As soon as she climbed into Lee’s carriage, he started off in the way that Blair was beginning to prepare herself for. She held on for dear life.
“Where is this first case?” she shouted over the sounds of the carriage tearing along the road south out of Chandler.
“I don’t usually do these calls anymore, since I work in the hospital most of the time,” he shouted back at her. “So some of the cases I haven’t seen, but this one I happen to know. It’s Joe Gleason, and his wife’s sick. I’m sure it’s another baby. Somehow, Effie manages to produce one every eight months.” He gave her a sideways look. “Ever caught a newborn?”
Blair nodded and smiled. Since she’d lived with her uncle, she’d an advantage that the other students in her college did not have: she’d been able to work with patients rather than just learn theory from books.
After a ride that left Blair’s side bruised from slamming against the side of the carriage, Leander halted in front of a little log cabin that was at the foot of the mountains, the bare yard in front of it full of chickens, dogs and an endless number of thin, dirty children—all of whom seemed to be fighting each other for space.
Joe, little, scrawny, mostly toothless, shooed children and animals out of his way with equal disdain. “She’s in here, Doc. It ain’t like Effie to lay down durin’ the day, and now she’s been in bed for four days, and this mornin’ I couldn’t wake her up. I been doctorin’ her the best I could, but don’t nothin’ seem to help.”
Blair followed the two men into the house, looking at the wide-eyed children as she listened to the beginning of Joe’s tale of what had happened.
“I was choppin’ wood and the axe head flew off and hit Effie in the leg. It didn’t cut her real bad but she bled a lot and felt dizzy, so she went to bed—in the middle of the day! Like I said, I doctored her the best I could, but now I’m worried about her.”
The little room where the woman lay in a motionless heap was dark and foul smelling.
“Open that window and get me a lantern.”
“The wagon man said the air weren’t good for her.”
Leander gave the man a threatening look, and Joe ran to open the window.
As Joe got the lantern, Lee took a seat by the woman’s bed and pulled back the covers. On her leg was a filthy, rancid, thick bandage. “Blair, if what’s under here is what I think it is, maybe you—.”
Blair didn’t give him a chance to finish. She was examining the woman’s head, lifting her eyelids, taking her pulse, and at last bending to smell her breath. “I think this woman is drunk,” she said with wonder, as she looked about the room. On the crude little table next to the bed was an empty bottle labelled Dr. Monroe’s Elixir of Life. Guaranteed to cure whatever ails you.
She held it aloft. “Have you been giving this to your wife?”
“I paid good money for that,” Joe said indignantly. “Dr. Monroe said it’d do her a world of good.”
“Is this thing from Dr. Monroe also?” Lee asked, motioning toward the thick bandage.
“It’s a cancer plaster. I figured if it could cure cancer, it’d sure cure Effie of a little cut. Is she gonna be all right, Doc?”
Lee didn’t bother to answer the man as he began shoving pieces of wood into the old stove that sat in the corner of the room and put a kettle of water on to boil. As they waited for the water to boil and, later, while Lee and Blair were scrubbing their hands, she asked questions.
“Have you given her anything else?” she asked, dreading the man’s answer.
“Just a little gunpowder this mornin’. She was havin’ a hard time wakin’ up, and I thought gunpowder would help perk her up.”
“You damn well may have killed her,” Lee said, then his face whitened a bit as he started prying away the edges of the filthy bandage from the unconscious woman’s leg just above the knee. As he looked at the flesh under the bandage, he grimaced. “Just what I thought. Joe, go boil me some more water. I’ll have to clean this up.” The little man took one look under the bandage and hurried from the room. Lee, his eyes on Blair’s, pulled the filthy fabric back so she could see.
Tiny, squirming maggots covered the swollen, raw cut.
Blair didn’t allow herself to react as she took instruments from Lee’s bag and handed them to him. She held an enamelled basin while Lee began to carefully pick out the maggots.
