.
howl, and she could no longer see to the top of the cliff. She grabbed the horse’s reins. The leather was frozen stiff. “Halloo! Is anyone there?” she called out.
The snow blew into her mouth and stung her eyes. Leading the horse, she started to climb down into the canyon. She sensed that someone was in trouble out here, and helping people out of trouble was her specialty. But for once she was plumb out of ideas as to what to do.
Her boots slipped on the glassy rocks and she slid several feet, landing with her back against the sharp edge of a cracked boulder. The horse skidded along behind her. “Sorry,” she said to the animal as she scrambled back to her feet, ignoring the pain where the jagged rock had bruised her ribs. She took another look around. The world was utterly white. In just a few short minutes the snow blanket under her feet had become over an inch thick. Soon it would be blowing into immense drifts up on the plains.
She leaned back against the rocks. Her fists tightened in frustration as she tried to decide what to do. After all, she didn’t know for sure that the animal’s owner was in the canyon. The horse may have run away and left its rider miles from here. And with the progress of the storm, she and Susannah would be lucky to find their own way back to the ranch. To stay out here any longer would risk both their lives. Reluctantly she turned around once again and started up the cliff.
She almost fell on top of him. The horse pulled her to the left and she stumbled down a crevice, catching herself just before she slid right into him. Molly’s first thought was that he was dead. His body was twisted in an unnatural heap and his skin was totally white.
“Molly, are you hurt?” Susannah was climbing down toward her. She sounded terrified.
“I’m fine. But there’s someone here. He’s hurt…or worse.”
The storm seemed to abate for just a minute as the two sisters stared down at the frozen man.
“It’s that stranger—the one we saw in town yesterday. The gentleman,” Susannah said.
Molly gave a snort of disgust. “Maybe he is a gentleman if he’s blamed fool enough to try to cross Copper Canyon in this kind of weather.”
“What are we going to do?” Susannah asked, her eyes wide.
“We’ve got to get him up on his horse so we can take him back to the ranch.”
“We can’t lift a big man like that,” Susannah protested.
“It’s either that or he dies. Do you want that on your conscience?”
Susannah was silent, but she bent to help as Molly tugged at the man’s boots, trying to straighten out his body.
“You take the legs and I’ll take the shoulders—they’re heavier,” Molly ordered. Susannah was taller than Molly, but there was no question about who had the greater strength. They maneuvered the horse so that it was slightly below them on the cliff, leaving less distance for them to lift their burden. “On the count of three. Use all your strength, now,” Molly urged. “You can do it, Susie girl. One, two, three!”
They half lifted, half rolled the inert form over onto the saddle. Thankfully, the horse seemed too cold to protest and stood stock-still.
“We did it!” Susannah cried in triumph.
“Good job, sis,” Molly said, her entire chest filling with relief. Now all they had to do was find their way back home through a blinding snowstorm. “You lead the horse up and I’ll hold him on the back. We’ll tie him down when we get back on top.”
They struggled, pushing and pulling the reluctant mount up the rocks and onto level ground. Both girls were wheezing with the effort by the time they were at the top, and they threw their arms around each other in a victory embrace. “We made it,” Susannah gasped.
Molly was more reserved. “We can’t rest now. We’ve got to get started home.” She pulled a rope from her own horse and began to tie it around the inert man. There was no movement from him.
“You don’t suppose he’s dead, do you?” Susannah asked warily.
Molly brushed the snow from her face so that she could see the knots she was tying. “After all this trouble,” she said grimly, “he wouldn’t dare be dead.”
For several hours after they arrived home it looked as if the stranger they had rescued might indeed dare to die. His skin was completely cold to the touch, and his breathing was so shallow that at times it seemed to disappear altogether.
An anxious Mary Beth had greeted them at the big oak door of the ranch house, exclaiming over their tardiness in arriving through the storm. When they told her of the man, still tied to his horse out front, she ran to the kitchen to get Smokey. The bewhiskered old man was a roundup cook who had stayed on one spring years ago and had become a fixture at Lucky Stars.
“Where will we put him, Miss Molly?” Smokey asked as he helped her drag the stranger into the house.
“We’ll take him up to Papa’s room,” she answered after the briefest pause.
Susannah and Mary Beth exchanged a look. Since their father’s death the previous winter, his room had been unoccupied. When Susannah had once suggested that she would like to move there from her tiny corner room, Molly had answered her with a withering look and had gone upstairs to lock the door. It hadn’t been opened since.
Together the four of them carried the half-frozen man up the curving stairs and across the hall, then waited while Molly opened the door to the spacious bedroom. It was just as it had been when their father lived—his stand of pipes on the dresser, his old felt hat hanging from one corner of the clothes tree. But a groan from the unconscious man kept them from dwelling on the past.
“I’ve never seen skin so white,” Mary Beth said in a hushed voice as they laid him out on top of the high poster bed.
“Bring some coal oil, Smokey,” Molly directed. “We’ll have to rub it on him.”
Susannah and Mary Beth stared at her. “All over him?” Susannah asked.
“You girls ain’t rubbing no ‘all over’ on any shiftless cowboy,” Smokey said indignantly. “If he needs rubbing, I guess I’ll be the one to do it.”
Molly paused and looked up and down the stranger’s lean body. “I guess we could leave that part to you,” she told the old man. “But mind you’re gentle about it, or you’ll rub that frozen skin right off him.”
Smokey gave a little grunt. “I reckon I’ve unfroze my share of fingers and toes and ears in my time,” he muttered. “Now, you three can just skedaddle on downstairs.”
Molly set Mary Beth and Susannah to fixing supper and some hot soup for when their patient regained his senses, then she went back up to the bedroom with the coal oil. She hesitated at the door. Smokey had stripped off the stranger’s clothes, leaving his lower half covered by a blanket. She’d never seen a man’s naked chest close up. Papa had always said that any hand showing up around the big house without a shirt would be turned off the place. He’d guarded his daughters’ sensibilities as if they’d been princesses in a European castle rather than redblooded girls on a Wyoming cattle ranch.
She averted her eyes from the bed and held out the can of oil. “Are you sure you don’t need any help?” she asked.
Smokey walked over and gave her cheek a little pat. “You go down and get something warm into your gullet, missy. Let me worry about him.”
“Do you think he’ll be all right?”
Smokey shrugged. “He looks pretty froze. But we’ll do the best we can for him.”
“I’ll come back up in a little bit and sit with him, so you can have your supper.”
“Take your time. He’s not going anywhere.”
But Molly found she could not rest easy downstairs without knowing