The Rough Rider (14 page)

“I knew that would be your first thought, and I have no answer for you.” As he saw the struggle going on inside her, he realized it was futile to argue and said, “If you will pray about it, I would be obliged to you. I don’t think there’s much time. This army’s going to be leaving soon, and we need to give notice at the hospital as soon as possible.”

Suddenly, in the midst of her thoughts, Gail became conscious of a strange sense of the presence of the Lord. It had happened a few other times in services when she was praying. At those special times, she had felt God draw very close to her. Now in the crowded restaurant with the clatter of dishes and the hum of voices, it happened again. She sat very still and concentrated on what was happening. After a few moments, she looked at David with surprise on her face. “The strangest thing just happened,” she whispered. “It was as though God were speaking to me just as He sometimes does.”

“And what did He say, Gail?”

Gail Summers distrusted sudden visions and instant decisions. She had known too many people who said confidently, “The Lord told me. . .” Some of them, she had been aware, had been following their own inclinations. Being a conservative young woman, she hesitated for a moment. But finally she looked into his eyes and said quietly, “I seem to feel that God is telling me to go with you. But I’ll have to wait. It’s not something I can decide right now.”

Hope leaped into the eyes of the young physician, and he straightened his shoulders. “I’ll not rush you,” he said. “But
I’ll pray with you. I wouldn’t want you to go if God said no. But if He does say yes, somehow I feel there is a work to be done among the young men who’ll be dying out there. Who knows—maybe there’s one young man that’ll need the Gospel from Miss Gail Summers.”

Gail had not thought of that possibility. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be in the middle of a war. It was impossible to know, and finally she said, “I’ll pray about it, David.”

It was two days later that Dr. Burns looked up from bending over a patient in a bed and found Gail standing on the other side of it, her eyes bright as diamonds. He knew instantly what she had come to say. Leaving the patient, he took her arm and they moved outside into the hall. “What is it, Gail?” he asked.

Gail’s lips trembled and tears came into her eyes. “I’ll go with you. The Lord has told me that there is work for me to do. Deborah’s going too.”

“God be thanked!” David breathed. He wanted to reach out and take the young woman in his arms, but instead he put his hands behind his back and squeezed them together. He took a deep breath and a smile came to his lips. “Now,” he said warmly, “we’ll see what the good Lord will do with us in Cuba!”

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Painful Visit

After the numbing cold he had suffered in the Klondike, Aaron Winslow felt strange descending into the spring weather of San Francisco. As soon as the grubby freighter
Meteor
anchored and lowered the plank onto the busy wharf, he disembarked, carrying a single suitcase. Almost instantly Aaron discovered that gold madness was still infectious in the States. As soon as he got into a cab, the driver began talking about the strike in the Yukon. When Aaron inadvertently mentioned that he’d just come from the Klondike, the driver, a round-faced man with a bristly mustache and moon eyes, stopped the team abruptly and began firing questions at him.

Aaron answered the inquiries briefly, then growing irritated, he snapped, “Take me to the station. I’ve got to catch a train out of here.” From the scowl on the man’s face, he knew the driver was insulted, but Aaron didn’t care. He sat back moodily, not even looking out the window at the city he’d heard so much about. Ordinarily, Aaron Winslow would have been eagerly taking in the sights, but a weariness lay along his nerves, and the long white silences of the Yukon had changed him.

The bustling activity of the wharves and the crowded streets made him want to leave as soon as possible. After what seemed like a very long ride, he climbed out of the cab, paid the driver the exact amount of the fare, and moved with the flow of the crowd that was streaming into the busy railroad terminal.

“Ticket for one to Independence,” he said through the tiny window.

“I can ticket you through, but you’ll have to change trains,” the agent nodded. He was a tall, dignified-looking man with meek blue eyes and an inoffensive air. When Aaron nodded, the agent worked with a set of tickets, punching them and fastening them together. Handing them over, he said, “That’ll be $46.93.”

As Aaron paid the fare, he was conscious of the thinness of the small packet of bills that he stuck back into his pocket. “What time does the train leave?” he asked.

“Two seventeen,” said the man, motioning for the next person to step up to the window.

Aaron shoved the tickets into his shirt pocket and turned and walked away. He made his way through the crowd of waiting passengers and walked outside to the small cafe next door to the station and entered. It was almost vacant, and when he sat down at the table, the proprietor, a tall man with bleak gray eyes, sauntered over. “What’ll you have?” he asked. “We ain’t got dinner ready yet.”

“Anything—you got sandwiches?” Aaron ordered a beef sandwich, and then sat there drinking a cup of coffee the man had set before him.

As he waited for his food, a woman at a table a short ways away looked across at him. Finishing her meal, she put a coin on the counter, rose, and walked by. She walked more slowly as she passed Winslow, who lifted his eyes and met her smile with a blank look of indifference. Giving a sniff, the woman clutched her reticule more tightly and swept out of the restaurant.

Aaron stared at his hands. They were rough and calloused from his time in the Klondike. He thought of Cass and Serena and wondered if they’d struck it rich yet. Then the bitter memory of Jubal’s death clouded his thoughts, turning his smooth face rugged, and he swept his hand across his face in an impatient gesture. The meal came soon and he ate it
without enjoyment. For over an hour he sat there drinking cup after cup of steaming hot black coffee.

Finally, he walked back to the station and waited until the boarding call for his train was announced. Moving quickly, as though anxious to shake the city from his mind, Aaron boarded the car, which was one of the new sleeping cars. It was only half-filled, so he chose a seat by a window. Soon a hoarse scream from the engine split the afternoon air. The train jerked, gathered speed, then moved out of the station through the outskirts of the city and finally into the open country. As San Francisco faded from sight, Aaron Winslow expelled a deep breath and leaned back in his seat, staring out at the landscape as it rolled by. Shrouded in a dark moodiness, his hooded gray eyes did not see the trees or the horizon as it moved quickly by.
I’ve got to stop thinking about it,
he thought desperately.
Jubal’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back.

