed, pioneer spirit. What an asset that family would be to Antelope!

  Adam awoke to a gradual slowing of the train as it climbed. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he looked straight out at snowcapped peaks he wouldn’t have believed existed outside of an artist’s rendering. Amazingly, even though the train steadily chugged on for hours, the peaks came no closer!

  A grizzled man with well-worn boots and an over-sized hat laughed at Adam’s astonishment. “Son, out here the air is so clear things look a powerful lot closer. Are you aimin’ to stay?”

  “Yes, at least for a while.” Adam threw a sop to his conscience.

  Shrewd eyes measured the young doctor. “Let me give you a word of advice. Never hop on a cayuse and head out toward the mountains—or anywhere—without findin’ out from someone who knows how far you have to go.”

  “Thanks.” Adam felt humbled before this man’s direct concern and friendliness.

  “How come an easterner like you is in the Wyomin’ Territory?”

  “Why, my brother is here. I’m a doctor and he asked me to come.”

  “A doctor?” The rancher clapped Adam on the shoulder so hard the younger man nearly fell out of his seat. “That’s a whole bushel of good news. Where you aimin’ to settle?”

  “In Antelope.” Adam regained some of his composure. “My brother’s building a church there and—”

  “Jumpin’ grasshoppers, if you ain’t Nat Birchfield’s brother!” The welcoming grin accompanied another backslap but this time Adam braced himself. He could feel his blood pound in his head.

  “You know Nat?” he asked eagerly.

  “Half of Wyomin’ Territory knows him and admires what he’s doin’ to help make Antelope a place for decent folks to live and raise their families.” His unqualified approval warmed Adam to the tips of his travel-stained shoes.

  “My name’s Hardwick.” He thrust out a weather-beaten hand in the kind of grip Adam expected from such a man. “I own the Lazy H spread a few miles out of Antelope. Run quite a few cattle and horses.”

  What luck! Adam leaned forward and his dark eyes flashed. “I don’t mean to pry but how many is ‘quite a few?’”

  Hardwick grinned again. “Consider’ble more than last year, maybe less than next year.” He laughed outright at Adam’s raised eyebrow and relented. “We drove a bunch of cattle rustlers out of the country about a year ago, so the Lazy H and other ranches are prosperin’.” His eyebrows pulled together and the corners of his mouth turned down. “Who knows what kinda varmints will come creepin’ back? Or if the good Lord will choose this year for a ripsnorter of a winter that freezes critters where they stand? Then there’s the little matter of hail and drought, flood, and fire from lightnin’.” He jerked his big hat down over his eyes and mumbled, “Man’s a fool to try and beat this crazy country.”

  “But you wouldn’t live anywhere else.” Adam’s newly gained wisdom prompted the comment.

  Hardwick shoved his hat to the back of his grizzled head. Adam caught the same approval in his eyes that had been there when they discussed Nat. “Reckon you’re goin’ to be all right out here.” For the second time he pulled his hat forward. A few minutes later snores rumbled in time with the train wheels.

  There was no sleep for Adam. Hardwick had given him—a tenderfoot—the highest possible compliment. Too bad Ivy Ann Brown couldn’t hear Hardwick. What had he said about Nat? Oh yes, that half the Territory knew and admired him for helping to make Antelope a place for decent folks.

  “Dear God, what if I hadn’t come?” Adam barely whispered. Hardwick might be sound asleep but a rancher who lived on guard against two- and four-legged varmints would certainly be a light sleeper.

  “Good thing I run onto you, like I did.” Hardwick drawled the next day. “It’s a lot of rugged miles between Rock Springs and Antelope.” He eyed Adam’s strong body. “Can you ride?”

  “If you’d asked me that six months ago, I’d have said no.” The young doctor laughed. “I can now, though. I’ve been in West Virginia where they have some great horses.”

  “No better than our cowponies, I’ll wager.” Hardwick jealously defended his own. “They might be faster but, by jingo, a man needs a horse that’s half human and can get him out of trouble when the shootin’ begins.”

  “Is there a lot of shooting?” Adam tensed.

  “Tolerable amount. Not so much since your brother came.”

  The last miles of the long journey raced as Adam continued to learn from the rancher. “I won’t be totally ignorant when I get to Antelope,” he confided in his new friend, “thanks to you. By the way, why do you call your ranch the Lazy H? I can figure out it’s H for Hardwick but I wouldn’t think you’d have time for laziness.”

  His companion’s shout of laughter drew the interested attention of everyone in the car. “You’re right about that, son.” Hardwick’s eyes twinkled. “It’s just a name. See this?” He drew in the dust that had collected on the windowsill. “We have to brand our cattle and the lazy part just means the H is layin’ down on its side. See?” He pointed at his lazy “H”.

  Adam solemnly regarded the little figure. He sighed. “I have a lot more to learn, I guess.”

  Hardwick sobered. “Adam, any man who’s willin’ to admit he don’t know it all is a jump ahead of the game. Just do your doctorin’, keep your ears and eyes open and your mouth closed, and you’ll do fine.”

  “Say, do you have a gal back East?”

