and Sublett fired the second barrel at the empty doorway and took out a good chunk of doorjamb. Then he lowered the shotgun and stood there for a minute, looking like he couldn’t believe he’d done it.
Sublett was just starting to smile when Wes lurched back in through the door, clutching at his mangled side, his face all twisted up in pain. He yelled, “You sonbitch!” and got off a wild shot just as Sublett dropped the scattergun and ran out.
The blood was rolling off his wound and drenching his pant leg, but he staggered back outside as Sublett came out from the alley and ran down the street. Wes stumbled out into the street after him and got off a couple of shots, and Tim Jackson swore he saw Sublett catch one in the shoulder, but I don’t know. Sublett disappeared around the corner and that’s the last any of us ever saw of him. He had to of had a horse all saddled and waiting to get away as fast as he did.
Wes managed to gimp about ten feet down the street before he dropped, and we all went running up to him. He was gasping and wide-eyed. “I reckon I’m killed,” he said.
Barnett kept trying to soothe him as me and a bunch of the boys hoisted him up, one on each leg and one under each arm, and started toting him fast over to Doc Carrington’s office. It was a hell of a wound and left a bright red trail all the way to the doc’s. I thought sure he’d be empty as a tore-open water bag by the time we got him there.
On the way over, he told Barnett to take his money belt off him, that it had about two thousand dollars in gold, and that his saddlebags were holding another two or three hundred in silver. He told him to get the money to his wife and to tell her he tried to avoid this trouble but had no choice in the matter.
He was breathing rough when we got him into Doc Carrington’s, but his eyes were still burning with life. We put him on the table in the office and the doc sent one of the fellas to go get Doc Lester from his office in the livery, where he tended to animals and people both. Then he ran the rest of us on outside. Barnett was the last to come out. He had the money belt with him. It was dripping blood and had seven buckshot wedged in it.
If his assailant had aimed at his head instead of his middle, they would have carried him directly to the undertaker rather than to me. Or if the shooter had been standing five to ten feet closer to him so that the load had not spread quite so much before impact. Or if he hadn’t been wearing a well-packed money belt which shielded him from some of the shot. But if, if, if—
He was, however, at the lip of the abyss, as it were, when they brought him to me. The buckshot charge had torn away a sizable portion of tissue from his side and had severed several large veins. My immediate obligation was to contain the bleeding. But I was also quite concerned with two distinct entry wounds positioned rather more toward the navel. I turned him on his side but perceived no exit perforations, so it was clear the two shot were still in him. I was inclined to believe the wound was mortal, for his blood loss was quite severe. Yet his eyes showed clear focus and his breathing, though rapid, was even and strong. He was neither lung-shot nor wounded in the stomach, and his spirit seemed robust. I have seen many men die for lack of endurance against the shock of their wounds, but had Mr. Hardin expired on my table, it would not have been for want of grit.
By the time Dr. Lester arrived, I had extracted eight scattered and relatively shallow-perforation buckshot and had determined that the two wounds closer to the navel had lacerated the kidney and were most likely positioned near the lower juncture of posterior ribs and spine. It would be difficult to extract them, but not to do so at once would entail the greater jeopardy. Dr. Lester concurred. Up to this point, Mr. Hardin had endured my probings and extractions with impressive fortitude, holding tightly to the edges of the table and giving little evidence of his pain except for an occasional grimace and grunt. He rejected the opiate I offered him to dull the even greater pain he would feel when I went after the buckshot at his spine. “If death’s going to get me,” he said, “I want to give it a clear look in the eye when it does.”
We labored over him for more than an hour, and though he cursed loudly at times in reaction to my deep and sinuous explorations with the forceps, his tolerance of the pain was extraordinary. He bore the cauterizing iron with hardly more than a quivering flexion of sinew at each application. A man of less constitution would not likely have survived the procedure.
When at last I had removed the two buckshot, we stitched the gaping wound as best we could and carefully bandaged it. Lester and I looked as though we’d been in attendance at a hog slaughter. We were blood to the elbows and our aprons were heavily stained. Mr. Hardin was deathly pale from the loss of blood, and his sweat exuded severe pain’s prodigious reek. Yet he did not lose consciousness at any point in the procedure. He even smiled when we told him the ordeal was over. “Damn shame,” he said in a whisper, “it was so much fun.” Grit.
I informed him quite frankly that the chance for his survival was no better than sixty percent. The immediate dangers, as I made clear to him, were fever and infection—and, of course, a recurrence of profuse hermorrhaging if he did not keep passively to his bed while recuperating. He thanked me warmly for my services, assured me that his kinsman would see to my recompense, and said he would obey my instructions to the letter.
His friends made arrangements for him at a hotel across the street. Despite my protests, his kinsman, a lively fellow named Barnett, pressed a pair of twenty-dollar gold pieces on me, an exceptionally generous payment. As they were easing him onto a litter to carry him to his quarters, I heard Barnett whisper to him that they had cut the telegraph wires and posted lookouts at either end of town.
* * *
I have on many occasions been asked how it feels to have saved the life of a man who had already killed so many, and who, because of my surgical skill, survived to kill so many more. My answer has never varied. I am proud to have done it. I applied all my skill to save a man in extremis and I succeeded. As one sworn to the Oath of Hippocrates, I could have done no less than try. And I utterly reject any responsibility whatsoever for his subsequent depredations. He was the captain of his soul, I of mine—and I shall discuss it no further.
Wes and I had been schoolmates in Sumpter. Daddy had doctored his family from the time they came to East Texas from Dallas. Then Wes went off and became the notorious John Wesley Hardin, and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for nearly five years, not until the night Barnett Jones and some others brought him to our house in a wagon, burning with fever and bleeding to death.
Barnett called out for Daddy, saying he had somebody bad hurt who needed tending. We recognized his voice, so I let down the hammers on the shotgun I’d grabbed up when we first heard the horses, and I followed Daddy out the door. The moonlight cut white and sharp through the dark trees and across the hats of the mounted men. Daddy held the lantern over the man laying in the wagon and we saw it was Wes. He was unconscious and breathing rough. Daddy felt of his pulse and checked his eyes, then held the lantern close to his sopping wound. He smelled half dead already.
He’d been shot in Trinity six days before, Barnett told us. For two days Doc Carrington had thought he would die, but then his fever broke and he started taking food and looked like he’d recover. “But some son of a bitch yapped to the police,” Barnett said, “and we had to quick get him out of Trinity. Wes said to bring him here.”
They’d been a day and a night on the old Trinity trace, moving slow and careful, and it was God’s own wonder they didn’t meet up with any police patrols. But it’s a rough old trace they’d come on, and all that bouncing around in the wagon hadn’t done Wes a bit of good. Barnett said he’d been passing out off and on.
Daddy had him carried around to the lean-to in back of the house. I held the lantern up close for him while he worked at cleaning the wound and patching it where the stitches had come undone. The sweat was just steaming off Wes, his fever was so high. He was pretty much out of his head and mumbling nonsense.
While Daddy did all he could for him, Momma poured coffee for the fellas who’d brought him and passed around some warmed-over pone. They gobbled it up quick and left, all except Barnett. He was still at the table when Daddy got done with Wes. He told us he’d set up in the south woods, at a spot where he could watch both the main road and the old trace for any sign of somebody coming.
As sudden as all that, Wes was our responsibility. Momma’s face was hard as stone about it, but she didn’t
