“Have you eaten?” she asked Lee.
“It seems as though I haven’t eaten in days,” he answered, smiling back at her, and again she was impressed by how good-looking he was, with those green ey
es. And for some reason, she was reminded of the night they’d spent together. It was odd that she should think of that now, because she hadn’t remembered it in days. Perhaps it was that now he wasn’t trying to enrage her.
“Come into the kitchen and I’ll fix you some breakfast. Even I know how to fry eggs and bacon. Mr. Gates’s meal will probably be late and the entire household’ll catch it, but we’ll not be here to hear what he has to say.”
A half hour later, Lee leaned back from the big oak kitchen table and wiped his mouth. “Blair, I had no idea that you could cook. It seems too much to hope for in a woman, one who can cook, a woman who can be a man’s friend, a colleague,” his eyes and voice lowered, “a lover.” With a sigh, he looked back at her. “I swore to myself that I wasn’t going to be a sore loser, that I was going to give up gracefully.” He gave her a sweet little-boy smile. “You’ll have to forgive me if I forget sometimes.”
“Yes, of course,” she said nervously and realized that she was once again thinking of that night together. That night, when she’d been free to kiss him, when his hands…
“They aren’t clean?”
“I beg your pardon?” she said, coming back to the present.
“You were staring at my hands and I wondered if maybe something was wrong with them.”
“I…Are you ready to go?”
“Whenever you are,” he said, rising and pulling back her chair.
Blair smiled at him and thought of that ill-mannered man Houston said she planned to marry and thought that there was no comparison between him and Lee.
On the way to the hospital, he asked her about Alan and she told him that he was to meet them at the infirmary. He did, looking sleepy and a bit sullen at seeing Leander and Blair arriving together.
The day was a hard, long one. It seemed that every patient was Lee’s sole responsibility, and the three of them had to do the work of a dozen people. At one o’clock, four men who’d been hurt when the end of a tunnel of the Inexpressible Mine had collapsed were brought in. Two of them were dead, one had a broken leg, but the fourth man was hovering between life and death.
“He’s a goner,” Alan said, “might as well leave him.”
But Blair was looking at the man’s eyes, closed now, but she saw that he was struggling to live. She couldn’t tell what was hurt inside him, but she thought that maybe he had a chance. By all rights, he should be dead now, yet he wanted to live enough that he was hanging on.
Blair looked at Lee, and for a moment he was reminded of the union organizers’ eyes.
“I think there’s a chance. Can we open him and see? I think he wants to live,” she persisted.
“Blair,” Alan said in an exasperated voice, “anyone can see that he can’t live more than minutes. His whole insides must be crushed. Let him die with his family.”
Blair didn’t even look at Alan, but kept her eyes on Lee. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Let’s get him to the operating room,” Leander bellowed. “No! don’t move him. Keep him on that table and we’ll carry it.”
Blair was right, but so was Alan. His insides were crushed, but not as badly as they’d thought when they’d first opened him. His spleen was ruptured and it was bleeding a lot, but they managed to remove it and clean some of the other wounds.
Because of the internal bleeding, they had to work fast and, without anyone being conscious of what was happening, Alan was pushed out of the way. Leander and Blair, who worked so well together and who had the experience, sewed as fast as Mrs. Krebbs could thread needles. She was Leander’s favorite nurse and had been with him since he’d returned to Chandler. Alan, realizing that he couldn’t work as fast as Leander and Blair, stepped back and let the three of them repair the man’s mashed insides.
When they had sewed him shut, they left the operating room.
“What do you think?” Blair asked Lee.
“Now is when God comes into the matter, but I think that you and I did the best we could.” He grinned at her. “You were damned good in there. Wasn’t she, Mrs. Krebbs?”
The stout, gray-haired woman grunted. “We’ll see if the patient lives,” she said as she left the room.
“Not given to compliments, I take it,” Blair said, as she scrubbed the blood from her hands.
“Only when you deserve them. I’m still waiting for mine. Of course, I’ve only been here two years.”
As the two of them laughed together, Blair wasn’t aware of Alan standing against the wall watching them.