ground. It was all she could do to lift her daughter and carry her a few steps.
Captain Call wasn't as heavy as Clarie, not nearly. It seemed absurd to her that this man, old and small, was still the man they sent after the meanest killers. They should have found a younger manhunter long since, and Captain Call should have been living a safer life.
That was wisdom come too late, though. As she was carrying him to the horse, the Captain woke.
He looked at the ground, as if surprised that a woman was carrying him. But his eyes were not focusing, for he was in great pain.
'Captain, do you think you can ride?' Lorena asked. 'I caught that other horse--I'll put you on Blackie.' Call blinked; the world was hazy. He saw the black horse standing by the dead horse. Lorena was carrying him as if he weighed nothing. The fact was, his weight had dropped in the last few years. But not being on his own feet startled him. It made him wonder if he was still himself.
He had always had his own feet on the ground.
To be carried, even the few steps to the horse, was like floating. He felt he was floating into another life, a life so different from his old one that he wondered if he would even have the same name.
'I ain't been carried since my ma carried me, I guess,' he whispered.
Lorena got his good foot in the stirrup.
Call pulled up with her help, but when he swung his bad leg over the saddle, he yelled out; then he vomited and fainted.
At least he was on the horse, Lorena thought.
He was unconscious. She cut his lariat into sections with the big bowie knife he kept in his saddlebags, and then she tied him on.
The buckskin stray was jumpy when she first mounted, but she walked him until he settled down. Captain Call was alive, but only just.
She didn't want any jumpy horses causing his death. She led Blackie, and led him slowly.
She hoped Call would come to from time to time, to direct her if she strayed off course.
Call did awaken several times during the day, but he was too weak to speak. The pain in his leg was so intense that he could not hang on to consciousness for more than a few minutes. Lorena checked on him frequently. She was hoping for directions, but Call's whispers were incoherent. He muttered a name, but she didn't catch it.
Lorena stopped well before dark. She wanted plenty of time to gather firewood. They stopped by a little creek with a trickle of water in it. She wanted to heat water and try again to wash the Captain's wounds. He had wet himself during the long day horseback. She knew she could never manage to change his pants with the shattered knee, but she could at least put him by the fire and dry him. The wound in his chest was still leaking blood. She cleaned that and then cleaned off the saddle; it was a bloody, smelly mess.
Lorena gathered an abundance of firewood and drank several cups of strong coffee. She gave the Captain some and he came awake enough to drink it gratefully. All they had was bacon.
Lorena fried some, but the Captain only ate two bites.
'Dillard,' he whispered. It was the name he had been muttering all day. But it meant nothing to Lorena.
'Dillard Brawley,' Call said. 'He was the barber in Lonesome Dove.' 'Well, I never used a barber in Lonesome Dove,' Lorena said. 'I guess I never met him.
'A centipede got in his pants and ruined his leg,' Call whispered. 'Gus and me tied him to a table and cut his leg off. We had to--he would have died of blood poisoning, if we hadn't.
You have to do the same, you have to cut my leg off.' 'No,' Lorena said. 'That town can't be more than two more days. There'll be a doctor there to tend to your leg.' In his haze during the ride, Call remembered Gus McCrae's wounded legs and how they looked before he died. Both Gus's legs had turned black, and Gus's wound had been nowhere near as bad as his. During the day, a great clot of blood had formed on Call's splintered knee. The bullet had hit just below the knee, but had gone upward and wrecked the kneecap. Lorena had tried to wash the clot, but it looked so bad that she had concentrated on doing the other wounds first. The bone fragments were like needles.
Then she remembered the one-legged man in Lonesome Dove; he had come in the bar sometimes.
He had a hoarse voice.
'Was Dillard the man with the hoarse voice?' she asked.
Call nodded. 'He ruined his voice, screaming, when we took the leg off,' Call whispered. 'We thought he'd faint, but he never fainted. He just screamed his voice away.' Lorena concentrated on washing the wounded arm; she hoped the Captain would forget about the leg, though she knew the pain must be too great to allow for forgetfulness. She was not squeamish. Clara had sometimes been in demand as a midwife, and Lorena had gone with her to help. She had also helped castrate horses when the ranch was shorthanded, and she had helped birth foals, as well as babies. She had felt the pains of childbirth five times herself, and she didn't faint at the sight of blood, even a lot of blood. She had seen injuries, some of them horrible. She had once bandaged the arm of a farmer who had been mangled in a haying machine, and she had several times cut fish hooks out of her own children.
But she didn't want to have to be the one to remove Captain Call's leg. Better to travel night and day until they reached a settlement where there was a qualified doctor. The knee looked so bad that she was even indecisive about cleaning it. Still, there was Gus and his death to remember. The clot on the Captain's knee was black.
Lorena thought about it until her mind went numb. She tipped over by the hot fire and slept a little.
In the morning when she awoke, the Captain was looking at her out of feverish eyes. Lorena looked at the leg and then looked away.
'You might bleed to death,' she said.
