Adam found his work challenging and read far into the night of the new theories in medicine that Doc Wilson kept sending. After a few weeks of burning a lamp late into the midnight hours, people began tapping on the back door. They were the folks who lived in shadows, the drunks, the prostitutes, the beggars. Adam found himself with two practices, one by day, one by night. Though some of the after-dark callers offered to pay in trade, Adam insisted they wait until they could pay him back some other way.
He found himself wishing he could tell Nichole some of their stories. In a way, she was one of them, a creature of the night.
By March of 1866, Adam began to relax and enjoy the challenges of life in Fort Worth. Folks on both sides of the street spoke to him and more books were coming every week for him to study.
Then, on Tuesday, March 22, Nance opened the door and the wind blew in trouble.
“Telegram for you, Doc.” The young man from the new telegraph office ran in all excited to have been allowed to bring the doctor something he was sure must be important.
“Thanks for bringing it by, Harry.” Adam wiped his hands on a towel and opened the note expecting to hear word from Wes or Dan.
The message read: Request debt payment. Shipment arriving by stage. Guard with your life until I can pick up. Wolf.
TEN
NICHOLE SLAMMED HER fist into her brother’s chest with all the fury she could muster. “I’m not going!” she screamed. “You can’t make me!”
“Like hell I can’t, Nick!” Wolf’s voice was so angry it rumbled around the tiny grove like a huge cannon, rattling the air all the way to treetops. “You’ll be on that train tonight if I have to lock you in a trunk and have you shipped to Texas.”
“But you need me.” Nichole paced in front of him, showing no fear of the man twice her width. “I’m the best rider you have. It’s my land, too. You think I can stomach the idea of someone stealing it any better than you. Let me stay and fight with you.”
“Not this time, Nick.” Wolf glanced toward the campfire where two men waited. “Tyler and I have it all planned out. When trouble rolls in, I don’t want to have to be worrying about where you are. For my own peace of mind I have to know you’re safe. You’re all the family I got left, don’t you see, Nick?”
“All right. I won’t ride with you, but let me go somewhere else. Anywhere else.” Adam was probably married by now, and Nichole didn’t know if she could face seeing him with that china doll of a woman. “I could camp out in this grove. No one would ever find me. You know I could stay here for months.”
“This time we ain’t fighting Yanks, we’re fighting folks that know these hills as well as we do.” Wolf hesitated a moment as if he felt sorry for her. “I know being shipped to Texas and the McLains is a dent in your pride, but better that than getting killed. The McLains are the only men I can trust, Nick. We’ve no family, and any friends we had before the war won’t know us now. Except for Tyler and Rafe, all the Shadows have gone home to their own problems. I can’t fight for my land and worry about you. You’re going to Texas.”
Nichole knew it was useless to argue any longer. “All right, but let me go in my own clothes, not in some dress.” Before her parents died, when she’d only been a kid, her mother had never minded her living in her brother’s hand-me-downs. She could barely remember putting on a dress even as a child.
Wolf wasn’t a man who budged easily. “Dressed as a woman is the only way you’ll make it out of the county alive. They’ll be watching every man who leaves. Nick Hayward has a price on his head, but Nichole Hayward is unknown. So put on those duds I bought you.”
Nichole stormed off to the stream using every swear word she’d ever heard. She dressed in the ugly olive green skirt and whiskey-colored jacket Wolf had picked out for her at the mercantile. The skirt was too large in the waist and the jacket an inch too tight across the bodice, but she hardly noticed. Her brother, her only kin, was kicking her out of her state. Her own brother was sending her to the hell of Texas with only a prayer of finding one of the McLains. With her luck, they were all dead, or whiny little Bergette had made them turn around and go back to Indiana.
Since Wolf had helped with the delivery of May and Daniel’s twins, he’d talked as though the McLains were his family and not just some men he’d met once. Nichole had tried to forget Adam, but Wolf hadn’t made it easy. He retold their days in Indiana as though it had been his only trip to the normal world in this lifetime. He bragged about Adam being a great doctor and Wes being one of the only Yankees who knew how to fight.
When she tried to step back in the clearing without falling over her hem, the men froze. Tyler, who’d ridden with her for three years, stood as though a lady had just entered a room. He dusted himself off and smoothed back his curly black hair.
“Nick?” He tilted his head slightly as if he didn’t believe his eyes. “Is that you?” His normally emotionless face was twisted with confusion.
“Say a word and I’ll gut you like a pig.” Nichole stared at him in challenge.
Tyler lowered his eyes, slowly-far too slowly for Nichole’s way of thinking.
“I… I never thought… I-”
“Well, you can stop thinking whatever it is you’re thinking right now as far as I’m concerned. I’m still Nick, nothing more.” She’d called Tyler a lot of names over the years, but fool had never been one of them. It came to mind now.
The boy Rafe, not yet out of his teens, slapped Tyler on the shoulder. “She’s more, ain’t she, Tyler? She’s a whole lot more.”
“Shut up,” Tyler mumbled.
Nichole couldn’t stop looking at the way Tyler’s eyes had changed. He stared at her so hard it looked as if the firelight was coming from him and not reflecting off the campfire. Suddenly, she knew what he was thinking as truly as if he’d spoken the words out loud.
“Stop it!” she shouted placing her fists on her hips. The effort only tightened the material across her bust-line. Nichole greatly missed her bindings and she could see she wasn’t the only one who noticed them missing.
“Stop what?” Tyler raised his hands in surrender but couldn’t seem to get the smile off his face.
“Stop thinking of me as a woman. I’m Nick. Nick! The same person who’s been with you for three years. I’ve bailed you out of more than one scrape and saved your ass more times than I can count. I’m one of you. I’m a Shadow, just like you.” How could he think less of her by thinking her a woman?
Tyler looked guilty. “I know.” He swallowed hard making his Adam’s apple bob up and down. “I’ve ridden with you and trusted you with my life. But I never thought you’d look the way you do in a dress.”
“She sure don’t look like one of us.” Rafe giggled. “One Shadow has a few more curves.” Rafe moved his hands over his own chest showing how hers rounded out.
Both Tyler and Wolf’s fists swung toward the boy. In dodging, he stumbled backward, almost landing in the fire. The warmth sobered him.
Nick reached for her Colt, but the weapon wasn’t at her hip. She wanted to shoot all three of them. Rafe thought she was a freak in a sideshow, Tyler couldn’t stop staring at her like she was fresh-made apple pie, and Wolf was so overprotective he would smother her completely at any moment.
Grabbing the carpetbag Wolf had bought, Nick shoved her normal clothes inside, then lifted her Colt from the branch where she’d hung it. If this was anything like the reaction of the rest of the world, she’d rather stay here and be shot. Since Wolf wouldn’t allow that, she figured she’d need the fine new Colt he’d bought her last year. She didn’t know if she could stomach every man from here to Texas acting like his brains had been drained.