“No. I can’t.”
“Not if you don’t learn what you need to.” Taking her arm, he led her to the side yard where Drinkwater was watching Freddy examine a coil of rope as if she’d never seen one before. Dal handed Les a lasso that Drinkwater had made. “Study the knot. Learn how to tie it.”
The two women glared at him as if he were solely to blame for their predicament. He narrowed his eyes back at them because he for damned sure knew they were the cause of his predicament. “When I ride in here tomorrow morning, I want to see both of you tie a lasso and swing it.” If they had been men, they would have flung an obscenity at him, and he would have returned the compliment. Instead, he walked away feeling angry and frustrated, and calling himself a fool for thinking the one in the wheelchair was going to be his biggest problem.
He found Alex in the ranch-house kitchen, helping Se?ora Calvos chop onions. At least she was in the general vicinity of where he’d hoped to find her.
“Would you care for a cup of coffee?” she inquired with cool politeness.
“This isn’t a social call, Mrs. Mills. If you’re ready, we’ll drive out to the brush poppers’ camp and I’ll show you a chuck wagon.” The day was slipping away from him.
His instinct was to push her chair, but he didn’t. There wouldn’t be anyone to push her on the drive, and he needed assurance that she could manage by herself.
At the edge of porch steps she glanced up at him with an annoyed expression. “I’ll need your assistance on the stairs. If it isn’t too much trouble.”
Pressing his lips together, he bumped her down the stairs, then he let her wheel herself to the buckboard that he’d asked one of the hands to bring up to the house.
She halted beside the wagon and fixed her gaze on the horizon, her expression stony. “You’ll have to lift me onto the seat.”
Silently, he lifted her onto the seat of the buckboard, feeling the waves of humiliation that flowed out of her, then he loaded the wheelchair into the bed of the wagon. The high back and seat were woven of rattan framed by sturdy wood. Hard rubber tires capped the wheels. It surprised him to discover how heavy the chair was.
“I can’t spare a man to help you,” he informed her as he drove the wagon out of the yard. “The wrangler helps the cook when he can, but it’s hit-and-miss. He’ll help you only after his own work is done.” He glanced at her sharp profile. “Can you push that chair over rough ground?”
“We’re about to find out, aren’t we?”
They drove the next two miles in silence, then she shifted slightly and glanced at him. “In case you’re wondering, my husband’s sympathies were Union, but he did not serve in the army.”
“The war’s over, Mrs. Mills.”
“Is it, Mr. Frisco?” She swept a gaze across his shirt.
He shrugged. “No sense wasting a good shirt. You’ll see pieces of Confederate uniforms all over the South.” He waited a beat then turned it back on her. “In case you’re wondering, I served in the Confederate army, but not as a soldier. I served in the Quartermaster Corps, trailing cattle for the troops, usually to New Orleans.” Immediately he thought of Lola, and his face darkened. Abruptly, he changed the subject. “How did you lose your leg?”
“You, sir, are an offensively blunt man.”
“That seems to be the consensus,” he agreed, smiling. “I’m also a man with a lot to do and not much time to do it.” For about a quarter of a mile, he didn’t think she was going to answer.
“My husband was a professor and a lecturer of some renown.” She paused as if she expected him to say something, but he didn’t. She lowered her head, fiddling with the braid trimming the bottom of her jacket. “We were late for a dinner party at the home of the university’s president. It was raining.” Her voice thinned. “The driver was going too fast, and the road was slick. We… the carriage went off an embankment and rolled.”
“And?” he asked when she stopped speaking.
“When everything was over, my husband was dead, and I was pinned beneath the carriage. My leg was crushed.” She pulled her skirt away from his thigh. “I don’t remember the amputation.”
He thought about her story. “Have you considered a wooden leg?”
“Never!” When he looked at her, high color burned on her cheeks. “My husband is dead, Mr. Frisco. We both should have died that night, but I didn’t. I don’t want a wooden leg. I don’t want to walk again as if that night never happened! Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He had no idea. Was she saying if she couldn’t die with her husband, the least she could do was be crippled? Or that her husband’s death somehow became trivialized if she went on with her life?
“I don’t understand limiting yourself if you don’t have to,” he said finally.