Vin was still flat on his back and as weak as a kitten when the evening star rose and the shadows grew long. Between his bouts of nausea, during which the woman gently turned his head, held his long hair out of the way and buried his stomach offerings, and the sweats, where she stripped him bare and bathed him in cool stream water, he had been in a fugue like state somewhere between the living and the dead.
Without a word the woman simply cared for him and, when she thought the worst of it was over, she rummaged through his saddlebags. Finding his meager rations and his camp kit she brewed some coffee, savoring the taste so unlike the roasted roots and various barks used by her captors. Next she found his shaving soap wrapped in a square of linen and, stripping off her leather dress and footwear, she bathed until the cold stream numbed her hands and feet painfully.
Squatting naked on the shore she took an ocotillo branch and used the spiny stalk as a makeshift brush and soon her hair hung down her back in a smooth fall which she nimbly braided and tied off with a few blades of buffalo grass. She then rubbed her leather garments with fine sand to freshen them up before getting dressed again to sit near the small fire she had built and watch as the white man dozed fitfully.
With the falling of night a chorus of coyote barks and yelps started up in the distance and Vin awoke with a start to find himself naked under his blanket and the woman sitting by a small fire staring at him. He was surprised that she had stayed but if he had been able to see into the confusion of her mind he would have known that she had no place else to go. Who she was and where she had come from was not only a mystery to him but to her as well.
As the poison dissipated Vin's sweats were gone but the wound was now contaminated with bacteria and a fever had set in. He began to shiver so hard that the muscles in his back threatened to lockup and he groaned aloud. The woman continued to stare at him as another chill wracked his body and she thought that if the rudimentary herbs she had also found in his packs didn't cleanse his blood and break the fever there wasn't much she could do except what he had wanted her to do in the first place, cut his hand off. He wouldn't be much of a pistolaro but he would be alive.
The former captive reached for the coffee pot of steeping herbs and poured a large draught into a tin cup and with her help and despite his spasms Vin managed to down all of it.
"Thank you," he said softly then asked, "What's your name?"
The woman looked up from the fire, swallowed hard and in her stilted way explained in English, "Just a slave. No name."
Vin gritted his teeth and shivered but managed to get out, "Then I think I'll call you Molly. It's a good name…for a good woman. You can call me Vin," he told her and watched as she tried her new name out, repeating it several times to herself.
The night air was turning colder and not sure that they were out of danger, Vin asked her to bank the fire. Soon, despite his fever and the warm medicinal brew she'd fed him and the blanket he was huddled in, he was chilled to the bone. After she had tended to his horse, Molly laid out Peso's saddle blanket on the ground intending to sleep on it herself but now thought better of it. If the tracker slept on it he'd be more insulated from the heat-leaching cold of the earth and she pointed to the brightly colored wool pad and grunted.
Vin put on a good front and told her as he sat up, "I'll be fine. As soon as I get dressed you can have my bedroll. I'll keep watch," and she huffed a derisive laugh as he closed his eyes again and trembled. When he opened them again the woman stood next to him extending a hand, which he took.
He was up on his feet still wrapped in the blanket but Molly didn't know for how long. She showed him that his clothes were still damp and he knew they could quite possibly be the death of him if he were to put them on again. When she pointed to the horse blanket again he capitulated and settling him on it, she straightened out his blanket and tucked it tightly around him. For her own warmth and comfort she laid out the canvas roll in which the blanket had been wrapped beside him and encased herself in it. Satisfied, she closed her eyes and hoped that he'd be alive in the morning.
A few hours into the long night Vin began to hallucinate. He called out to his mother. He begged her not to leave him, not to die and she came back to him; slipping into the bed they shared in the rundown, one room cabin where they lived, just as she had when he was a child and the winter winds howled outside. With his mother beside him he slept easily and when his eyes drifted open a few hours later he was warm and wrapped in Molly's strong arms as she slept next to him, both of them naked as the day they were born.
Vin smiled softly when she sighed contentedly and shifted closer to him. He was thankful for the additional warmth she brought to his bedroll but not for his reaction to her close proximity and although this particular form of bundling was accepted, especially when one was in peril of freezing to death, he was purely embarrassed and clearly aroused and when he moved just the tiniest bit Molly awoke.
If she was uncomfortable with their situation she didn't show it and she simply reached up and felt his forehead, as any good nurse would have done. He was still feverish to the touch and another chill wracked his body. Stretching out her arm she picked up the tin cup and offered him more of the herbal tea, this time cold. He drank it down without complaint and setting the cup back down next to the fire's ash she pulled the blanket and the tarp back over them.
"Molly?" Vin said tentatively, "Do you know where your people are?"
After a long pause she shook her head.
"Were you a child when they took you?" he then asked her and felt her stiffen.
Again, after a long pause, she shook her head. "Not a child…a woman." She remembered that much.
Despite the grease and her sun-browned skin, Vin had estimated her to be no older than him, maybe younger, but how long she'd been held captive was anybody's guess. Long enough for her to be unaccustomed to speaking English, he guessed, and with an accent he wasn't familiar with.
Definitely a woman, he thought, as he felt her breasts pressed to his ribs and grew even harder at the thought. He smelled his shaving soap and when he ran his hand gently down her arm he felt neither grease nor dirt and suddenly he was stifling hot beneath the blankets.
His hand throbbed despite the herbs and he felt worse if it were possible. "Listen Molly," he said as his teeth began to chatter, "If somethin' happens to me you just follow the sun. It'll take you to a little town just west a here. Folks are real nice there and they'll help you. Find your people, get you home safe and sound."
"Home," he heard her say without emotion. "Home," she repeated and this time her voice was thick with emotion. "Home," she said again and started to cry.
His heart breaking at the sound, Vin pulled her closer and when she turned her face up to his, he kissed her.