Page 43 of The Promise of Jenny Jones

Ty made a pillow out of the saddlebags, then covered Jenny with her shawl when she curled down on the seat. Kneeling beside her, he studied her flushed face, hoping she wasn’t feverish. “Is the bandage too tight?”

“Feels like a corset.”

“Do you want more tequila?” He smoothed a length of sweat-damp hair back from her forehead. “We have more tortillas if you’re hungry.” She shook her head. “All right, get some rest. Sleep is the best healer.”

He eased back on the seat beside Graciela and lit another cigar to occupy his hands.

Outside, the light was starting to shade toward evening.

Long shadows pointed away from the cacti, which were taller now than those growing deeper in the wastelands.

If he’d been on horseback, he would have noticed the northern incline of the land, but the motion of the train distorted such observations.

Smoking, seething with anger and concern, he studied Jenny’s pale face. The way her lashes curved in a coppery crescent on her cheek, the way her lips parted slightly.

It should have been him. Not her. Hell, she’d already been shot. If someone had to get wounded, it was his turn. Frowning, he glared out the window over Graciela’s head.

Marguarita might have chosen her daughter’s protector hastily, but she had chosen wisely.

She must have sensed Jenny’s fearless persistence, her stubborn and dogged commitment to a promise once given.

So far, she’d received a blackened eye, a cracked lip, a shot-up arm, and a slashed stomach. And they weren’t yet out of Mexico.

Gradually he became aware of Graciela’s low murmur beside him. “What did you say?”

“I’m praying,” she answered in a choked voice. “I’m telling God that I didn’t mean it about making Jenny bleed.”

“Listen.” He dropped an arm around her shoulders and let her burrow into his side. “What happened to Jenny wasn’t your fault.”

“I asked God to punish her,” she mumbled against his waistcoat.

Instantly the conversation tumbled into deep water.

Ty drew on the cigar, searching for answers as ephemeral as smoke, not sure if he could shape them into the form his niece needed to hear.

If someone had inquired, he would have said he was a spiritual man but not religious.

To him, God was a spark within every living thing, an artist who painted with sunset clouds and ocean mist, a sculptor shaping human clay, earthly soil, and distant stars.

The way he saw things, God was the creator. Any dogma beyond that was nit-picking.

Never would he have believed that he might be called upon to interpret God for a child. He wondered if Robert had any inkling of how parenthood was going to change his life.

“Well, God doesn’t grant unjust requests.” All he could do was hope for the best. “You wanted Jenny punished for killing your mother, and that was wrong. So God ignored that part of your prayers.”

Graciela peered up at him. “But she did get punished. She got shot, and she got knifed.”

“Well, I know that,” he said, floundering. “All right, just for the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that God punished Jenny because you asked him to.” Now what? “Did you tell God that you’d changed your mind? You did change your mind, didn’t you?”

She nodded solemnly, her gaze fastened on his face.

“Well, then. There you are. God turned things around by letting you be the person to save Jenny’s life.”

Graciela’s eyebrows soared. “I saved Jenny’s life?”

“She would have bled to death if you hadn’t sewed her up.”

She relaxed against his body like a dog he’d had once, going hot and limp on his chest. After several minutes of silence, she lifted her head. “Uncle Ty?”

“What?” He gazed at Jenny over her head.

“Sometimes I like Jenny,” she whispered.

“So do I.” The object of their discussion was snoring slightly, moaning softly every now and again. Smiling, he decided that any man who hankered after Jenny Jones lusted for reality, not fantasy.

“When I like her, it makes me feel bad inside because of my mama.”

With one sentence, she tossed him back into the deep water.

Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder to soften his words.

“Honey, you know Jenny didn’t kill your mother.

You know that. Your mother explained it, Jenny’s explained it, I’ve explained it.

You’ve got to stop blaming Jenny. It isn’t fair to her.

” Oh God, he’d made his niece cry again.

“Listen, it’s all right for you to like Jenny.

” Pulling off his scarf, he pushed it into her hands.

“Wipe your eyes. And your nose. It’s better if you like Jenny, because…

” His mind jumped around like spit on a griddle, searching for a reason.

“Because you own her now. She’s your responsibility.

” And he’d been the one telling Jenny not to expect too much of a kid. Damn.