“These things are really a blessing in disguise,” Lee was saying. “Maggots eat the putrefied part of the wound and keep it clean. If these”—he held one aloft on the point of his tweezers—“weren’t here, we’d probably be amputating now. I’ve even heard that doctors used to put maggots on a wound just so the worms could clean it.”
“So maybe it’s good that this place is so filthy,” Blair said with distaste, looking about the nasty little room.
Lee looked at her speculatively. “I would have thought that this sort of thing would have been too much for you.”
“I have a stronger stomach than you think. You ready for the carbolic?”
As Lee cleaned the wound further, Blair was always ready with whatever he needed, always half a step ahead of him. He handed her the needles and thread, and Blair sewed the raw edges of the cut while Lee stood back and watched her every movement. He grunted when she finished sewing and let her apply clean bandages to the wound.
Joe arrived to tell them the water was boiling.
“Then you can use it to boil these rags you call sheets,” Lee said. “I don’t want any more flies getting under that bandage. Blair, help me get these sheets out from under her. And I want some clean clothes for her, too. Blair, you can change her while Joe and I have a talk.”
Blair didn’t attempt to bathe the woman, but she was sure that the wound on her leg was the cleanest spot on her body. She managed to insert the woman’s big body into one of Joe’s night rails while the woman lolled about and grinned sometimes in her drunken stupor. Through the open window, she could see Lee and Joe at the side of the cabin, Lee towering over the little man, yelling at him, punching his chest with his finger and generally scaring the man to death. Blair almost felt sorry for Joe, who’d only been doing the best he knew how for his wife.
“Where’s the doc?”
She turned to see a man wearing the chaps and denim shirt of a cowboy standing in the doorway, his face anxious.
“I’m a doctor,” Blair said. “Do you need help?”
His deep-set eyes in his thin face looked her up and down. “Ain’t that Doc Westfield’s rig outside?”
“Frank?” Lee asked from behind them. “Is something wrong?”
The cowboy turned around. “A wagon fell down an arroyo. There were three men on it, and one of ‘em’s hurt pretty bad.”
Lee said, “Get my bag,” over his shoulder to Blair as he hurried to the carriage, and it was already moving by the time she got there. Silently, as she tossed the two bags to the floor of the carriage, grabbed the roof support and put her foot on the runner, she thanked Mr. Cantrell for the design of her suit that gave her such mobility.
Lee did grab her upper arm with one hand, as he held the reins with the other, and helped haul her inside as the horse broke into a full gallop. When she was seated, the bags held firmly between her feet, she looked at Lee and he winked at her—a wink with some pride in it.
“This is the Bar S Ranch,” Lee shouted, “and Frank is the foreman.”
They followed the cowboy, Lee making the buggy go nearly as fast as the lone rider, for about four miles before they saw any buildings. There were four little shacks and a corral precariously pasted onto the side of Ayers Peak.
Lee grabbed his bag, tossed the reins to one of the three cowboys standing nearby and went into the first shack, Blair, bag in hand, on his heels.
There was a man lying on a bunk, his left sleeve soaked with blood. Lee deftly cut the fabric away and a spurt of blood hit his shirt. The encrustation of dried blood on the cowboy’s shirt had temporarily sealed the cut artery and ke
pt the man from bleeding to death. Lee pinched the artery with his fingers and held it; there was no time to think about washing.
The cowboys stood over them, barely giving them room, as Blair poured carbolic over her hands and, with a gesture that was as practiced as if they’d been working together for years, Lee released the artery while Blair’s smaller fingers took hold. Then Lee disinfected his hands, threaded a needle and, while Blair held the wound open, he sewed. In another few minutes, they had the wound closed.
The cowboys stepped back and their eyes were on Blair.
“I think he’ll be all right,” Lee said, standing, wiping the blood off his hands with a clean cloth from his bag. “He’s lost a lot of blood, but if he pulls through from the shock, I think he’ll make it. Who else?”
