'Why?' gasped Vicky, forgetting herself sufficiently in this incredible series of events to question her mother's order. For a moment it seemed that she would have to pay for the impertinence with a box on one pink ear, but Robyn's hand dropped back to her side.
'Because-' Robyn said softly, '-because he is the devil the very devil.'
He was propped on the iron cot, with a bolster under his shoulders, and Louise rose from the other cot as Robyn entered the guest-hut carrying her bag.
'Madam, will you kindly wait outside,' Robyn ordered brusquely and, not deigning to see if she would obey, Robyn placed her bag on the chair beside his cot. Behind her the latch on the door clicked.
Mungo Sint John wore only a pair of baggy white trousers from which one leg had been hacked off high in the thigh. Like his face, his body was wasted by sickness, but there was still the width of shoulder and the solidness of bone that she remembered so well. His belly had sunk in like that of a greyhound, and his ribs stood out in a rack above it, but his skin retained the texture and silkiness of a far younger man, while the body hair that was crimped into curls upon his chest was not marred with silver as was his beard and the hair upon his head.
'Hello, Robyn,'he said.
'I will speak to you only when it is absolutely necessary for your treatment, and you will do the same,' she said, without looking at his face.
She started with the wounds in his flank and back bullet wounds, she realized, but through and through and completely healed. Then with a little start she noticed the other old, long-healed scar just, below the bullet wound.
She recognized the little white pricks of the suture which had closed the knife-cut. Her own work was distinctive, there was nobody who could throw down those even and precise knotted sutures as she could, and before she realized what she was doing she touched the old hardened cicatrices 'Yes,' Mungo nodded. 'Camacho made that.'
She jerked her hand away. Mungo had taken that knife-cut when he had intervened to protect her from the Portuguese slaver. He had saved her life that night.
'Do you remember this also?' Mungo asked, and showed her the pock mark on his forearm. That was where she had inoculated him when smallpox had swept through Huron.
'Do you remember?' Mungo insisted softly, but she kept her face averted and her lips compressed in a thin hard line as she lifted the dressing from his upper leg.
Then the horror showed on her face. Her grandfather's uneven knife strokes had lacerated the leg from knee to groin, where he had probed and searched for the ball, and his crude stitches had cobbled it all back together like a man repacking a valise in haste.
'Bad?' Mungo asked.
'It's a mess,' she said, and then hated herself for unbending that far, and by inference criticizing her grandfather's work.
The flesh of the leg had that unhealthy putty colour, and there was ulceration in the wounds, that awful sloughing of tissue that hinted at the corruption beneath.
Her grandfather had left drains in the wounds, thick black horse hairs that stuck stiffly out between the stitches. She drew one now, and Mungo gasped but did not flinch. A weak little trickle of watery pus followed the hair Out. She stooped and sniffed it and grimaced. This was not the rich creamy pus that the ancients had called 'pus bonum et laudabile'. From the stink of it, gangrene was not far off. She felt a little icy splinter of dread, and immediately wondered at it, surely there were no feelings left in her for this man.
'Tell me how it happened?'
'That, doctor, is my business.'
'Dirty business, I have no doubt,' she snapped. 'And I want no lurid account of it, but if I am to locate the ball I must know where you were in relationship to the weapon that was fired at you, the type of weapon, the weight and charge 'Of course,' he said quickly. 'Your grandfather did not bother to enquire.'
'Leave my grandfather out of it.'
'The man used a pistol; it looked like a single-action Remington army model, in which case the ball would be.44, Of lead, cone-shaped, weight one fifty grains, and driven by black powder.'
'Low penetration, break up of the ball if it hit bone,' she muttered.
'The man was lying on the ground, about twenty-five paces distant, and I was in the act of dismounting from my horse, this leg raised 'He was ahead of you.'
'Slightly ahead and on my right hand.'
Robyn nodded. 'This will hurt.' And ten minutes later she stood back and called, 'missis Sint John.' As soon as Louise entered, she said, 'I shall operate as soon as the light is good enough tomorrow morning. I shall need your assistance. I warn you now that even if I am successful, your husband will not recover full use of the leg. He will always have a pronounced limp.'
'And if you are unsuccessful?'
'The degeneration will accelerate, mortification and gangrene 'You are frank, doctor,' Louise whispered.
'Yes,' Robyn agreed. 'I always am., Robyn could not sleep, but she reminded herself that she seldom could on the eve of an operation under anaesthetic. Chloroform was such an unpredictable substance, the margins of safety were frighteningly narrow, overdosage, too high a concentration or inadequate oxygenation, would lead to primary collapse with fatal depression of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.
She lay beside Clinton in the darkness and ran through a mental list of her preparations for the morrow, and set her mind on the procedures she must adopt. Firstly she must re-open and find the source of the mortification.
She moved and Clinton stirred beside her and muttered in his sleep. She froze and waited for him to settle.
