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.
The three grown men managed to move him forward three damned cars and change, with the gal fussing at them not to make any sudden moves, as other passengers gaped at them all along the way.
Then they had the condemned killer stretched out atop a bed quilt with his shirt open and his pants half down, despite his protestations that he didn’t know Sister Anders that well.
She told him to just hesh as she placed the ice pack in place. It was soggy as hell as the warm night air got right to work on that ice. But Harmony Drake blessed her as an angel of mercy who made Florence Nightingale look like a witch on a broom, and allowed that he was feeling a whole lot better already.
The blonde’s worried blue eyes met Longarm’s. She indicated by a slight motion of her head that there were some things it might not be wise to discuss in front of the children. Longarm had naturally cuffed one of his prisoner’s wrists to a handy brass rail of the bunk bed. So he simply nodded, and the two of them stepped out into the companionway for her to confide, “We should have gotten off back there when we had the chance. I know this line. There’s nobody that can help him at that Gila Bend agency if it’s his appendix. There’s nobody anywhere who’ll be able to save him if his appendix bursts before we get him to a real surgeon. What if we were to take him off at the next water stop and catch a westbound back to Yuma?”
To which Longarm could only reply with a sigh, “What westbound coming when, Miss Ilsa? They run passenger trains both ways at night across this desert in high summer. Next westbound for Yuma will just be leaving Deming with a good twelve-hour run ahead of her.”
She made a wry face and decided, “We’d be far better off holding out for Deming and hoping for the best then. They’d never be able to help him at the Gila Bend agency, and poor old Doctor Wolfram at Growler Wash just doesn’t have the sanitary facilities for any really serious operation.”
She turned to go back into the compartment. But Longarm reached out to stop her, saying, “Hold on, ma’am. You say there’s a surgeon at that flag stop way this side of Gila Bend?”
She nodded, but said, “Retired. Seventy years old and trying to grow olives, dates, or something on an experimental farm near that trading post and desert post office. We don’t want to get off there with poor Mister Drake and an inflamed appendix! They say Doctor Wolfram was a wonder at saving limbs when he was running that Union field hospital in his salad days. But even if he still has his old skills, the risky operation that may be called for is a whole new procedure and, as I just said, old Doctor Wolfram is running an experimental farm, not a modern hospital.”
Longarm slid the compartment door open to call in to the conductor, “Could you stop this train and let the three of us off at Growler Wash, pard?”
The conductor replied, “I command this fool train. I can stop it anywhere I’ve a mind to. But why would anyone want to get off at that cluster of ‘dobes around our railroad trestle in the middle of nowhere, after sundown, during an Apache scare?”