Longarm had to chuckle at the picture. Old Norma was sort of what you might call Junoesque, if not pleasantly plump. But he assured the worried-looking gal, 'Just getting 'em in bed out of the noonday sun must be helping 'em some, Miss Norma, and as for the curados Miss Consuela here might have mentioned, you can't exactly call a curado a witch doctor. They got the same sort of witches we worry about. They call 'em brujas. A curado or curer is more like a herbalist mixed with a Pentacostal preacher. Picture a Holy Roller speaking in tongues and casting out demons whilst dosing sick folks with sassafras bark, licorice root, and such. I know you'll find this hard to believe, Doc. But that very quinine you've been dosing these folks with was discovered by Indian medicine men. I once read about a highborn Spanish lady being saved on her deathbed by some Jesuit missionary back from the woods with some bitter bark the Indians had given him.'
She nodded and said, 'The Countess Chinchon, who introduced it to Europe as Peruvian bark around 1640. You're so right about a weak brew of ground-up tree bark saving her life and restoring her to almost perfect health. So why don't these patients respond to pure quinine sulfate, more than ten times as strong?'
Longarm suggested, 'They have another fever entirely, ma'am. I'd forgot the name of that countess. But I read somewhere that the stuff only works on one particular family of fevers. I know for a fact you can't cure yellow jack with quinine.'
She nodded but insisted, 'This fever here is nothing at all like yellow jack, and please give me credit for reading a little myself!'
She swept a bare arm rather grandly around at the sweltering icehouse. 'They've all been suffering the same symptoms. They're hit without warning by a sudden violent rise in temperature, along with headaches, muscular cramps, and drenching sweats.'
Longarm shrugged and said lots of fevers did that to folks.
She snapped, 'I hadn't finished! The patient is helped by liquids but can barely tolerate broths. The poor appetite is complicated by an almost suicidal depression. Then, as suddenly as it began, or after a bout of chills and shivering, the patient suddenly snaps out of it, save for feeling weak, dehydrated, and ravenously hungry.'
Longarm allowed, 'That sure sounds like plain old ague. Chills, fever, and you say it comes back?'
She nodded, repressed a shiver of her own, and told him, 'It's usually the second or third attack that takes them. I don't know if it's because the fever gets stronger or hits them the same way once they're weaker. We know so little, Custis, for all our Latin terms and impressive diplomas!'
Longarm suddenly found himself holding the sort of solid old gal against his chest, smoothing her brown hair with a gentle free hand as he said, 'Don't go blubbering up on us now. These sick folks are depending on you, whether you know what you're doing here or not. Ain't it possible the bugs that cause the ague can get used to quinine the way those Austrian miners I've read about get used to arsenic?'
She leaned against him, sort of like a babe lost in the woods might have. But her voice was cheerful enough as she marveled, 'My, you do seem to read a lot, don't you?'
To which he could only modestly reply, 'They got a fine public library up in Denver, and along about the end of the month I ain't got the money to spend my free evenings at the opera. Could we discuss these invisible bugs instead of my modest wages, ma'am?'
She sighed and said, 'I work for the same cheap government. I've already considered a strain of a still- unknown microbe building up a resistance to the usual specific drug. That could be the answer, or just as cheerfully, you could be right about it being some entirely different malady and... Oh, Custis, I'm so tired, even if I knew what I was doing!'
He said, 'At least you've been trying, and that has to count for something. I understand you've been treating others out at that Coast Guard station you're staying at?'
She sounded half asleep as she replied, 'A Deputy Gilbert, that prisoner called Baldwin, and one of the officers, an Ensign Domer. For some reason the garrison out there's been lightly hit by whatever this may be. Everyone out there who's suffered any fever at all came down with it here in town, or shortly after returning to the garrison from town.'
She didn't seem to be getting any lighter on her feet as he kept on holding her there near the grinning Mexican kid. So Longarm reached up to remove his Stetson and wave it some for attention as he asked the big gal in his other arm whether his McClellan and Winchester might be out at that Coast Guard station as well.
She murmured, 'In my quarters near the dispensary. You had all my toiletries with you in that trunk, so I had to use some soap from one of your saddlebags and I hope you don't..'
Then she was fast asleep against his shirtfront, and he had to put his hat back on and grab her with both arms as her knees went to sleep down yonder as well.
The gal with the mock red hair came over to join them, looking scared as she asked Longarm, 'What's wrong? Don't tell me she's down with it too!'
Longarm didn't. He said, 'I suspect she's just run herself into the ground. If you'd help me find a place to lay her down and stretch her out, it's going on siesta time in any case and I got to get on out to that Coast Guard station.'
The gal nodded and said, 'There's a lie-down we've been taking turns with over by the autopsy theater. That's what Doctor Norma calls the corner she uses to cut 'em open, dead or alive, the autopsy theater.'
Longarm nodded, scooped the semi-conscious Norma up in both arms as if he were toting someone's mighty big baby off to bed, and let the other gal lead the way.
Their progress didn't go unnoticed by all the other volunteers. So there were others around them as Longarm lay the exhausted Norma on the semi-secluded cot in a shadowy nook between those hanging sheets and the brick wall of the improvised fever ward.
As he straightened up, Longarm observed, 'She'd do better out of that starched-linen outfit with just a thin sheet over her. But I'd best let you ladies worry about that after I leave, right?'
One of the other gals, a small bleached blonde, suddenly covered her face and bawled, 'I can't stand this! I can't tell whether these government folk are trying to be polite or mocking!'
The red-haired gal told the bemused Longarm, 'Tess ain't used to being called a lady. None of us are. But you're trying to be a good sport, right?'
