Chapter 4: Stitches

"Get dressed," Nels said.

He turned his back on the ladder and walked out of the lamplight.

Dutch looked down at me with his big face gone pink to the ears.

"I'll talk to him," he said.

"You'll do no such thing," I said.

I pulled the quilt around myself and climbed down the ladder behind him with my legs not quite steady.

Nels was waiting at the barn door with the rifle propped against the frame and a coil of baling twine in his fist.

"Thought a bear had got in," he said, not looking at either of us.

"Heard a woman screaming."

"That was me," I said.

"I figured."

"Did you want something, Nels?" Dutch said.

"Yes. I want you to go to bed."

Dutch hesitated.

He looked at me, and I nodded, and he went out into the rain with his shoulders hunched.

Nels finally looked at me.

His eyes were dark and flat and missed nothing.

"You're bleeding," he said.

I looked down.

There was a long cut across my right palm from the gravel bar, black with creek dirt.

A thin line of red had run down my wrist and onto the quilt.

I hadn't felt it at all.

"Tack room," Nels said.

"I've got a kit."

It was a narrow room off the barn aisle, hung with saddles and bridles and smelling of leather and neatsfoot oil.

A single bulb burned over a workbench.

He sat me on a feed bin under it and set a white tin first-aid box beside me.

"Give me the hand."

I gave it to him.

He turned my palm up under the light and washed it with a bottle of saline and a clean rag, quick and impersonal.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Flood Stranded Me With Three Ranch Men, So I Kept All Three from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.