Love and War: The Coltrane Saga, Book 1 (21 page)

Kitty stepped forward to explore the exposed wound. She had seen Doc treat this kind of injury before—the result of a drunken brawl that had ended in tragedy. Probing with her fingertips, she found that the bullet had entered the arm almost in the center of the elbow joint, smashing through. The bones of the elbow had splintered, and when she touched the drum-tight skin, it felt hot and lumpy. Doc had taught her how to feel along the muscles for a sign that inflammation was spreading, but she found no evidence of tell-tale swollen nodules in the armpit, which would mean a pus seepage from the wound into the body itself.

“Well, damnit, say something!” Luke cried angrily. “Can you fix him up without taking off his arm?”

“No,” she answered quietly. She searched for the right words to tell them what it was going to be like to remove that arm, and how he might die anyway. What if they believed it was her way of taking out her revenge? If he died, they might blame her, think she purposely let him die. God, why did she have to be in a mess like this? Why couldn’t Orville Shaw have just died with the others?

Luke reached over and picked up a nearby jug and lifted it to his lips, whiskey dribbling down his chest. “Get busy.” He swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Do what has to be done.”

“It isn’t going to be pleasant. You’re going to have to tie him down, and he’s going to scream, because it’s going to hurt terribly. We don’t have anything to give him but the whiskey, and I can’t have him moving around.”

“We’ll hold him down. Don’t you worry. You just get busy.”

“Are you sure you can stand it?” She looked at each of them in turn. “Have any of you ever seen a man’s
arm
cut off?”

“Have you ever cut a man’s arm off?” Paul Gray snapped then, looking a bit pale.

She shook her head. “No. I helped Doc a couple of times, and I read the books he told me to. I think I can do it, but I’ll need help. I don’t want anyone fainting on me.”

“Us…faint?” Luke snorted, took another swig from the jug. “You just do your part, and we’ll do ours. Paul—get some rope, and let’s tie him down.”

“Are you sure you’ve got to take that arm off?” Silas Canby looked at her as he threw a log into the crackling fire.

She shrugged helplessly. “I can do an excision—remove the bone fragments and try to save the limb. It might take him months to get over it, though, and there’s a chance the fever will set in. It’s too soon to know, but I feel some pus forming around the wound.”

“Luke, you said we’d move out when the spring thaw comes,” Silas looked at the leader. “And we see signs the thaw might come soon. We can’t stay behind because of Orville. Remember what we heard in that saloon before the fightin’ started? The Yankees are close by—and I believe those were Yankees that fired on us at that house we was raidin’…couldn’t see that good from where they were. We’ve got to be moving on. What if they track us? What if…”

“Shut up! Would you want someone to go off and leave you to die? Hell, no, you’d be screaming like a baby.” Luke turned to Kitty. “Now you tell us what you want us to do, and we’ll do it. And you do what you have to do. Just get on with it.”

“I’ll need some light. It’s too dark in here. And I need plenty of bandages and lint. There were several boxes in Doc’s wagon. Get them for me, please.” She stared down at the sleeping man. The pain would be excruciating. He would never sleep through it at the start. Perhaps blessed oblivion would take over when it became unbearable. Doc had been using chloroform when necessary, but there was never much of it, and they’d had none when they set out for the Outer Banks.

Placing her hand on Orville’s forehead, she noted that it was extremely hot. She hated him along with the others, having seen him plunder and kill innocent people. But now, at this moment, he was a human being, and there was something inborn, something she instinctively felt, that made her want to save him—enemy or not. If given the chance, she knew she could kill him herself. What, then, made the difference at this hour when she
did
have the opportunity to kill him and rid the earth of a useless creature? Doc would call it challenge—challenge, and desire to do battle with the clutching hands of death.

She placed a tourniquet on his arm, about four inches below the shoulder. Then she twisted the knot and anchored it tightly to hold back a hemorrhage. If possible, she would cut quickly and mercifully, in an effort to keep pain as low as possible. But there would be moments of excruciating agony when the blood vessels in the stump were clamped and tied off.