  Adam couldn’t keep from squirming. “Well, not really. I mean, I met a girl, that is, two girls this summer.”

  “They ain’t keen on the West?”

  Adam felt Hardwick could see right through him. “One sure isn’t.” He shifted position again.

  “And the other?”

  Adam felt his lips curve up into a smile. “If she weren’t a well brought up young woman, I think she’d—” He broke off and stared out the window across the aisle over Hardwick’s shoulder. “Look!”

  Hardwick whipped around and unconsciously grabbed for the Colt sixshooters he had earlier showed Adam. With a motion so fast the fascinated doctor could scarcely follow it, the guns were out of their holsters and into his hands. Hardwick’s gaze never left the band of Indians on horseback that stood statue-like watching the train.

  “Are—are they friendly?”

  Hardwick muttered something under his breath and slowly sheathed the six-shooters as the color came back to his face. “Friendly? No. Peacable? Maybe.”

  “Do they bother your ranch?”

  Hardwick shrugged. “Now and then a steer’s missin’ and all we find is the hooves. Can’t say if it’s hungry braves or someone else.” His lips tightened into a grim line.

  “Do you—I mean, it’s hard back East to get any kind of picture of what the situation out here really is.” Adam waited, sensing m
ore beneath Hardwick’s actions than stolen steers.

  For a long time the rancher didn’t answer. “There’s right and wrong on both sides. I saw what was left of a wagon train after the Indians hit it. Then I saw an Indian camp after a cavalry raid.” He turned toward Adam, his eyes molten steel. “I don’t ever want to see either again and neither do you.” He cleared his throat. “You’ll ride along with me from Rock Springs to Antelope.”

  Adam knew the subject had been closed, permanently.

  Nothing Adam had seen so far compared with the ride from Rock Springs where they got off the train up through western Wyoming Territory to Antelope. Those hundred miles offered Adam a hundred new experiences and every emotion known to humankind. Humbled, Adam numbly followed in his guide’s tracks.

  The sheer beauty of autumn in the Wind River Range made Adam speechless: cliffs with narrow trails that clung to their rock sides and broke off sheer into gorges far below that thundered warning in white water; peaks he could only see by craning his neck, especially Wind River Peak, over thirteen thousand feet high, that dwarfed all else, yet Hardwick said Wyoming Territory had other peaks even higher! How magnificent was God’s creation, Adam realized fully for the first time.

  Adam lost count of the times they had to ford creeks, streams, and young rivers that roared their way downward. He learned to hold on stonily and let his horse do the work. Now he knew what Hardwick meant when he had observed that this country called for half-human horses to keep riders out of trouble. The beautiful filly the Browns had graciously let him use might do well in her own environment but out here she’d prove useless.

  Yet the danger, fear, and restless anticipation of what might come next couldn’t dampen Adam’s spirits. Never had he appreciated food as he did now. Even his mother’s cooking paled before the hearty fare served on tin plates after being cooked over the open campfires. The rancher never praised Adam for starting campfires but Adam saw growing friendship and respect to match his own and treasured this rare opportunity.

  Sleeping on pine needles with nothing between him and a million blazing stars brought rest beyond belief. Not even in medical school where he had cherished sleep had Adam slept so well as on the ground with smoky blankets to keep off the frost that formed every morning.

  They heard Antelope before they saw it. Tinny piano music and the yells of cowhands and miners in town for Saturday night reached Hardwick and Adam when they dropped down the last fairly steep incline from the forest to a fairly level area below. “Antelope at its noisiest and worst,” Hardwick warned. Only the thought that Nat had a long way to go to provide a better place for families dampened Adam’s raging enthusiasm.

  They swung around a bend. Antelope lay ahead a few hundred yards. Etched into Adam’s brain were a few neat, peeling log cabins flanked by hastily thrown together buildings. Dirty tents were on one side and saloons bordered each end of town, the Pronghorn and the Silver. Adam shuddered, yet he only had to lift his eyes to the hills: Like wasted tea leaves that lay in the bottom of an exquisite teacup, such was the contrast between Satan’s meddling and God’s handiwork. No wonder Nat pleaded for help, Adam thought.

  Adam squared his shoulders and silently rode forward. On closer inspection he saw a blacksmith shop, a dressmaker’s business, and a sprawling building that Hardwick explained held everything from food and clothes to trapping equipment. The main street, if such a dusty thoroughfare could so be called, looked three times wider than any street in Massachusetts and held horses and riders, a lone buckboard, and half a hundred shouting men.

  “What’s happening?” Adam raised in his stirrups to see better.

  The yelling stopped and the roughly dressed men spilled to each side of the street.

  “We’d better go back and head for your brother’s,” Hardwick suggested, as he neck-reined his horse to the right.

  The sound of a shot—and a cry from the crowd—stopped Adam from following. What impulse led him to spur his horse on down the street he could not explain. A man loomed in the dust, his feet apart and steady. He still held a Colt in his right hand. Another man lay face down in the road, his fingers still clutching his six-shooter. Although Adam saw a ray of sun glint from the silver star on the erect man’s chest, he ignored it and flung himself down beside the fallen cowboy. “Bring a light,” he ordered in the same way that kept his assistants in surgery hopping.

