The thought had already occurred to Longarm. But even a convicted killer had been known to take sick like other mortals. So he got out his pocket watch, cussed it, and decided, “I could use some help from you gents in bearing him from here to that railroad platform.”
He could see nobody seemed anxious to leap at such an opportunity. So he fished out some smokes to distribute as he quietly added, “If he dies aboard the train, it’ll be all my misfortune and none of your own.”
So after they’d all lit up, they improvised a litter to carry the moaning and groaning Harmony Drake down the way, and cheerfully helped Longarm get him aboard the 8:15 eastbound.
In the time they had left while the engine took on water for the first leg of its desert run, Longarm cuffed his prisoner’s right-hand wrist to the arm of his seat against the south-facing window and gave him a cheroot and some waterproof Mexican matches, murmuring, “I have to ask the conductor something. Don’t go ‘way, unless you want a bullet where it might smart, and I’ll be back directly.” Harmony Drake said he didn’t feel like smoking. He asked if Longarm would mind removing his leg irons seeing he was secured to the seat and it felt better when he held his right knee up as high as he could get it.
Longarm had hoped the rascal wouldn’t say anything like that. He muttered, “When I come back. I know what you’re trying to sell me. I ain’t sure I’m ready to buy it. But just sit tight and like the old hymn goes, farther along we’ll know more about it.”
Then he strode up the aisle and into the car beyond, where sure enough, he caught the grizzled conductor flirting with a gal young enough to be his granddaughter.
Ticking the brim of his Stetson to the gal, Longarm curtly cut in to ask the older man if they’d be stopping to jerk water at the Gila Bend Indian Agency.
The conductor nodded and said, “East-or westbound, we always jerk water at Gila Bend. Why do you ask, Deputy?”
Longarm explained, “I’m carrying a prisoner back to Colorado with a bellyache. Leastways, he says he’s got a bellyache, with a fever. I thought I’d like to have the sawbones at that Indian agency take a look and tell me I’m just acting like an old fuss.”
The gal chimed in to say with a smile that she was not connected in any way with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but that she worked as a nurse out of the Deming Dispensary if he was in the market for her modest medical opinions.
He declared he surely was. So all three of them went on back to find Harmony Drake writhing on the floor between the seats like a sick wolverine with one paw caught in a trap.
The gal, whose light hair and coloring went by the name of Sister Ilsa Anders, stamped a foot and told him to behave like a big brave boy if he expected her to give him a proper medical examination.
Harmony Drake stared goggle-eyed, laughed more like a silly kid than a big brave boy, and asked if she cared to give him an improper going-over.
Longarm told him to behave, and got him back up on the seat as the train was pulling out of the depot with a mournful tolling of its engine bell. When Ilsa asked him to free the prisoner’s ankles, Longarm did so, and sure enough, Drake hauled his right knee up to hug against his belly with his free arm, gasping, “Oh, Lord, that feels much better!”
The ash-blonde perched on her knees in the empty seat in front to reach over and feel Drake’s forehead with the back of her hand, sadly wishing aloud for the medical kit she hadn’t packed while going to visit her kin in Yuma.
She asked Drake whether he’d been having any chills as well as hot, sweaty spells. When he allowed he had, she made him stick out his tongue. Then she turned to tell Longarm, “It’s hard to be sure with not even a proper thermometer to work with. It could be nothing more than mesenteric adenitis, albeit he seems a tad old for such childish infections. It could be pyelonephritis of the right kidney, of course.”
Longarm stared morosely out at the window lights of the town they were rapidly leaving as he quietly asked, “Or couldn’t it be a mortified appendix, such as Brother Brigham Young just suffered up to Salt Lake City, ma’am?”
The conductor whistled, and allowed he could still stop the train if they wanted to get off.
Longarm was tempted. But then the gal who seemed to know more about such grim matters said, “There are a dozen less dangerous conditions that have the same symptoms, and he’ll do better, no matter what ails him, if you get him to a doctor at a higher and cooler altitude. The muggy heat down at this end of the valley is enough to make anyone with any condition break out in a sweat, and even if this is what I’m sure we all hope it isn’t, cooling that abdomen as much as possible is indicated.” The conductor said they had some ice up in the dining car.
Longarm asked him to go fetch some as he told his prisoner and the volunteer nurse, “We’ll put an ice pack aboard and see whether it’s better or worse by the time we reach Gila Bend. Unless it’s way better, we’d best get off there and stick you in that agency clinic, old son.”
Harmony Drake protested, “I don’t want to have that bellyache Brigham Young come down with and died, damn it! Can’t you cure me better than them Mormon medicos, ma’am?”
Sister Anders said soothingly, “It may not be anything half as serious as appendicitis, sir. Didn’t you just hear me saying there were a lot of other conditions with similar symptoms?”
Harmony Drake insisted, “My gut hurts like fire and you ain’t said you can make it better, pretty lady!”
The blonde regarded him with ill-concealed distaste as she told him he’d have more to worry about if the pain suddenly vanished for no apparent reason. The conductor came back with a colored dining car attendant who was packing some linen napkins and a bucket of crushed ice.
The conductor volunteered, “We have a vacant sleeping compartment up forward if you want to operate on him, Sister Anders.”
The young blonde sighed and replied, “If only I or anyone else had the skills, or the nerve. Surgeons have removed inflamed appendixes, in a hospital, under general anesthesia, and some few of their patients have survived. But the currently accepted procedure calls for bed rest with ice packs and quinine or other febrifuges that may get the patient’s temperature down before the inflamed appendix bursts!”
Harmony Drake sobbed that he didn’t want his damned appendix busting inside him. Longarm told him not to blubber up, and suggested they get to that compartment, strip him down, and ice his guts good.