What was it Doc had told her? She fought to remember as she rinsed her hands in the water Silas had heated at her instruction. Let the tourniquet hold for a while, and the pressure will dull the nerves, maybe keep the patient from twitching in a movement that would be fatal as the knife cut down deep. He had also told her to be sure never to leave a tourniquet tied too long, for if the stump were deprived too long of blood, it would not heal properly.

“Get on with it,” Luke snapped nervously, tipping the jug up for one last swallow. “He’s starting to wake up.”

“He’ll wake up,” she said. “Let’s just pray he passes out again so deeply that he won’t feel the pain, because I assure you there’s going to be plenty of it, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Just be ready with that jug, and maybe that will take some of the edge off.”

Her fingers closed around the handle of the bowie knife. Suddenly, Luke’s hand snaked out to close about hers. “Just don’t get any funny ideas with that blade, you hear me?” he warned. “I’m going to watch every move you make, understand?”

Through gritted teeth, she ground out the words she had held back so long. “One day, I’ll settle my debt to you, Luke Tate. First things first.”

She yanked her hand away, and he did not try to continue his hold on her.

She had never done an amputation before…never seen one done without anesthesia. Now she prayed for the strength, the skill, to do what had to be done. She set the blade to the skin, outlining the contours of the flaps she would use, Doc had said to leave a long one at the back—a shorter one in the front. Closing her eyes momentarily, the gravelly voice of Doc came back to her.

“When you amputate, Kitty, it’s important to make the posterior flap long, because the muscle has to cover the bone stump. Otherwise, the extremity is useless…”

The blade bit into the flesh, bloodless now from the pressure of the tourniquet. She swept it up in a curving line, making real the contours of the flaps she had mentally outlined. Luke stood at her side, close enough to grab her if she turned on him or Orville. Paul Gray and Silas Canby stood at Orville’s head, holding down his shoulders. Joe was holding the wounded man’s legs.

She didn’t dare look at Orville’s face, as she prayed he would not awaken. Pushing the superficial tissues aside, the bulging red surface of the muscles beneath was exposed. She knew that the next slash of the knife was going to have to shear through muscle all the way to the bone, and it had to be at a slightly higher level, to make sure that the layers of tissue would fold and heal evenly across the cut end of the bone itself.

Again she brought the knife slicing down, and several large vessels could be seen gaping in the depths of the incision, a trickle of dark blood beginning to ooze upward. There was no time to worry about clamping.

She pressed the blade downward on the bone.
Please, God
, she whispered,
give me the strength to break through the bone.
She circled, leaving the white surface bare in the depths of the wound. “Give me linen,” she whispered, licking dry, parched lips nervously. Someone handed her a strip, which she wrapped around the bone. Seizing the two ends, she pulled muscles and skin upward, exposing about two inches of bone.

“Cut it a few inches shorter than the other tissues or it will project and cause a painful stump…” she repeated Doc’s words out loud.

“There’s an old surgical saw in the bottom of that case,” she said to Luke, who was still hovering over her. “Get it for me, then do as I say.” When she had the saw in her hand, she nodded to the linen thong she held and told Luke to take it, holding it in an even, upward pressure.

The act of sawing, Kitty knew, would be the most painful of all. Doc had told her how terribly it hurt when the steel cut through what he called the outer periosteum, and how it was sheer agony when it bit through into the sensitive marrow cavity. But it had to be done. Taking a deep breath, she mustered every bit of strength she possessed and bore down. The saw bit into the bone, the sharp teeth—which were set precisely to cut the right depth, Doc had said—were making a harsh and muted noise in the gaping crimson cavity.

The smell of bone dust permeated her nostrils, and for the first time she felt nauseous.

Suddenly the body twitched, jerked, and Orville Shaw’s head slammed backward against the table as his lips parted to shriek forth the most God-awful sound Kitty had ever heard. Her fingers instinctively froze in their sawing motion, and she looked at him to see eyeballs rolling frantically in his head, then settling to stare straight upward before fluttering lids finally fell downward to cover the glare of agony.

He slumped. Kitty waited. She saw the rise and fall of his chest. He was still alive. She began the sawing motion again, and there was a splintering, cracking sound as the arm and elbow fell to the floor. The amputation was almost over.

