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.