“What?” Wadding up his scarf, she pressed it against her wet eyes.

In for a penny, in for a pound. He drew a breath. “Not far from the ranch where your daddy lives, there’s a big town called San Francisco. In San Francisco, there’s a lot of Chinamen.”

“What’s a Chinaman?”

“Men who used to live in China. Across the sea. Never mind that part. These Chinamen believe if you save a person’s life, then you’re responsible for that person forever after, sort of like you own them.

” Maybe it wasn’t the Chinamen who believed that, he wasn’t sure, but he’d heard it somewhere.

“The important thing is, it’s good that you like Jenny.

It’s all right to like her. It’s a lot better that way since you own her now. ”

She hid her face behind his scarf, and he could almost hear her thinking. When she lowered the scarf, she was frowning. “Do you and Jenny own me? Because you saved me from my cousins with the snakes?”

This was getting complicated, and he wished he’d never mentioned it. “I suppose we do,” he conceded uneasily, irrevocably linking the three of them in her mind. This was a problem he’d worry about later.

When the train stopped to take on more passengers, he bought bowls of fiery stew for their supper, a loaf of fresh dark bread, and he refilled their canteens.

After the train moved out again, Graciela wet a strip of her torn nightgown and gently wiped the sweat from Jenny’s face.

Jenny roused briefly, murmured something, then slept again.

Ty watched his niece adjust the shawl around Jenny’s shoulders and decided Jenny had been right and he had been wrong.

Six-year-olds were capable of much more than he would ever have believed.

Graciela lifted his arm and nestled beneath it, resting her head on his chest. “Tell me a story.”

His eyebrows rose toward his hat brim, and he cleared his throat. “I don’t know any stories.”

“Tell me about when you and my daddy were little boys.”

“You don’t want to hear about that.” But she did, so hesitantly at first, then with growing pleasure, he told her about the time he and Robert had tried to steal Don Antonio Barrancas’s prize bull and how he’d gotten gored for his trouble.

“Right in the butt,” he said, laughing. “Couldn’t sit for a week.

” Then he told her how his mother had always baked an extra cherry pie because she knew her boys would steal one, and about the time he and Robert had sneaked out their bedroom window to sleep in the haystack but Cal caught them and blistered their behinds.

He might have talked until midnight, remembering himself and Robert, except he noticed that she’d fallen asleep.

Trying not to wake her, he lit another cigar and gazed out the window as the train rolled through the desert night.

Graciela was not his daughter, and Jenny was not his woman.

But it felt good to watch over them while they slept as if they were his.

He would have torn the limbs off anyone who came near them.

For the first time in his life, Ty glimpsed why a man might choose the aggravation of a family.

Jenny struggled to sit up, blinking at the morning sunlight. Across from her, Graciela still slept, her head in Ty’s lap, but Ty was awake, watching her.

“Mornin’,” she said, pulling her shawl down over her bloodied blouse. “Did you get any sleep?”

“Some. How are you feeling?”

“I’d have to say I’ve felt better. This damn train is shaking me to pieces. Can I have some water, please?” Their fingers brushed when he handed her the canteen, and she glanced at him, frowned, then poured water on a strip of Graciela’s nightshift and washed her face and hands.

The desert outside the window was a sun-baked sand and alkali plain, but here and there she spotted a few bony, mean-looking cattle. She wondered what they found to eat out there.

After running her tongue around her teeth she drank deeply from the canteen, then replaced the cap.

“We’re almost clear of the wastelands. We’ll start seeing farms and ranches soon.

” Leaning, she scanned the western horizon, spotted towering cacti and low brown hills curving against the morning sky.

She’d made the El Paso–Chihuahua freight run enough times to recognize the terrain.

“We need to hole up for a few days,” Ty announced quietly, watching her comb her fingers through her hair. “Give you a chance to mend and get your strength back.”

Slipping a hand beneath her shawl, she gingerly explored with her fingertips, tracing the bandage that Ty and Graciela had wrapped around her waist. She couldn’t decide if the pain was less or about the same as yesterday. Pain was a hard thing to remember, hard to define by degrees.

“The cousins are going to find the bodies we left behind,” she pointed out, resting against the hard seat back. “Luis is still out there. He’s going to come after us.”

“Chihuahua is big enough that we could stay there a month, and they’d never find us.”