Read Online A Cold Day in Hell by Terry C. Johnston - Free Book Online Page B

glove against his dusty sky-blue pants and straightened. “Give the order, men—we’re turning about forGlendive. And, for God’s sake: let’s try not to let those red bastards kill any more of these blessed mules!”
    Gazing into the face of her sleeping child, Samantha hadn’t believed anything could be quite so beautiful.
    Four days old he was. Despite the sleeplessness, despite the tenderness and outright pain in her breasts, the hot shards of torment she felt down below where she had torn giving birth—no matter any of it now. She was completely in awe at the miracle of that baby.
    What she and Seamus had created together. Truly a gift from God.
    It was so hard to believe, still so much like a dream: the long, agonizing labor; the explosive delivery; the joy in seeing the tears streak her husband’s face; the sheer and utter happiness in holding the squalling child for the first time, listening to his little cry of protest.
    Oh, how he had taken to her breast that cold morning as Elizabeth Burt had shooed Seamus from the room.
    “You go off now and get yourself a whiskey and a cigar. And buy one for my captain, too, won’t you?”
    Then Elizabeth set about instructing Sam on the art of breast-feeding—how to hold the child just so, place the nipple against his lips and cheek to excite the sucking reflex, and then to relax. Just relax and enjoy such exquisite closeness. Oh, how the little one took to that! Surely, she had thought so many times since as the babe suckled, this was his father’s child! So in love with a woman’s bountiful anatomy were they both.
    The babe lay beside her on the bed this late afternoon. The sun would soon set beyond Old Bedlam and the evening gun would roar down on the parade. She was weary from the trips up and down the steps, laundering the diapering cloths. Never had she believed it possible that such disgusting stuff could come out of so beautiful a creature!
    Seamus helped as much as he could, often being the one to carry her work downstairs for her to the room where together they would boil the water and do the wash. Each evening he would carry the little child downstairs in his huge arms, clutched so lovingly against his great body, smiling to beat the band as they warmed water in a kettle on the woodstove, preparing the babe’s daily bath. In their time together Seamus had shown her much tenderness with his big, hardened hands—those same hands carefully, lovingly lathering the infant in that washbasinthey had set in the middle of that small table right beside the warmth of the woodstove.
    “What will we name him?” Samantha had asked him that first morning while they gave their son his very first bath.
    “I thought that was best left up to the women in the family,” Seamus had replied, lifting the wriggling child from the water as she draped a towel around its rosy body.
    “Not in my family, we’re not,” Sam had declared. “In this family, boys will be named by their fathers.”
    “Then I will have to give it some thought.”
    “You do that, Seamus Donegan,” she told him as she pressed against him, the child held between them in that embrace. “You give good thought to this matter of naming your firstborn son. For this may well be one of the most important things you 11 ever do in life.”
    He had bent to kiss the top of the babe’s head, then bent to brush his lips against hers. Then he said, “Yes, one of the most important things I’ll ever do in this young fellow’s life.”
    She heard him on the stairs now. There was no other sound like his boots clattering up those steps, what with their high, two-inch leather heels so they would not slip through a stirrup, a bit of a shelf on the back of the heel to support a spur, and with stovepipes almost tall enough to reach his knees—yes, he had explained the usefulness of it all to her many times. But right now those boot heels announced his return from that conference he and a few others were called to