The Trailsman by Jon Sharpe

Author:Jon Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

12

Two afternoons a week Serena Lund worked with the poor at Haven House, a shelter run by three nuns. Serena hadn’t wanted to even get close to a job like this but her father had insisted she do it for the sake of his standing in the community. So she’d reluctantly showed up one morning six months ago to the great amusement of the sisters who worked in the four-room adobe building that the local gentry had built. They didn’t often get volunteers who pulled up in expensive surreys. Nor did many of their volunteers wear clothes—costumes, really—that would have attracted attention even in Chicago or St. Louis for being costly.

Their amusement extended to watching Serena have to deal with shabbily clothed, unwashed, uneducated, and very needy men and women whose dreams and lives had gone bust when their gold prospecting had failed them. Her first afternoons at Haven House, Serena had been afraid to touch any of them. She dished their soup, she passed out their donated used clothing, she handed over the few greenbacks the nuns had been able to winnow from the wealthy—all without having any physical contact. She had turned up her very pretty nose at smells, sneezes, coughs, and other, ruder noises. She was in hell and she wasn’t even dead yet.

But one afternoon the six-year-old daughter of a dead miner appeared and for the first time in her life Serena—Serena the spoiled brat—felt what mothers felt. She wanted to protect the little girl against a savage world. She became Serena’s ward. In the four weeks it took for the mother to travel from Missouri to pick up the girl, Serena took her to a doctor, a dentist, a clothing store, a book store, a gift shop, and a bank. She arranged for the girl to have a trust fund of three thousand dollars. No one could touch it but the girl, and the girl could touch it only when she turned seventeen. The mother, who had been in St. Louis recovering from tuberculosis, barely recognized her daughter when she saw her.

From then on Serena Lund became the best volunteer Haven House had ever had.

She gently took the man’s slender hand and turned it over so that she could see the underside of his wrist. His name was Con McKenzie and he’d left a wife and three children in Ohio a year ago to search for gold out here. Two nights ago they’d found him drunk and nearly dead in an alley.

‘‘How’re you feeling today, Con?’’

He was a middle-aged man with the face of a sad hound. After a night spent in the doctor’s office where it was assumed he would die, the nuns had brought him fresh clothes and told him he could stay in Haven until he was ready to go back to Ohio and face his family.

Serena’s fingers gently lifted the cloth the sisters had wrapped around Con’s wrist this morning. The white cloth was already discolored with green pus and dark red blood.

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