Johanna took the boy by his shoulders and held him steady. “Are you all right?” she asked, sweeping him with her experienced gaze. Nothing broken. The bruises would mend… if his spirit did. “What is your name?”
“Peter,” the boy whispered. A tear tracked its way through the dirt on his face, but he straightened under her scrutiny. He looked toward the place where his father lay. “My pa—”
“Peter, I want you to stay right here,” she said firmly. “I am a doctor. I’ll see to him.”
“Is he dead?”
She swallowed, wondering whether it was sadness or relief she heard in his voice. “I don’t think he is. But I will not let him hurt you again.”
Peter nodded and did as she asked. She returned to the site of the unequal battle and found the bully lying where her rescuer had left him. She knelt to count his pulse and feel for broken bones. The right wrist was fractured, at the very least; he would have swelling in his face and two black eyes in the morning. But he still lived, and she saw no signs of internal bleeding.
She rose and wiped off her skirts, as if she could so easily rid herself of this man’s barbarous taint. Odd; she couldn’t quite bring herself to apply the same judgment to her phantom, in spite of the harsh punishment he’d dealt out. Hadn’t he given the bully a taste of his own medicine?
She shook her head, bemused by her own primitive response. Her phantom. He was nothing of the sort—merely another disturbed resident of this fetid dockside warren. He, like the man he’d attacked, undoubtedly had a history of violence dating back to his own childhood. He was likely beyond saving.
But Peter was not. She left his father where he lay, collected the boy, and went in search of a local doctor who could take charge of the case. She had to ask in several disreputable saloons before she got intelligible directions to the home of South Vallejo’s physician. He was none too pleased to be called out at dinnertime, but Johanna convinced him that she had the boy’s care to consider. Quite naturally, that was a woman’s job.
She wasn’t above using male prejudices when it suited her purpose.
Peter, it turned out, had no living mother; but an elder, married sister lived in the town of Napa City, a major stop on the Napa Valley Railroad’s route north to Silverado Springs. Johanna had no intention of leaving him in his father’s “care” another night. She doubted the father would pursue the lad once he was out of reach, and any life would be better than this.
By the time she and Peter reached the Frisby House, a ramshackle two-story frame building that passed for South Vallejo’s best hotel, the night was dark and damp with fog. She bought Peter the hotel’s plain dinner, which he ate with great appetite, and secured them a small, musty room with two narrow beds. She treated his bruises, checked under his dirty clothes for cuts or abrasions, and did her best to make him wash up with the use of the cracked bowl and pitcher the hotel’s housekeeper provided. His youthful reluctance to obey was heartening, if bothersome; his spirit hadn’t been broken. There was hope for him yet.
Afterward, he fell into an exhausted sleep. Johanna was left to make the best of her lumpy bed and threadbare blankets, listening to the constant din of frogs in the marshes about the town and remembering, again and again, the burning eyes of the phantom.
Gott in Himmel help any local scoundrel who ran afoul of him without a passerby to interfere. She was not much given to prayer, but she offered up a sincere plea that none of his future victims would be any less deserving than young Peter’s father.
And that she, personally, should never see him again. .
He knew exactly which room was hers.
As he watched from the ill-lit street across from the Frisby House, he could smell her scent, carried by the cool, wet winds from the Strait and the ocean thirty miles to the west. He’d memorized the smell instantly when he went to work on that cowardly piece of filth among the dockside shacks.