Banner O'Brien by Linda Lael Miller

giving the words a levity that she hoped would disguise her interest in his answer.
    He was stubbornly silent.
    And it was then, of all times, that Banner realized the pitiful entirety of her problem.
    She loved Adam Corbin.
    For a time she tried to deny it. She hadn’t known him long enough. It was unreasonable. It was impossible; it was hopeless. She’d been hurt too badly in love to wander witlessly into its net again—hadn’t she?
    The buggy shifted and rolled onward, and Banner grew quietly desperate with the need to escape it, to escape the way gravity kept thrusting this man’s rock-hard frame against her own.
    Tears smarted in her eyes, and she turned her head away so that Adam would not see them. The forest passed in a fragrant green and white blur.
    Presently the rig came to another stop, and Banner was jolted out of her reflective misery by a pungent stench composed predominantly of fish oil and human waste.
    She wrinkled her nose.
    Adam arched one eyebrow and indicated the Indian village below the ridge on which they sat. “Pleasant, isn’t it?” he drawled. “Would you like to wait here?”
    Nausea welled, scalding, into Banner’s throat, but she shook her head. Bad smells were something one got used to, and for all her revulsion, she was wildly curious about the Klallum village and its people.
    From their vantage point she could see a series of long wooden buildings constructed of unpainted cedar or pine. Between them, quick red children frolicked in the snow. Squaws in buckskin shifts or ill-fitting discards from the wardrobes of white women tended fires, wove baskets, and dug for clams along the shore beyond the camp.
    The braves sat in circles, talking and engaging in what appeared to be games of chance.
    Banner looked again at the lodges, feeling a little disappointed that there were no teepees.
    Adam secured the buggy’s brake and jumped to the ground, his bag in one hand. “Come on, O’Brien,” he said, walking away.
    Banner scrambled after him with such haste that, had he not caught her arm and steadied her, she would probably have rolled down the slanting face of the ridge in a ball of gray woolen and ruffled muslin petticoats.
    The tribe was aware of them now, and the children came forward first, dancing around Adam as though he were a piper and shouting questions in a mixture of English and Chinook, the jargon that had begun as amethod of intertribal communication, long before the advent of the whites.
    A small boy caught at Adam’s hand, his dark eyes shining. “Kloochman?” he cried eagerly, indicating Banner. “Big Doctor’s kloochman?”
    Adam laughed and shook his head.
    “What was he saying?” demanded Banner, in a whisper.
    Adam looked at her with mischief and something resembling tenderness. “Never mind, O’Brien. I’ll explain it later.”
    “Ub-ran!” shouted the child in triumph.
    “What is an ub-ran?” Banner insisted, as the braves and squaws began to gravitate toward them in unnerving numbers.
    “It’s you, Shamrock,” he replied. “The boy was trying to say ‘O’Brien.’”
    Feeling foolish, Banner eyed the horde of approaching Indians. “Are they dangerous?”
    “Only if you accept a luncheon invitation.”
    “They’re not cannibals!” cried Banner, who wasn’t so sure.
    Adam chuckled. “No, but they’re terrible cooks. Step it up, Ub-ran. The glamorous practice of frontier medicine awaits.”
    The masses had reached them, and a man Banner would have sworn she’d met or seen before stepped forward and caught at her cloak with a semi-clean hand. “Kloochman?” he beamed, peering up into Adam’s face as he spoke.
    Adam laughed again, this time throwing back his head in the force of his amusement, and the sound pleased the savage, as did his reply. “God forbid!”
    Banner was not to be put off again. “What is a kloochman?” she whispered tersely.
    “A wife,” replied Adam, without so much as glancing at her.
    Banner stiffened, but even