He thought how different his trip to the Klondike had been . . . less than a year ago. Aaron had made the train ride from the East in what was called a “zulu” car. They were rough, unadorned cars for passengers, filled mostly by immigrants heading west to start a new life. At times he and Jubal had felt strangely out of place. Though they were clicking across the tracks headed west, English was not the prevailing sound in the zulu cars. They heard so many different languages, they thought they were abroad in some foreign country. The journey to the West Coast had been long and arduous. Aaron and Jubal had lived on groceries sold from car to car by raucous vendors. Often they had been sidetracked for scheduled trains and delayed by sudden washouts. It wasn’t long before both men had grown weary from all the delays. There had been hasty stops at station lunch counters, which usually lasted ten minutes. The food was often poor and the prices were outrageous.

But now on the trip back east, Aaron found himself traveling in luxury. He took his meals in an ornate dining car. He
had little money left, but he ordered the best on the menu—oysters, lobster, and fine wine—at a table covered with a white tablecloth and attended by a black steward who grinned at him with flashing white teeth when he brought the food. Setting the large china plate filled with lobster in front of Aaron, the steward grabbed the folded napkin on the table and snapped it open for him. A bit surprised at the motion, Aaron mumbled his thanks and started to eat.

At night he slept comfortably in a bed transformed out of one of the seats. The car was carpeted and the chair-beds were made of plush cushions, unlike anything he’d seen before.

If Aaron had been his usual, cheerful self, it would have been an exciting time for him. Yet he couldn’t shake his somber mood and spent hour after hour staring out as the scenery changed. He rode the Central Pacific through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, arriving at the Great Salt Lakes, where he changed to the Union Pacific. As the train chugged by Fort Sanders, spewing a pillar of smoke, he thought,
Uncle Mark probably helped tame this town when he was helping build the railroad.
Just past Fort Sanders, he disembarked and waited for ten hours to mount a car attached to a coal burner with “Kansas Pacific Railroad” painted across the side. This train carried him through Denver, then wheeled east and out across the open plains. On the second day, the engineer came through the car calling out, “Independence! All out for Independence!”

Aaron quickly grabbed his bag and was the first in the aisle to get out of the car. As soon as he stepped onto the platform, he looked around, then asked the conductor, who was helping a woman off the train, “How do you get to Jefferson Barracks?”

“I don’t know—ask the stationmaster.”

Aaron made his way across the broad, open platform and moved through the people to the outside, where three buggies were drawn up waiting. “I need a ride to Jefferson Barracks.”

A small man in the first carriage straightened up and said, “I can take you there for a dollar fifty.”

Aaron threw his bag into the back, climbed up into the seat and nodded. The cab driver pulled his hat down over his face and picked up the lines. With a flick of the wrists he called out, “Right! Hup, Babe—Horace!”

The team stepped out and twenty minutes later they had cleared the outer city. The intense April sunshine beat down on the barren landscape, which already seemed to be baked as if in preparation for the hot, dry summer. The cab driver sat silently, and Aaron was grateful, for his head was full of thoughts after the long trip. Finally, the driver pointed with his buggy whip and said, “There’s Jefferson, right over there!”

“Do you know where the adjutant’s office is?” asked Aaron.

“Sure do!” The driver wheeled the buggy down the center of a parade ground and pulled the horses to a stop.

Aaron handed him two dollars, saying, “Thanks for the ride.” Then grabbing his bag, he stepped down. The driver nodded, then clicked to the horses and the team moved off, the wheels raising a cloud of fine dust.

Aaron turned and saw a sign that read “Adjutant” over a narrow door near the end of a row of buildings. He entered and found a corporal with his arm in a sling sitting at a small desk and staring moodily down at a stack of papers.

“Help you, sir?” asked the officer in a bored tone.

“I’m looking for Colonel Winslow.”

“Well, he’s already gone home.” It was late in the afternoon and the sun had begun to drop below the horizon.

“Where will I find that?” Aaron asked mildly when the corporal seemed to have ended the conversation. The man was busy shuffling through his papers when Aaron said, “My name is Winslow. I need to see the colonel.” At once, the corporal looked up and blinked—the name of Winslow stirred him, and he sat up straighter and put a more amiable look on his face.

“Why, yes, sir—come along and I’ll show you.” Rising
with alacrity, the officer led Aaron out the front door and pointed down the parade ground. “Go down till you come to the end of this street, turn right and just keep going. It’s a big white house with pillars, sitting on the left under some cottonwood trees. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks, Corporal!”

For a moment Aaron considered calling the cab driver back, but the buggy was already disappearing down the road in a cloud of dust. He shrugged and was glad for the chance to stretch his legs. The slow trip on board ship and the long train ride had been galling to him. Moving swiftly down the dusty avenue, Aaron turned a corner and soon was standing before a white-framed house shaded by six tall cottonwood trees. A white picket fence circled the house, and a tall, skinny private was listlessly pulling weeds in a small garden.

Aaron strolled past the soldier and walked up the front steps. Reaching the top, he thought,
I’d rather do anything than knock on this door!
He stood there immobile, shocked at how difficult the simple task of meeting Jubal’s parents was turning out to be. He’d traveled thousands of miles—but now he wanted nothing so much as to turn and flee. He gritted his teeth and, with a forced effort, pulled his shoulders back and knocked firmly on the door.