Page 12 of Runaway Hucow

The aching in her breasts had returned. It had mostly gone away after the morning. Or maybe it had simply been forgotten in all the excitement with the bounty hunters and the flight across the prairie. Tess was very aware of it now, though, and she knew she would have to do something about it eventually.

The bisonman dipped one of Tess’s hairs in whiskey to sterilize it, and he tried to tie the end of it to the cotton cord leader on one of the fish hooks, but his fingers were too big, and they struggled to complete the delicate task.

“Here, let me do that,” Tess said. “My fingers are smaller than yours.”

That was another understatement. One of Spike’s fingers was as big around as four of hers put together, and twice as long. The bisonman handed over the hook and the hair. Tess could feel his eyes watching her closely as she tied the two together.

“Sometimes smaller is better,” he said in that soft, rumbling voice of his.

“I suppose,” Tess replied. “But most of the time bigger’s better.”

She wasn’t sure why she’d said that—just making conversation, she supposed—but heat flooded her face as she realized the possible connotation of such a statement. She tried not to think about that big thing she’d seen twitching inside the minotaur’s britches a few minutes ago, and she moved around beside Spike’s wounded arm.

“Hold still,” she said. “This is going to hurt a little.”

“I can handle it, ma’am.”

Tess set to work on the sutures. The curve in the fish hook was different from what she was used to, and the barbed tip made it dangerous to work with, but the bisonman’s hide was thicker than human skin, so it was able to handle it. The tweezers were a bigger problem. They were less than ideal for tying the knots, and Tess would have greatly preferred a proper needle holder and some forceps. Still, she was able to make do.

“You’re good at that,” Spike said.

Tess heard the unspoken question in his voice. “My father was a doctor. Not my real father, of course. I never met him. I’m talking about my human father, Dr. Jeremiah Bradford. Legally speaking, he was my owner. Back east, he was a professor, a man of learning. He had a wife and a daughter, but his wife died of tuberculosis, and soon his daughter caught it too. Like so many others afflicted by the White Death, he brought his daughter west to Colorado, in the hopes that the dry climate and fresh air might cure her lungs, and for a little while it did. But he lost most of his money to bandits during the journey westward, and he had trouble finding good work in the west. They settled in a small town, and he worked as a frontier doctor, but it didn’t pay well, and as time went on, Jeremiah began to worry about his daughter’s future. He was already an old man by then, and she had few prospects for marriage, seeing as how nobody would want to take a poor, sick woman for a wife.

“So, Jeremiah took what little money he had saved up, and he bought me. He was able to get me for a good price because I was little, barely more than a baby, and it would be many, many years before I’d ever be able to produce milk. Still, he thought a hucow would be a good investment for his daughter’s financial security after he was gone. The income from my milk would help bolster the meager savings he would leave her.” Only I never was able to produce milk, Tess thought.

“He must have lived long enough to teach you something about doctoring,” Spike said.

Tess nodded. “He did. He lived a lot longer than he expected to. Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true for his daughter. She passed on about a year after he bought me. Jeremiah could have sold me after that, but he chose not to. I’m not sure why exactly, but I think maybe he was lonely, and he thought I could help fill the hole left by his daughter’s passing. He didn’t treat me the way most men treat hucows. He raised me like his own flesh and blood. Taught me how to read and write. Taught me other things too.”

“Like doctoring?” Spike asked.

Tess nodded. “A little. Also, since he was one of the only folks in our town who was literate, he ran the local telegraph office out of our home for extra money. He taught me how to operate a telegraph machine and how to use Morse Code. And he taught me lots of things about history and literature too.”

“He sounds like a fine man,” Spike said.

“He was,” Tess agreed as she continued to work on the stitches.

“So how did you end up in Crooked Valley?”

“I was never supposed to be there,” Tess said. She could feel a lump forming in her throat, but she forced herself to talk through it. “A few months ago, my father felt himself growing weaker, and he feared he wouldn’t live much longer. He couldn’t just leave the homestead to me, because I’m a hucow, and hucows can’t own property, so he started making other arrangements for my future. After a bit of searching around, he learned of a hucow farm down in Arizona called Duffy Ranch. The woman who runs it is named Shannon Duffy. Supposedly she treats all the hucows well. They have clean clothes and good food and a warm safe place to sleep at night, and they aren’t forced to meet quotas of milk production like on other farms. My father had been in communication with Miss Duffy. They’d sent some telegrams back and forth and arranged to have an airship come pick me up so I could go live on Duffy Ranch.”

“What happened?”

“My father died in his sleep a few days later. I barely had a chance to bury him before some men showed up at my door. It was that dirty little auctioneer and some of his henchmen. I didn’t want to go with them, but I didn’t have any choice in the matter. My father never had me branded, so there was no way to prove I belonged to him, or that he intended to sell me to Shannon Duffy. I guess you pretty much know the rest of it. You saw me in Crooked Valley.”

Tess blushed as she thought about just how much of her the bisonman had seen.

She finished tying off the last of the stitches. It had taken five strands of her hair to complete it.

“There you go,” she said. “All done. Good thing the cut wasn’t longer, or I might have gone bald stitching it up for you.”

Spike smiled slightly. It was the first time she’d seen him do that, and she liked it. She liked it a lot.

“Is that where you were trying to get to?” he asked. “Duffy Ranch in Arizona?”

Tess nodded. “It’s near a town called Lamentation.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Spike said. “Not too far from the border. Ma’am, you’d never be able to get there on foot. It’s hundreds of miles away, and the land you’d have to cross is some of the most dangerous land west of the Hundredth Meridian. There’s centaurs out there, snakemen, wolves—and humans; they might be the most dangerous of all.”