Twin of Fire Read online

  “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