“But, Doc, the man’s been gut shot and he’s bleedin’. He needs somebody right away.”
Yesterday, Blair would have been furious that Lee wanted to exclude her from a case, but she knew now that he wasn’t against her helping him with the patients, so it had to be something else. She put her hand on his arm. “Whatever happens, I’m in this, too. You can’t protect me.” There was a hint of threat in her voice that said that she’d follow him if he left her behind.
“They ain’t shootin’ now, Doc,” the cowboy said. “The lady’ll be safe while you patch Ben up.”
Leander glanced at Blair, then skyward. “I hope I don’t live to regret this,” he said, as he snapped the whip over the horse, and they were off.
Blair grabbed the side of the carriage and said, “Shooting?” But no one heard her.
They left the horse and carriage some distance away and the cowboy led them to the ruins of an adobe house, stuck on a steep hillside, a section of the roof fallen in.
“Where are the others?” Lee asked and looked to where the cowboy pointed through the trees toward another ruin.
Blair wanted to ask questions about what was going on, but Lee put his hand in the small of her back and pushed her forward into the ruin. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a man and a fat, dirty woman sitting on the floor below what was left of a window, rifles across their shoulders, pistols by their sides, spent shells all around them. In the corner were three horses. With her eyes wide as she looked around, she was sure that she was in the midst of something she didn’t like.
“Let’s sew him up and get out of here,” Lee said, bringing her back to the task at hand.
In the darkest part of the shack, on the floor, was a man holding his stomach with his hands, his face white.
“Do you know how to give chloroform?” Lee asked, as he sterilized his hands.
Blair nodded and began to remove bottles and candles from her bag. “Can he hold his liquor?” she asked the people in the room.
“Well, sure,” the cowboy said hesitantly, “but we don’t have no liquor. You have some?”
Blair was very patient. “I’m trying to figure out how much chloroform to give him, and a man who takes a lot of whiskey to get drunk requires more chloroform to put him under.”
The cowboy grinned. “Ben can outdrink anybody. Takes two bottles of whiskey just to make him feel good. I ain’t never seen him drunk.”
Blair nodded, tried to estimate the weight of the man and began to pour chloroform onto a cone. When he began to go under, he fought the gas, and Blair stretched her body across the top of him while Leander held the man’s lower half. Thankfully, he didn’t have too much strength left and couldn’t do much damage to his wound.
When Lee pulled away the man’s pants and they saw the hole the gunshot had made in his stomach, Blair suspected there wasn’t much chance for him, but Lee didn’t seem to think that way as he cut into the man’s abdomen.
A friend of Uncle Henry’s, a doctor who specialized in abdominal surgery, had once visited them from New York and he had been there when a little girl was brought in who’d fallen on the broken half of a bottle. Blair had been in the surgery when the man’d removed the glass from the child’s stomach and repaired three holes in her intestines. That single operation had so impressed Blair that she’d decided to specialize in abdominal surgery,
But, now, as she watched Leander, threading one needle after another for him, she was awed. The bullet had entered the man at his hipbone and travelled crosswise to leave at the bottom of his buttocks, puncturing his intestines over and over as it made its way through.
Leander’s long fingers followed the bullet’s pathway, sewing layers of intestines as he went. Blair counted fourteen holes that he sewed together before he reached the man’s skin and the exit hole of the bullet.
“He’s to eat absolutely nothing for four days,” Leander was saying as he sewed the man back together. “On the fifth day he can have liquids. If he disobeys me and sneaks food, he’ll be dead within two hours because the food will poison him.” He looked up at the cowboy. “Is that clear?”
No one answered Lee because just then about six bullets came whizzing into the ruined shack.
“Damn!” Lee said, cutting off the last stitches with the scissors Blair had handed him. “I thought they’d give us enough time.”
“What’s going on?” Blair asked.
“These idiots,” he said, not bothering to lower his voice, “are having a range war. There’s usually one or two going on around Chandler. This one’s been on about six months now. We might be here for a while until they decide to take another break.”
“Break?”
Lee wiped his hands. “They’re quite civilized about it all. When a person’s wounded, they cease fire until a doctor can be found and brought into wherever they’re holed up. Unfortunately, they feel no such obligation to stop until the doctor’s out again. We may be here until morning. Once I was stuck someplace for two days. And now you see why I wanted you to stay at Winter’s ranch.”
Blair began cleaning and putting the instruments back into the two medical bags. “So now we just wait?”
“Now we wait.”
Lee led her behind a low adobe wall that had once been a room partition. He sat down in the farthest corner and motioned for Blair to sit next to him, but she wouldn’t. She felt that she should stay as far away from him as possible and so leaned against the opposite wall. When a bullet hit the wall two feet from her head, she practically leaped into Leander’s open arms and buried her face against his chest.
“I’d never have guessed that I could like a range war,” he murmured and began to kiss her neck.
“Don’t start that again,” Blair said, even as she turned her head so he could reach her lips.
