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trust, for you do not know who the teacher is.” At the look of worry in her eyes, he added. “I’ll live—” He flinched and took a deep breath, nearly arching from the spasm that tore through his body. “Someone has betrayed us . . . .” He closed his eyes.
    Mandy leaned over, close to his ear. “I’ll be careful.” She accepted a blanket from someone in the crowd and placed it under his head. Meg worked to stop the bleeding, pressing one cloth hard to his shoulder wound, the other to the wound in his side.
    Meg caught Mandy’s eye. “You work hard to save a man you’ve only just met, even if you do know him from your dreams.”
    “So do you,” Mandy challenged.
    Meg shrugged. “Like he said, be careful, Mandy.”
    Mandy looked up into her friend’s concerned expression. “I will.” Looking down at Hawk, she studied his face. “Do you want me to send for the teachers?”
    “No.” He clenched his teeth, opening his eyes and catching hers with a steely gaze. “It would be too dangerous for them. Besides,” he reached up and tugged on one of her loose curls, “I have you.”
    Mandy caught herself just short of a full-blown panic. “I’m only an apprentice,” she whispered. “There’s much I don’t know.”
    “You know enough.” Hawk drew in a sharp breath, then mercifully he passed out.
    Cord shouldered his way through the growing crowd with more cloth in his hands. “Sheriff Tucker is going to want a good explanation for this,” he muttered in an undertone. “And when he finds out Hawk was hunting McKinney . . . .”
    Mandy caught his meaning, but Doc appeared before she could reply.
    Seeing Hawk’s face, Mandy heard him mutter an oath of surprise. He quickly assessed Hawk’s wounds. He put a finger in the shoulder wound, then the wound that passed through Hawk’s side, moving it this way and that. “Lucky,” she heard him mumble. “He’ll be a mite sore, but the bullets didn’t hit noth’n vital.” He lifted the cloth and looked again. “Yep, damn lucky.”
    Mandy didn’t know why, but she didn’t like the fact he had put his finger in Hawk’s wound like that. Still, she was relieved the bullet hadn’t hit anything vital. She breathed in such a sigh of relief, he looked sharply at her. She ignored the questioning look in his eyes. “What about the one that hit his side? How do you know it didn’t hit anything?”
    “Passed clear on through, plenty of damage, but it’ll mend. Important thing is, it went out the other side—and it missed his guts. Seen all kinds of damage done when the bullets hit the guts. Lucky,” he muttered again, then dropped his voice to a near whisper. “Better we get him out of these clothes.”
    Mandy searched his face for an explanation, but he said no more.
    “You boys,” he pointed out four good-sized men, “carry him to my office. Man’s lost enough blood as it is. That’s the biggest danger to him right now, he can’t afford to lose much more.”
    When they reached the office, Doc Mallory barked out orders. Hot water, bandages, needles and thread. Laudanum, alcohol and clean cloth. It was the longest hour of Mandy’s life. She didn’t want to examine why; this morning, she had almost hoped he would go and let her find another way to deal with McCandle. Now, she felt as though her life’s breath would leave her if he were to die.
    There was so much blood; the wound in his shoulder was so deep. Doc had warned her of fever. And Hawk had said she couldn’t endanger the teachers by sending for them.
    He had proven to be a quick, deadly gunman, but that wasn’t his true power.
    Trickster coyote.
    Doc Mallory, true to his word, had immediately disposed of Hawk’s clothes. She closed her eyes and felt the shock of knowing that the man in her dreams, the white Indian dressed in white man’s clothes, was now lying, shot, in the next room. She sensed the danger, clear to her core. His gun-hand was convenient for her revenge—but it