There was nothing else to do, she thought, but wait and pray and hope.

For all of that, Abigail’s temperature rose steadily throughout the day. By sunset, she was limp, like a wrung-out cloth, and her eyes were glazed, half open, waking and sleeping. She no longer seemed to recognize Evangeline.

* * *

He felt terror seize his throat when he saw them, sitting there by the fire. All the heady pride he’d felt at bringing in two mustangs evaporated in an instant. Evangeline was rocking the motionless, quilt-wrapped child in her arms, although the chair was not made to rock, and as she looked at Scully, he saw moving shadows in her eyes.

He strode across the room to kneel beside the chair and lay his hand to Abigail’s forehead. It felt like a stove lid with a good, strong fire blazing beneath it.

“God in heaven,” he breathed, partly in prayer and partly in pure fear.

Evangeline looked at him bleakly. “She’s dying,” she whispered. “She’s dying.”

CHAPTER

11

“NO,” Scully said, tearing off his coat and gloves and flinging his hat into the shadows. “No, Evangeline. Abigail isn’t going to die. We won’t let it happen.”

Evangeline bent her head and kissed the child’s hot, dry forehead, her despondent gaze fixed on the fire. She kept on rocking, like a woman lost in a dream, humming an old hymn that Scully remembered only dimly from his childhood.

His thoughts were frantic ones at first; he calmed them only by force of will. Then he went to the pantry, fetched the washtub Evangeline had bathed in only the night before—the sight, the memory of that, would be with him forever—and hurried back outside. There, he used his bare hands to scoop up wet, heavy snow and fling it into the tub.

When he had the receptacle three-quarters of the way full, he hoisted it up, feeling a sting of protest from the ghost wound in his shoulder, and raced back inside. Setting the tub in the middle of the table, he wrenched Abigail out of Evangeline’s embrace, catching her by surprise, and flung off the quilt covering the little girl’s fever-racked body.

She was so small, so fragile. Tears stung Scully’s eyes as he plunged her into the tub and packed the snow in around her, over her arms and legs and chest, everywhere.

“What are you doing?” Evangeline cried, dragging at his arm.

He kept her back, blocking her with his shoulder, with the whole side of his body, a tactic of very limited effectiveness. Separating a woman, especially this woman, from her child was the business of tigers and titans, not mere men, and if Scully had not known it before, he learned it then.

“You’ll kill her!” Evangeline rasped, flying at him, scratching and kicking and pulling, all of a piece.

“Damn it, Eve,” Scully said, trying to dodge her blows while still keeping the snow packed close against Abigail with both hands, “I’m trying to bring her temperature down!”