the man had died.
“Mister Souter, I will ride in ahead to tell Miss Katherine and send a man to bring back the doctor.”
Davey watched the old man tell the boss to get riding—“Hurry dammit.”—without ever taking his eyes from English.
As Red gathered tree limbs and cut a rope to fashion a travois, Burn lay with his head resting on Davey’s arm. Sliding him onto the travois was brutal. Covered with Davey’s canvas jacket and Red’s torn sheepskin, lying on Souter’s old coat and his own hide jacket, English stayed awake for the entire trip, his eyes studying a world he might leave. Souter’s big coyote dun carried most of the travois’s weight. Souter rode the boy’s mount and Red doubled behind him. Souter kept looking straight ahead, refusing to glance at Davey or stare down at the fragile body.
Davey thought too much in the silence. Burn English was important and he didn’t know why. He’d never thought much before why one person was a friend, another was just someone to know. He couldn’t bear riding and thinking, so he climbed off his horse and walked beside the travois.
Souter spoke back at Davey. “Hildahl, get on your bronc’. You ain’t doin’ the man no good walkin’ and lookin’ like a mourner come early to the buryin’.” A long speech for Souter.
Davey remounted his bay. He pinched his nose, rubbed his eyes. Worry bit into him. He was good at taking orders but not so good on making his own decisions. Maybe he’d made a mistake, maybe warning English was what had got the man riled up and running. If English hadn’t known, maybe he wouldn’t have gone with the horses. And now he wouldn’t be riding a pole bed.
The procession stopped at a big pine blocking mestenero the trail. At Souter’s orders Davey roped and dragged the tree clear. The
The cut across English’s throat had swollen and leaked fluid. Each time the jaw worked and the light eyes blinked faster, Davey swore he could see the pain. But the man was determined, so Davey paid attention. Nothing between him and this mustanger was easy.
“Bay colt.” English got out those two words and the veins on his neck throbbed a deep blue, his mouth pulled white around the drawn lips. Then: “Colt hobbled…turn…loose.”
“Hildahl…colt needs branding.” A long wait here, so Davey thought maybe that was all. “Use Donald’s brand.” Then a deep, rough breath. “Dark bay, like his pappy.”
A hand on his wrist, no weight or strength, only the warmth of skin, the light heft of bone. He looked down at scarred knuckles, a shallow cut drawn over past scars. There was a hint, a pushing. English wanted more. One word.
“Please.”
The eyes closed, and Davey had the odd notion the single word was rough passage. He nodded. But he was promising an unconscious man.
He looked up to see Gayle Souter, his mouth drawn in that ugly line. Davey let his hand rest on English’s forehead, felt the dry skin, a pulse vaguely working at each temple. Then he made the mistake of lifting the coat off English’s belly. He gagged, swallowed. Pools glistened in the hollow beneath the rib cage; the coat had soaked up a whole lot of the blood but more kept coming. Fresh blood. Davey pressed the coat back in place and looked up pleadingly at Souter.
The old man wiped his jaw with one shaking hand. He couldn’t meet Davey’s stare.
When the ranch was in sight, Souter sent Davey to Miss Katherine, waiting on the steps. Bit Haven had gone for the doc, she said calmly. And she’d already started water to boil, had bandages laid out in the small back room. All that was needed was the patient.
Davey tied up the bay, stood close to Miss Katherine, and found it to be hard breathing for a different reason.
Red slid off the back of his horse and Souter took the reins to his coyote dun and guided the travois up to the steps. Miss Katherine was quick to draw back the coats and look for herself. Three coats laid on the man, all three thick with blood. She dropped them one by one in the dust and they made a wet sound. Red got sick again. No one noticed.
Miss Katherine made crooning sounds as she touched her patient. Red and Davey lifted Burn from the travois and carried him into the house, to the back room. Davey knew they carried too light a burden; English didn’t weigh enough to live, even wrapped in clothing and wearing boots. Davey imagined him on a bucking horse, instead of drowning in blood.
Canvas covered the mattress, and Red and Davey laid the mustanger there. Red looked over to Davey. He was stained down the front of his shirt, and when he raised his hands, they were bloody. Dried flakes rolled off as he rubbed his hands along his filthy pants.
“Get going, Red. Don’t want you going down in here. There ain’t room.” It wasn’t much, not really a joke, but a few words to leave the boy something.
Red nodded once, gulped hard, and left the room on his own two feet.
“Strip him.”
It took a woman to be this practical, Davey thought as he began the task. The gear was rags and easily peeled off. Davey blushed when he got to the combinations, for Miss Katherine was looking over his shoulder. His fingers became impossibly clumsy, and she pushed him on the shoulder, but he refused to quit.
“I’ve seen a man naked before, Mister Hildahl. There are no surprises.”
A bit of cloth was stuck to flesh, and Davey shuddered as he yanked it clear. Miss Katherine shifted in to work next to Davey with a bowl of hot water and clean cloths. It was a slow and ugly process. There wasn’t much to English, mostly skin and bone, and most of that torn and marked with old battles long forgotten. As he glanced at the
He averted his eyes when Miss Katherine removed the last of the combinations. Davey’d never seen the human body laid out bare, never had tended an injured man, never had much doings with illness or dying. He had to look away from Burn English, but saw the effect on Miss Katherine. Her eyes were shadowed, her mouth tight, still she washed and rinsed and wiped, then had Davey get more hot water, never looking up from the work. Her hands were gentle on English, across his chest, down his belly, and over his groin. Davey’s head ached. He went for more water, furious at himself, jealous of a dead man.
When he returned, English was still bleeding. Past the great number of minor scratches, there were two major wounds. One sliced diagonally across the belly, exposing gut and rib. The other went from the right leg, above the knee, in a long wrap to the top of the rump. The worst of that was inside the thigh, high up where it bled occasionally. Miss Katherine had tied a cloth over the cut, but there wasn’t much to be done with the belly wound as it kept bleeding.
A faint blue ringed English’s mouth and the fine skin under his closed eyes was the same milky-blue. Davey sighed and Miss Katherine’s head came up. Tears softened her gaze as she stared past Davey; her hand rose clutching a bloody cloth.
“He’ll bleed to death from that terrible hole.” Her voice was raspy. Davey flinched. “We’regoing to lose him. I can’t stop the blood!” Hysteria was in the last words and she clamped her mouth shut.
Davey ran to the kitchen and got a sack of flour, hurried back to the small room, and dumped half the bag into English’s belly. The wound disappeared in white powder, then turned pink, finally a thicker, darker red. He spilled more flour until the bleeding stopped. Davey sagged.
Miss Katherine touched Davey’s hand. “The leg, Davey. Help me.”
They rolled the body over and she supported English’s head while Davey poured flour into the raw haunch. It turned ugly as the blood thickened into a muddy paste. They let the body roll back on its own.