Quickly, she moved to clamp off the major vessels, telling Luke how to hold the forceps for her, as she made the knots with the flax thread that was found in Doc’s bag.

Luke followed orders, and they worked well together. Finally, Kitty was able to ease the tourniquet a bit. Then, when the vessels were all tied off securely, and the bleeding halted, she shaped the flaps, ligating the cut ends smoothly to bring the cut tissue together in a compact fold. She had seen Doc do this several times, and he had drawn her pictures and made her study them.

“A continuous fold, Kitty,” Doc had said, “without tension. You have to avoid tension, because it causes slough and slough causes gangrene, as far as I’m concerned.”

Suddenly, Kitty felt herself swaying. The tension and strain, the strength she’d had to muster to saw through the bone…the glimpse of the limb she’d just removed lying in a pool of blood on the dirt floor—it was all too much. “Someone else bandage, please…”

Stepping backward, Luke slipped an arm around her waist and, helped her to the pallet, where she slumped gratefully. “Rest a spell,” he said gruffly. “Then get back over here. I want you to watch him every minute for a while, till he’s over the worst of it.”

Didn’t he realize, she thought wearily, leaning against the pine-needle bed and for the first time not feeling their prickle, that the worst of it could last for weeks?

She tried to sort her scrambling, exhausted thoughts…tried to piece together what had happened to them. They had obviously gone somewhere to a saloon—but where? Was there a settlement close by? They had come to this spot, where Luke decided to set up a camp, in the dead of night. She’d been unaware of her surroundings and not been anywhere since. But they had been gone how long? Several hours. They could not be far from a settlement, then, and Luke liked to brag that he could cover his tracks and hide better than any Indian.

Maybe they were followed, she thought with a sudden pang of hope. Maybe they would be captured. But there would be a fight. That was a certainty. Luke would never give himself up. He might even kill her rather than see her given freedom by his attackers.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized she had to be ready if an attack did come. It would be necessary to hide—but where? The cabin was one square room and very small with no windows—only the front door.

Suddenly, things looked more hopeless than ever, and she blinked back hot tears of frustration.

Luke kicked at her with his foot. “Get up and get some food going. If he wakes up, we want him to eat and get his strength back. We’re going to move out of here first thing tomorrow.”

“You can’t do that!” she blinked at him incredulously. “You can’t move him for more than a week. It will kill him.”

“Not Orville. He’s tough. He can take it. You just do as I tell you. Now get up and get busy. We’re all hungry.”

Instinctively, she moved first to check on her patient again, noticing out of the corner of her eye that the bag and instruments had been taken away. There was no opportunity now to slip the bowie knife beneath the bulky folds of her shirt to wait for the first chance to plunge it into Luke Tate’s traitorous, murdering heart.

Orville was unconscious, and his breathing was labored, ragged. She lifted an eyelid and saw that his eyes were still rolled back into his head. His skin was pallid, felt hot and sticky. Checking the bandages on the stump, she was satisfied that the oozing of blood was minimal, with no cause for alarm. With proper treatment and rest, he just might pull through, she decided, but if he were moved, then he would probably die. But she wouldn’t fret over that. Not now. She had done her job. If Luke insisted on moving him, and he died, then his blood would be on Luke’s hands—not hers. The water bucket was empty. Looking about, she saw that the others were settled in front of the fireplace, talking animatedly about the skirmish they’d been in earlier, the death of their friends. There was no need in asking, or expecting, anyone to fetch water from the stream below the cabin. She would have to do it herself.

She didn’t remember taking off her coat when she’d come in before, but she pulled it back on, opening the door against the blast of cold wind. Snow was starting to fall once again. Ducking her head, she stepped outside, walking as briskly as possible without stumbling, down the rocky, slippery hillside to where the icy stream gurgled among snow-capped stones and rocks.

Placing the bucket sideways in the stream, she filled it with rushing water. When it was full, she straightened, pausing to gulp in the cold, crisp air. How easy it would be to just keep on walking down the hill, until she was able to break into a run and try to get away from the evil and horror that waited back there in that cabin. Was anyone nearby? Could she get to help? Or would Luke find her and shoot her in the back—or let her freeze to death as she wandered about in the wilderness lost, not knowing which way to turn?