“Me,” said a man on another bunk. “I busted my leg.”
Leander slit the man’s pant leg, felt the shin bone. “Somebody hold his shoulders. I’ll have to pull it into place.”
Blair looked about the room as three men moved in front of her to hold the cowboy’s shoulders. Leaning against a wall was an enormous man, with arms the size of hams. His big, wide face that looked as if it’d seen many fights, was white with what Blair recognized to be pain, and he was cradling one arm with the other.
She went to him. “Were you in the wagon accident?”
He glanced down at her, then away. “I’ll wait for the doc.”
She started to turn away. “I’m a doctor, too, but you’re right, I’d probably hurt you more than you could stand.”
“You?” the man said; then, as Blair faced him, she saw his face turn even paler.
“Sit down,” she ordered and he obeyed, sitting on a bench near the wall. As carefully as she could, she removed his shirt and saw what she’d guessed was wrong with him: that big shoulder of his had become dislocated in the fall. “It’s going to hurt some.”
He arched his eyebrow at her from under a brow beaded with sweat. “It’s doin’ that now.”
All the cowboys were gathered around Lee as he set the broken leg, and one in the back of the watching crowd had a whiskey bottle to his lips. Blair snatched it away from him and handed it to her patient. “This’ll help.”
Blair wasn’t sure she was physically strong enough to do what she knew had to be done, but she also knew she couldn’t stand by and wait for Leander to finish while this man suffered. She’d set a dislocation only once before, and that had been for a child.
With a deep breath and a prayer, she began to flex his forearm, then pressed it against the wall of his massive chest. Grabbing a box of canned goods, she stood on it and, with great effort, managed to raise his big arm high in the air and rotate it. She repeated the procedure, trying not to cause him more pain. She was sweating and panting with the exertion of trying to move that big arm inside a joint that was as big as her hips.
Suddenly, the humerus snapped back into place with a loud click and the deed was done.
Blair stepped back off her box, and she and her patient grinned at each other.
“You’re a fine doctor,” he said, beaming.
Blair turned around and, to her surprise, everyone in the room, including the two other injured men, were watching her. And they stayed there, staring silently while Blair bandaged the man’s shoulder with her best basket-weave pattern, making it pretty as well as comfortable and useful.
Leander broke the silence when she’d finished. “If you two are ready to stop congratulating each other, I have more patients to see to.” His words were at odds with the sparkle of pride in his eyes.
“Ain’t you one of them Chandler twins?” a cowboy asked, walking with them to the buggy.
“Blair,” she answered.
“She’s a doctor, too,” Frank said, and they were all looking at her strangely.
“Thanks, Dr. Westfield and Dr. Chandler,” the man with the dislocated shoulder said as they climbed into the carriage.
“Might as well get used to calling her Westfield, too,” Leander said as he snapped the reins. “She’s marrying me next week.”
Blair couldn’t say a word, since she nearly fell out of the carriage as Leander’s horse leaped ahead.
Chapter 12
Leander slowed the horse when they were away from the line shacks.
“My father’s housekeeper packed us a lunch. I’ll stand while you get it out, and we’ll eat on the way to the ranch.”
Lee stood in the carriage, like a gladiator in a chariot, and Blair lifted the seat. “What an awful lot of room,” she said, surprised, looking at the blankets, a shotgun, boxes of ammunition, extra harness, and tools that were stored under the hinged seat. “I don’t believe I’ve seen a compartment with that much room before.”
Leander frowned at her over his shoulder, but she didn’t see him. “That’s the way it came,” he mumbled.
Blair stuck her head farther into the compartment, looking at the sides of it. “I don’t believe it is. I think it’s been altered, something removed to make the space larger. I wonder why.”
“I bought the thing used. Maybe some farmer wanted to carry his pigs back there. Are you going to get the food or are we going to starve to death?”
Blair took a big picnic basket out of the hole and sat back down. “It’s big enough to hold a man,” she said, as she withdrew a box of fried chicken, a jar of potato salad, and a jar of iced lemonade from the basket.