  “Here, who are you?” the sheriff bellowed. He strode to Adam, gripped his shoulder, and rocked him back on his heels.

  With a mighty effort, Adam threw off the restraining hand. “Get me a light,” he repeated, his voice razor-sharp, as he slipped his hand under the wounded man’s body. “Good. Bullet went clean through. He’s alive but needs surgery. Where’s that light?”

  “Right here.” Hardwick shouldered the sheriff aside and held out a lighted lantern he’d evidently snatched from someone.

  “I want to know who you are and what business this is of yours,” the sheriff demanded at the top of his lungs.

  Adam glanced up only long enough to see a slow smile spread across Hardwick’s face. In the dusk outside the circle of lantern light, Hardwick cleared his throat.

  “Folks, meet Adam Birchfield, brother of Nat and our new doctor.”

  Adam ignored the silence followed by a cheer. “I want three strong men—Hardwick, Sheriff, and you.” He pointed to a burly man standing nearby. “Where can I take this man to treat him?”

  No one answered or moved.

  “Confound you all, if I don’t get him sutured he’s going to die.” Adam faced the crowd. “Take him to Nat’s.”

  “The range is better off without Mark Justice,” the sheriff grumbled, but he subsided when Adam threw him a fiery glance of scorn.

  Each holding a leg or arm, the quartet carried the young cowboy who didn’t look over twenty away from the main street to a new-looking peeled log cabin. Too concerned over his first patient in this violent land to pay attention to anyone else, Adam vaguely heard Hardwick say, “Preacher must not be home. No light.”

  “Then make one,” Adam ordered when they got inside and had laid the cowboy on a bright, blanket-covered bed. “This boy’s lost a lot of blood.” A half-hour later, Adam turned from his task. Not a word had been spoken while he cleansed, stitched, and bandaged the gaping hole.

  “I oughta take him to jail,” the sheriff blustered, but a reluctant smile erased some of his truculence. “Guess it ain’t necessary. You’ll be responsible for him, Doc?”

  “Of course. What did he do, anyway?” Adam’s voice struggled to sound matter of fact.

  “Got drunk, lost at cards, shot up the Pronghorn, and pulled his gun on me when I tried to arrest him. I had no choice but to shoot—”

  “What are you doing in my cabin?” An icy voice asked. Adam pushed through the others toward the door. “Nat, I’m here!”

  “Adam?” Strong arms caught him and that single moment of reunion with his beloved brother more than made up for everything that had gone before.

  Chapter 5

  Dr. Adam Birchfield’s first month in Antelope brought more and different kinds of cases than he had seen during his entire Concord practice. “Did they all save things up until I got here?” he demanded of Nat one evening after wearily finishing up with his last patient.

  Nat lifted black eyebrows so like Adam’s. His younger brother noted with satisfaction that Nat looked years younger than the fateful night he burst into his cabin to discover it had been turned into a temporary surgery. “Now how could Mrs. Fenner have saved up falling out of a tree until you came?” he teased.

  “With no doctor in town, she probably was scared to climb the tree until I got here.” Adam stretched his muscles and rejoiced in his newfound strength, the result of riding out to folks who couldn’t come in for his help. “And Mrs. Trevor obviously wasn’t due to have Junior earlier.” He yawned. “Seriously, Nat, what did people do here with no medical help? I know you did what you could….”

&
nbsp; “But patching up heads after fights isn’t operating on Mrs. Hardwick and having her appendix burst just after you removed it.”

  Adam shuddered. That particular situation had been a nightmare. Bound by friendship to the first person in Antelope who had welcomed him, it had taken intense prayer, a steady hand, and all his concentration and skill to save Mrs. Hardwick. “A few minutes more and it would have burst inside her and shot poison through her system. Little chance of saving her if that happened. Thank God it didn’t.”

  Nat rose, ruffled his brother’s hair the way he did when they were small, and gruffly said, “Your being here means everything on earth to me.” He cleared his throat and Adam saw the convulsive motion when he swallowed. “I know it’s way too early for you to make any kind of permanent decision, but I’d be the happiest person alive if you decided to stay.”

  Before Adam could answer he swung out the door of the extra room that willing hands had built for “the new Doc.” Long and low, partitions divided it into a small waiting area, a work area, and a tiny bedroom with a bunk for Adam. The smell of freshly peeled logs bore witness to the friendship and appreciation of the rugged families served by both Adam and Nat. Although the saloonkeepers and gamblers never came to the small church, they had been generous with money and labor in adding on to the preacher’s cabin.

  “I wonder what Miss Ivy Ann Brown would think of my new home,” Adam said to himself as he headed for his bedroom to wash up before supper. “Or Laurel. They couldn’t fault the town’s friendliness. It matches what I received from them.”

  The thought recurred an hour later. Nat sat preparing his next sermon, deep in thought and Scripture. Adam idly flipped through an old medical journal. Suddenly he said, “I’ll do it.”