Twin of Fire (Montgomery/Taggert 7)

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.