“Are you going to talk about that all day? What if I tell you some stories about when I was interning in Chicago?” Anything, Leander thought, to get her mind off that space back there. If the coal mine guards were half as observant as Blair, he wouldn’t be alive today.
He ate chicken with one hand, held the reins with the other and told her a long story of a young man who’d been brought in by the police one night and, because he was already blue from not breathing, he was pronounced to be as good as dead—but Leander had thought there was hope. He’d tried rhythmical manipulations, but when there was no response, he’d examined the patient and found that his eyes were pinpoints, so Leander had guessed that the man was a victim of “knockout drops”: opium.
“Are you going to eat all of that potato salad yourself?” Lee asked and, when Blair started to hand him the jar with the fork in it, he said he couldn’t possibly eat it and the chicken and drive the buggy. So, Blair had to move so that she was sitting beside him and could feed the salad to him.
“Go on with your story.”
“I realized that the only way to keep the man from going into a coma was to continue artificial respiration until he revived. None of the other doctors would waste his time on a man they considered as good as dead, so they went to bed and the nurses and I took turns trying to save the man.”
“I’m sure the nurses would help you,” she said.
He grinned at her. “I didn’t have much trouble with them, if that’s what you mean.”
She shoved a large forkful of salad into his mouth. “Are you going to brag or are you going to tell the story?”
Leander continued telling of the long night of trying to save the man, of how he’d taken an icy cloth and repeatedly flicked the man on his bare stomach, then there was heart stimulation, and gallons of black coffee. He and the nurses had worked in relays all night, walking him until morning, when they’d thought he was out of danger and they could put him in bed and let him sleep.
Lee had had fewer than two hours sleep that night before he was due back on duty, and when he made morning rounds, he went into this patient’s room, ready to be modest in the blaze of this man’s praise for working so hard to save his life.
“But what the man said was, ‘See, doctor, see, they did not get my watch. It was safe inside my pants, hidden from the thieves that poisoned me.’”
“He didn’t even acknowledge that you’d done all that for him?” Blair asked in disbelief.
Leander smiled at her, and in a moment she began to see the humor of the situation. There were times whe
n being a doctor wasn’t the glory that one expected, but it was just plain hard work.
They finished the lunch and, as they travelled, Blair got Lee to tell her more stories about his experiences as a doctor, both in America and abroad. In turn, she told him about her Uncle Henry and her schooling, where the teachers had been so rough, saying that the women would be competing with male doctors who expected the women to be ill-trained, so, of course, the women had to be the best. She told him about the gruelling three-day test that she’d had to take to get into St. Joseph’s Hospital. “And I won!” she said and went on to tell Leander about the hospital. She wasn’t aware of the way that Lee was looking at her as she talked about her future at the hospital.
In the early afternoon, they reached the outskirts of the Winter ranch, and Lee drove them to the big old ranch house to visit the rancher’s eight-year-old daughter who was recovering from typhoid.
The little girl was perfectly fine, and Lee and Blair stayed for a cup of milk warm from the cow and an enormous chunk of corn bread.
“That’s all the pay we’ll probably get,” Lee said, as they got back into the carriage. “Doctors don’t get rich in the country. It’s good you’ll have me to support you.”
Blair started to say that she had no plans to stay in Chandler or to marry him, but something made her stop. Maybe it was the way he’d hinted that she really was a doctor, and that when—if—they were married, she would still practice medicine. And considering the prejudice and bigotry in this town, that was saying a lot.
They were barely off the rancher’s land when a cowboy rode up to them, his horse stopping on its back legs and raising a cloud of dust over them. “We need some help, Doc,” the cowboy said.
To Blair’s disbelief, Lee did not take off immediately with his usual lightning speed.
“Aren’t you from the Lazy J?”
The cowboy nodded.
“I want to take the lady back to Winter’s ranch before I go with you.”