“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.