After a ride that left Blair’s side bruised from slamming against the side of the carriage, Leander halted in front of a little log cabin that was at the foot of the mountains, the bare yard in front of it full of chickens, dogs and an endless number of thin, dirty children—all of whom seemed to be fighting each other for space.
Joe, little, scrawny, mostly toothless, shooed children and animals out of his way with equal disdain. “She’s in here, Doc. It ain’t like Effie to lay down durin’ the day, and now she’s been in bed for four days, and this mornin’ I couldn’t wake her up. I been doctorin’ her the best I could, but don’t nothin’ seem to help.”
Blair followed the two men into the house, looking at the wide-eyed children as she listened to the beginning of Joe’s tale of what had happened.
“I was choppin’ wood and the axe head flew off and hit Effie in the leg. It didn’t cut her real bad but she bled a lot and felt dizzy, so she went to bed—in the middle of the day! Like I said, I doctored her the best I could, but now I’m worried about her.”
The little room where the woman lay in a motionless heap was dark and foul smelling.
“Open that window and get me a lantern.”
“The wagon man said the air weren’t good for her.”
Leander gave the man a threatening look, and Joe ran to open the window.
As Joe got the lantern, Lee took a seat by the woman’s bed and pulled back the covers. On her leg was a filthy, rancid, thick bandage. “Blair, if what’s under here is what I think it is, maybe you—.”
Blair didn’t give him a chance to finish. She was examining the woman’s head, lifting her eyelids, taking her pulse, and at last bending to smell her breath. “I think this woman is drunk,” she said with wonder, as she looked about the room. On the crude little table next to the bed was an empty bottle labelled Dr. Monroe’s Elixir of Life. Guaranteed to cure whatever ails you.
She held it aloft. “Have you been giving this to your wife?”
“I paid good money for that,” Joe said indignantly. “Dr. Monroe said it’d do her a world of good.”
“Is this thing from Dr. Monroe also?” Lee asked, motioning toward the thick bandage.
“It’s a cancer plaster. I figured if it could cure cancer, it’d sure cure Effie of a little cut. Is she gonna be all right, Doc?”
Lee didn’t bother to answer the man as he began shoving pieces of wood into the old stove that sat in the corner of the room and put a kettle of water on to boil. As they waited for the water to boil and, later, while Lee and Blair were scrubbing their hands, she asked questions.
“Have you given her anything else?” she asked, dreading the man’s answer.
“Just a little gunpowder this mornin’. She was havin’ a hard time wakin’ up, and I thought gunpowder would help perk her up.”
“You damn well may have killed her,” Lee said, then his face whitened a bit as he started prying away the edges of the filthy bandage from the unconscious woman’s leg just above the knee. As he looked at the flesh under the bandage, he grimaced. “Just what I thought. Joe, go boil me some more water. I’ll have to clean this up.” The little man took one look under the bandage and hurried from the room. Lee, his eyes on Blair’s, pulled the filthy fabric back so she could see.
Tiny, squirming maggots covered the swollen, raw cut.
Blair didn’t allow herself to react as she took instruments from Lee’s bag and handed them to him. She held an enamelled basin while Lee began to carefully pick out the maggots.
“These things are really a blessing in disguise,” Lee was saying. “Maggots eat the putrefied part of the wound and keep it clean. If these”—he held one aloft on the point of his tweezers—“weren’t here, we’d probably be amputating now. I’ve even heard that doctors used to put maggots on a wound just so the worms could clean it.”
“So maybe it’s good that this place is so filthy,” Blair said with distaste, looking about the nasty little room.
Lee looked at her speculatively. “I would have thought that this sort of thing would have been too much for you.”
“I have a stronger stomach than you think. You ready for the carbolic?”
As Lee cleaned the wound further, Blair was always ready with whatever he needed, always half a step ahead of him. He handed her the needles and thread, and Blair sewed the raw edges of the cut while Lee stood back and watched her every movement. He grunted when she finished sewing and let her apply clean bandages to the wound.
Joe arrived to tell them the water was boiling.
“Then you can use it to boil these rags you call sheets,” Lee said. “I don’t want any more flies getting under that bandage. Blair, help me get these sheets out from under her. And I want some clean clothes for her, too. Blair, you can change her while Joe and I have a talk.”
Blair didn’t attempt to bathe the woman, but she was sure that the wound on her leg was the cleanest spot on her body. She managed to insert the woman’s big body into one of Joe’s night rails while the woman lolled about and grinned sometimes in her drunken stupor. Through the open window, she could see Lee and Joe at the side of the cabin, Lee towering over the little man, yelling at him, punching his chest with his finger and generally scaring the man to death. Blair almost felt sorry for Joe, who’d only been doing the best he knew how for his wife.
“Where’s the doc?”
She turned to see a man wearing the chaps and denim shirt of a cowboy standing in the doorway, his face anxious.