Free One Bright Morning by Alice Duncan Page A

said at
last.
    “ Yes he did,” Dan
contradicted.
    “ Hell.” Jubal sounded very
disgruntled. “I never let myself get shot before.”
    “ Weren’t your
fault.”
    “ Like hell.”
    Jubal Green didn’t believe in chance
accidents or luck, good or bad. He knew he must have done something
stupid to let French Jack shoot him. After all, now that he thought
about it, he remembered that it was French Jack that he and Dan had
been after. It made sense, therefore, that he was supposed to have
shot French Jack, not the other way around. That annoyed Jubal a
lot.
    “ They must’ve got another
man to ride with ‘em, because we followed their trail and two of
‘em doubled back, but French Jack, he fooled us both and shot
you.”
    “ Hell,” Jubal said
again.
    “ I chased the decoys and
when I figgered out what they’d done, I went back for you, but he’d
already got you so I shot one of ‘em and followed your blood to
here.”
    Jubal didn’t react to Dan’s gruesome
revelation, but looked around the room in which he lay. He was
certain he had never seen it before.
    “ Where am I?”
    “ Little cabin in the woods
near Lincoln. It’s Mrs. Bright’s farm.”
    “ Mrs. Bright?” Jubal didn’t
recollect knowing a Mrs. Bright. He looked at Dan with a big
question in his eyes.
    “ Mrs. Bright. She took you
in and saved your life,” said Dan.
    Another frown greeted those words. Jubal
couldn’t recall ever meeting anyone by the name of Bright
before.
    “ Who’s Mrs.
Bright?”
    “ Widow lady. Lives with her
daughter here in this cabin. We’re about ten miles outside of
Lincoln. French Jack’s still around though. He shot her hired man.
Then she up and shot his hired man.”
    Dan Blue Gully grinned at the
recollection.
    “ She shot him?”
    “ Right in the ass.” Dan
actually chuckled.
    Jubal’s expression settled into a frown of
pained concentration. He was troubled by flittery, shimmery images
of a rumpled angel with stringy blonde hair and a tire, good face,
and he couldn’t dislodge them from his mind’s eye. He wondered if
the person attached to those foggy mental pictures was the one who
shot French Jack’s colleague. It didn’t seem likely somehow. He
would have shaken his head in an effort to clear it of those
strange memories, but everything hurt too much to shake.
    He decided to mention that fact to Dan.
    “ I hurt like
hell.”
    “ I bet you do,” said Dan
with another grin. “You got shot all to blazes.”
    That wasn’t exactly what Jubal wanted to
hear. He gave his friend a murderous scowl. Then he remembered
Dan’s earlier comment.
    “ You said this Mrs. Bright
saved my life?”
    The question sounded vaguely incredulous.
Jubal Green had never known a woman who was good for more than just
one thing, and that one thing was something a man only wanted every
now and again. Well—a man might want it more often than that, but
he only needed it every now and again.
    But Dan Blue Gully was firm on that
point.
    “ She saved your life,” he
said, and Jubal knew he meant it.
    “ Hmmmm,” he muttered. “I’ll
have to thank her, I guess.” It didn’t sound as though he relished
the prospect.
    “ You better,” said Dan. “She
worked herself damned near to death for you, you ungrateful son of
a bitch.” The words were said mildly and were laced with a liberal
dose of fondness.
    Jubal looked up at him and his gaze
registered vague curiosity. Dan Blue Gully sounded suspiciously as
though he actually respected this Mrs. Bright person, and that was
a reaction Jubal would have found perfectly astonishing if he’d had
the strength. Neither Jubal Green nor Dan Blue Gully had discovered
very many people who were worth respecting in the course of their
lives and, thus far, those few people included no women. And he
wasn’t forgetting his mother, either.
    “ What’s she like?” he
asked.
    Dan thought hard about Jubal’s question for
a while. All that heavy thinking required him to stare at