Page 60 of Two Wars and a Wedding

But no. There Paul was, arm in arm with another man who was slumped forward so that his hat covered his face. She couldn’t tell who was supporting whom. They were both covered with mud and blood.

It was Betsy’s worst nightmare. Well, one of her nightmares; she had so many, it was hard to tell which was worst. But seeing Paul wounded was definitely high on the list. Paul was one of life’s golden people. Nothing bad was allowed to happen to him.

Betsy hurried toward them. “Are you all right? Are you—”

Paul gave himself a shake, like a dog. “Don’t fuss, Bets. I’m right as rain. It’s not me. It’s Holt.”

“Holt?” That was Holt? That was the man who had bullied her back onto the train tracks that night, who had loomed over her at the Tampa Bay Hotel, this bag of bones and canvas? But then he looked up at her, and she saw those surprisingly blue eyes in that thin sunburned face, and she felt a weird sense of grief, which was strange, since this man was nothing to do with her or she with him.

Betsy dealt with her emotions by snapping, “What did you do to yourself, you ridiculous man?”

“S’nothing. I’m fine,” rasped Holt. His eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp against Paul’s supporting arm.

“He’s not fine,” said Paul.

Trust Paul to state the obvious. “What happened?” Betsy made wild arm motions at a couple of orderlies. “You! Make up another pallet. Over there on the end. What do you mean you can’t fit another pallet in? If I say you can, you can. What?”

“You asked me what happened,” said Paul in injured tones.

“Yes, yes, I did.” She snapped her fingers at the orderly, who might have muttered something about her under his breath, but came all the same, taking some of the burden from Paul as they half dragged, half carried the unconscious man to the waiting pallet. “What happened?”

“It’s a head wound,” said Paul, as though Betsy couldn’t have inferred that from the sizable quantity of dried blood caked on the side of Holt’s face.

Betsy knelt beside him, smoothing the matted hair carefully away from his brow. Fine, straight hair, grown a bit too long, so that it brushed the edges of his collar, or would, if it weren’t clumped with blood.

The wound was on the left side of his head, Betsy could tell that much, but he was such a mess that it was impossible to see more. She took a pair of scissors from her apron and began neatly clipping the hair away from the area, revealing a long furrow from just to the side of his left eye all the way up to his temple.

“Water,” she said, holding out a hand. “Paul, the basin. Hand it to me. Oh, never mind.”

Paul trailed after her as she fetched the basin and began carefully sponging the area around the wound, talking all the while. “I was running straight at this Spaniard at the crest of the hill, and the ba—er, the fellow aimed his gun at me, and I thought for sure I was going to be singing glees with the heavenly choir, but then out of nowhere, there came Holt flinging himself at the man. Grabbed the gun with his bare hands.”

“How very noble,” said Betsy acidly. “I presume the weapon went off?”

Paul squatted down next to her. “Well, it was all a bit of a blur—a lot of people shouting and shooting and running—but I think that’s what happened. Bullet hit Holt in the head, and then the man clobbered him with the stock, but by that time I’d got my knife out and—well.” Paul belatedly remembered that one didn’t talk about dismembering people with one’s former dancing partners.

Sure enough, as Betsy swabbed an impressive amount of dried blood, there was not only a deep and painful-looking furrow but a truly impressive bruise beginning to bloom into blue-and-purple majesty.

Since Holt wasn’t awake to be yelled at, Betsy took out her spleen on Paul instead. “Did it never occur to you that it’s a bad idea to run straight at men holding loaded weapons?”

“That is what we’re here to do,” said Paul. “Be gentle with him, Betsy. He saved my life.”

She was being gentle. She was being extremely gentle. Even if she wanted to shake him for being such an idiot. But she wanted to shake Holt the most because everyone knew Paul didn’t have an iota of common sense in him, and this Holt creature clearly did, and if he’d used just a modicum of it, she wouldn’t be dealing with what was most likely both a head wound and a massive concussion.

“When did this happen?” The wound was relatively shallow, but it looked as though it had bled, clotted, ripped open, and bled again. There was also more dirt in it than there ought to be.

“Yesterday. When we took San Juan Hill. Did you know we took San Juan Hill?” Paul bounced on his heels in excitement. “It was—well, you don’t want to hear about that, do you?”

Given that she’d been patching up the men from that engagement for the past twenty-four hours and more, no, no she didn’t. “It took you over a day to bring him here? Why didn’t you put him in one of the wagons?”

“I couldn’t do that!” Paul looked deeply offended. “They were just throwing men in any which way! Holt saved my life! I wasn’t going to leave him to be jostled at the bottom of a pile of enlisted men. I brought him down myself. It took us a while—he can’t walk much—so we had to sack out in the open last night. . . .”

It all began to make sense now. Including the dirt in the wound, which must have been from lying on the open ground with his head rolling into the dirt. Or banging into Paul’s shoulder as he hoisted him along. Or both.

Keeping her voice very, very calm, Betsy said, “So instead of putting him in a wagon, which could have brought him here within a few hours, you took a wounded man on a ten-mile walk through inhospitable terrain?”

“It’s only eight. Or maybe nine. What was I supposed to do? Put him in one of those wagons?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Betsy in exasperation.