only death would part him from his wife now. That was the vow. Whatever paths he and Emma took, those words would guide him.
Matt smoothed the blanket across Lucy’s slender shoulders. She looked so tiny in the big bed, so helpless and pale in the lamplight. He touched her cheek, fresh with a frosting of new freckles. Her skin felt dry but not hot. No fever was a good thing, he supposed.
Emma had come up so quietly in her stocking feet that he hadn’t noticed her light steps crossing the room. She sat down on the bed beside Lucy with a glass of water in her hand. “Stomach complaints are common with children. Likely by morning she’ll be better.” The glass trembled slightly in her hand. She glanced at him. Her worried look said something else. “But there’s the cholera… .”
“It’s only a stomach complaint. She’s had them before.”
He wouldn’t let it be anything else. They all had been down with belly issues at one time or another and bounded right back. Morning would put the sparkle right back in Lucy’s eyes.
“We’ll need to make sure she drinks,” Emma said, touching Lucy’s hair to get her attention. “Sit up, sweetheart. You have to drink this.”
“No! It hurts to drink.” She burrowed under the blanket until only a blond curl gave away her presence.
Matt peeled the cover away and lifted Lucy onto his lap. Her toes peeked out from under her nightgown, as pale as her face.
“This might not stay down, so be ready,” Emma instructed.
Lucy drank half the water, then squirmed off his lap and burrowed back into her woolen cave.
A bedspring squeaked when Emma got up. The fabric of her skirt rustled against her legs when she walked across the room.
Lucy’s breathing seemed slow and even. Since sleep was what she needed most, Matt rose carefully from the bed and followed Emma out of the room.
He’d thought to find her in the kitchen washing the glass, or maybe running her fingers over her stove with wonder, as she often did. He thought to see her peering out of the window, looking at her land by the glow of the moon with that satisfied smile tugging her lips into a pretty bow, or maybe watching for Pearl.
Instead, he found her collapsed into a chair at the table with her head buried in her arms. Her hair twisted down her back and over her shoulders.
He knelt beside her and brushed away enough hair to see the side of her face.
A gust of wind buffeted the window, rattling the glass.
Emma sat up straight and pressed her hands to her cheeks as though to brush away tears, but her eyes were dry.
“Emma, you look worn through.” She tangled her fingers together on the table. He covered them with one of his hands and frowned at the tense cold knot beneath his palm. “Go on to bed. I’ll watch over Lucy.”
“Tell me about California. Is it really paradise on earth?”
He studied her face, looking for a spark of eagerness at the thought of moving there. Emma glanced at her stove and spread her fingers on the table where she served the tastiest food in the county. When she glanced at the “Home Sweet Home” frilly that she had crocheted and hung over the kitchen door, her eyes misted.
“So my mother says, but I’ve never been there. Seems to me this is paradise on earth.”
She opened her mouth to answer, but Lucy’s cry whispered down the hall.
Emma stood up and went ahead of him to her room.
* * *
Daylight had just brightened the plains with sunshine. Emma stood beside her laundry pot near the well, stirring Lucy’s sheets, blankets and nightclothes in boiling water and lye. She dropped Matt’s shirt into the pot with the rest.
Only a few hours from now, the train’s whistle would be blowing. Matt and his family might have been on it, but all through the night Lucy had grown more ill. Her little body seemed to shrink in upon itself. Her skin appeared tissue thin and her robust complexion pasty.
Emma had never seen a child so taken with a stomach ailment. The strength leached out of her body with each heave of her belly. The poor little mite had quit whimpering about her misery just before sunrise, but clearly her silence didn’t mean she was any better.
It was time to send for the doctor.
Red strode across the yard on legs grown longer and ganglier just overnight. He wore a hat,