It didn’t take Lee long to realize that he couldn’t continue this pursuit, not here and now with so many people present and bullets flying around them. “All right. I’ll stop,” he said and smiled at the look on Blair’s face.
She didn’t move away from him but stayed in his arms, since his nearness made her feel very safe and the sounds of the bullets seem farther away. “Tell me where you learned to sew up intestines like that.”
“So, you want more sweet talk. Well, let’s see, the first time…”
Blair seemed insatiable. For hours they sat snuggled together, Blair asking endless questions about how Leander had learned things, what cases he’d had in the past, what was his most difficult case, his funniest, why he’d become a doctor in the first place, on and on, until, to give himself a break, he began to ask her questions.
The sun went down, there was a lull in the shooting now and then, but for the most part it kept on all night. Lee tried to get Blair to sleep, but she refused.
“I see you’re watching him,” she said, nodding toward the man who’d been shot. “You have no intention of sleeping nor do I. What do you think his chances of living are?”
“It all depends on infection, and that’s controlled by God. All I can do is sew him up.”
The sky began to grow light and Leander said he needed to check his patient, who was beginning to stir.
Blair stood to stretch, and the next minute a sound reached her that made her forget everything except her profession. It was the sound of a bullet connecting with flesh.
Blair moved away from Lee and ran around the corner of the low wall just in time to see what had happened. The man who had not spoken had been shot in the chin and the woman had grabbed a handful of fresh horse manure and was about to apply it to the open wound.
Blair didn’t think about the bullets flying over her head as she launched herself from a standing position and leaped on top of the big woman.
Startled, angry, the woman began to fight Blair and Blair had to protect herself from the woman’s fists—but, under no circumstances was she going to allow that woman to put horse manure on an open wound.
Blair was so set on her purpose
that she wasn’t even aware when she and the woman went rolling out the wide opening where the door used to be.
One minute, Blair was trying to remove the woman’s hand from her hair, and the next minute, there was the thunder of rifle fire directly above them.
Both women stopped their fighting and looked up to see Leander standing between them and the shack across the way, a rifle at his hip, blazing as fast as he could cock it and fire.
“Get the hell inside,” he yelled at the women, and the next minute, he let out a stream of profanity directed at the men in the other shack, telling them that he was Dr. Westfield, and that he knew who they were, and if they ever came to him for help, he’d let them bleed to death.
The firing ceased.
When Leander walked back into the shack, Blair was cleaning the chin of the injured man.
“If you ever do anything like that again, so help me—.” He broke off as he couldn’t seem to find a threat bad enough.
He stood over Blair very quietly as she sewed the man’s chin and bandaged it, and when she had put on the last bit of adhesive plaster, he grabbed her arm and pulled her upright.
“We’re getting out of here this minute. They can all shoot each other for all I care. I’ll not risk you for any of them.”
Blair barely had time to grab her bag before Lee pulled her out of the cabin.
“Your union man came last night,” Reed greeted his son as soon as Lee walked into the house.
As Leander rubbed a sore place on his back where a wooden plank had gouged it all night, he looked up at his father in alarm. “You didn’t let anyone see him, did you?”
Reed gave his son a withering look. “All he’s done is eat and sleep, which looks to be something that you haven’t done in days. I hope you didn’t keep Blair out all night. Gates is after your hide as it is.”
Lee wanted nothing more than to eat and take a nap before he had to be at the hospital, but it didn’t look as if he were going to have time. “Is he ready to go?”
Reed was quiet for a moment, watching his son, feeling that this might be the last time he ever saw him alive. He always felt this way before Lee left to take one of the unionists into the mine camps. “He’s ready,” was all Reed said at last.
Wearily, Lee went to the stables and sent the stableboy on an errand while he hitched a horse to his carriage. His appaloosa was too tired after being out all night, so Lee took one of his father’s horses. Watching to see that no one could see them, he went to the door to get the man waiting beside his father. Lee only glanced at the young man, but he had the same light in his eyes that all the unionists had: a light of fire, an intensity that burned with such heat that you knew there was no need to talk to the men about the danger that they faced, because these men wouldn’t care. What they were doing, the cause they were fighting for, was more important than their lives.
Leander had removed most of the implements of his profession from the compartment in the back of his carriage —the big space that Blair had been so curious about—and now the man slipped inside. There was no talking, because all three men were too aware of the possibilities of what could happen today. The coal-camp guards would shoot to kill first, then ask questions of the dead men.
Reed handed Lee a papier-mâché cast that slipped into grooves in the sides of the compartment above the level of the man, a cast that at quick glance looked like a pile of blankets, a shotgun, rope, and a saw—things that any man might have in his carriage. On top, Lee put his medical bag.
For a moment, Read touched his son’s shoulder, then Lee was in the carriage and off.
Leander drove as quickly as he could without causing the hidden man too much pain. Two weeks ago, he and his father had had another discussion about what Lee was doing, Reed saying that Lee shouldn’t risk his life to get these unionists into the camps, that even if he were caught and somehow managed to live, no court in the country would uphold what he was doing.
As Lee drove closer to the road that turned off to the coal camps, he went slower, watching about him as best he could to see that no one was near who shouldn’t be. With a smile, Lee remembered when he’d defended the man who owned the coal mines around Chandler, Jacob Fenton, to Blair. He’d made excuses for Fenton and said that the man had to answer to stockholders, that he wasn’t fully responsible for the miners’ plight. Lee often said things like that to throw people off the track. It wouldn’t do for them to find out how deeply he felt about the mistreatment of the miners.
Coal miners were given two choices: they either obeyed the company rules or they were out of work. It was as simple as that. But the rules were not for men, they were for prisoners!
Everything to do with the mines was owned by the company. The men were paid in currency that could be exchanged only at the company stores, and a man could be fired if he were found to have bought something at a store in town. Not that the men were allowed out of the camps to go into town. The mine owners argued that the coal camps were towns, and that the miners and their families didn’t need anything from the surrounding town. And the owners said that the guards at the gates, who allowed no one in or out, were keeping out unscrupulous thieves and fast-talking men; the guards were “protecting” the miners.
But the truth was, the guards were there to keep out agitators. They were there to keep away all possibility of union organizers coming into the camps and talking to the miners.
The owners couldn’t abide the possibility of a strike, and they had the legal right to post armed guards at the entrances and to search the vehicles that went in or out.
There were very few carriages that were allowed inside: some old women in town brought in fresh vegetables, a couple of repairmen were allowed in now and then, the mine inspectors, and there was a company doctor who made rounds, a man who was so poor a doctor that he couldn’t support himself in private practice. The company paid him mostly in whiskey and, in gratitude, he ignored most of what he saw, declaring the company not at fault in every accident case, so that no benefits were due the widow and orphaned children.
A year ago Lee had gone to Fenton and asked permission to go into the camps—at no expense to the mine owner—to examine the health of the miners. Fenton had hesitated, but then he’d given permission.
What Lee had seen had horrified him. The poverty was such that he could barely stand it. The men struggled all day under the earth to make a living, and at the end of the week they could barely feed their families. They were paid by the amount of coal they brought out, but a third of their time was spent on what the miners called “dead work,” work for which they received no pay. They themselves had to pay for the timbers that they used for shoring the mines, because the owner said that safety was the miners’ responsibility, not his.
After the first days in the coal camps, Lee’d gone home and not been able to say much for days. He looked at the rich little town of Chandler, saw his sister come home from The Famous with fifteen yards of expensive cashmere, and he thought of the children he’d seen standing in the snow with no shoes on. He remembered the men standing in line for their pay and hearing the paymaster tell them what they were being charged for for that week.
And the more he thought, the more he was sure that he had to do something. He had no idea what he could do until he began to see articles in the newspaper about the organization of unions in the East. Aloud, he wondered to his father whether unionists could be persuaded to come to Colorado.
Reed, as soon as he realized what his son was thinking about, tried to dissuade him, but Lee kept going to the camps, and the more he saw, the more he knew what he had to do. He took the train to Kentucky and there met his first union organizers and talked to them about what was happening in Colorado. He learned about the early unsuccessful attempts at unionization in Colorado, and he was warned that his involvement could get him killed.
Leander remembered holding an emaciated little three-year-old girl in his arms as she died from pneumonia, and he agreed t
o help however he could.
So far, he’d managed to bring three unionists into the camps, and the owners were aware that they’d been there and that someone was helping the miners, so they were more and more on guard.
Last year, a big coal miner by the name of Rafe Taggert had begun to hint that he was the one to blame, that he was the one who was bringing the organizers into the camps. For some reason, the man believed that neither the guards nor the owner would harm him, that no “accidents” would be arranged to get him out of the way. There were rumors that Taggert’s brother was once married to Fenton’s sister, but no one was sure. Since coal miners had to move around a great deal as one mine after another closed, not many people had been in this area long enough to remember something that may or may not have happened over thirty years ago.
But whatever the reason, the suspicion was on Rafe Taggert, and no one had so far suspected the handsome young doctor who so kindly offered his time to help the miners.
As Lee pulled into the gate area of the Empress Mine, he did his best to act nonchalant and exchange banter with the guards. No one checked him and he drove to the far end of the camp to let the man hide in the trees until Lee could go from house to house to start getting a meeting together. Only three men would meet with the organizer at a time. The young man would stay there all day and into the night, risking his life every minute. And Lee would go from house to house looking at the children and telling the men where to meet the organizer and, with each telling, he was putting his life in peril, because he already knew that one of these men was an informer.
Chapter 13
Blair woke on Sunday morning feeling wonderful. She stretched long and hard, listened to the birds outside her window and thought that it must be the best of days. Her mind was full of all the things that she and Lee had done the day before. She remembered the way he’d repaired the man’s intestines, his long fingers expert, knowing what he was supposed to do.
She wished Alan could have seen him operating.