“It’s clean. Houston won’t let me out the door without an inspection.”
She didn’t answer his attempt at levity, but just turned away from him and blew her nose.
He reached across the desk and picked up the paper of accounts. “This what was makin’ you cry?” He barely glanced at it. “It’s seven cents off,” he said, as he put the paper down. “Seven cents make you cry?”
“If you must know, I got my feelings hurt, that’s what. Plain, old-fashioned, got my feelings hurt.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
“Why? So you can laugh at me, too? I know your kind. You’d never go to a woman doctor, either. You’d be like all the men and most of the women! You’d never trust a woman to cut you open.”
His face was serious. “I ain’t never been to any doctor, so I don’t know who I’d want cuttin’ on me. I guess, if I hurt enough, I’d let anybody work on me. Is that why you were cryin’? Cause nobody is here?”
Blair put her hands down on the desk, her anger, and energy, leaving her. “Lee once told me that all doctors were idealistic, at first. I guess I was worse than most. I thought the townspeople’d be thrilled to have a clinic for women. They are—if Leander is here running it. They see me and they start asking for a ‘real’ doctor. My mother has been here for three ailments in two days, and a few women I’ve known all my life have come. And, now, to add to my grief, the Chandler Hospital Board has suddenly decided that they really don’t have enough work for another doctor.”
Kane sat there and watched her for a while. He didn’t know much about his sister-in-law, but he did know she usually had the energy of two people, and now she sat there with a long face and eyes with no light in them.
“Yesterday,” he began, “I was in the stable without a shirt on—don’t tell Houston—and I rubbed up against the back wall and got a lotta splinters in my back. I can’t reach ‘em to dig ‘em out.” He watched as she lifted her head. “It ain’t much, but it’s all I can offer.”
Slowly, Blair began to smile. “All right, come into the surgery and I’ll have a look.”
The splinters weren’t very big, or in too deep, but Blair treated them with great care.
As Kane lay on his stomach on the long table, he said, “How’d your doorbell fall off? Somebody mad at you?”
That’s all it took for Blair to tell him about the woman wanting opium, how she’d said everyone was laughing at her. “And Lee’s worked so hard for this clinic, and it’s been his dream for years, and now he’s always on one case after another in the mines, and I have charge of this place and I’m failing him.”
“Looks to me like the sick people are failin’ you. It’s their loss.”
She smiled at the back of his head. “It’s nice to hear you say that, but you wouldn’t have come unless…Why did you come?”
“Houston’s rearrangin’ my office.”
He said it with such fatality that Blair laughed.
“It ain’t funny. She puts the silliest little chairs everywhere, and she likes lace. If I get back and my office is painted pink, I’ll…”
“What will you do?”
He moved his head to look up at her. “Cry.”
She smiled at him. “She paints it pink and I’ll come over tomorrow and we’ll repaint it. How’s that for a deal?”
“The best I’ve had all day.”
“All done,” she said a minute later and began to clean her instruments, as he put his shirt and coat back on. She turned to look at him. “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve made me feel much better. I know I’ve been unkind to you in the past, and I apologize.”
Kane shrugged his big shoulders. “You and Houston are twin sisters, so you’ve got to be somethin’ alike, and if you’re half as good at doctorin’ as she is at runnin’ things, you must be the best. And I have a feelin’ things are gonna change for you. Pretty soon, ladies are gonna be beatin’ down your door with all kinds of diseases. You’ll see. You just stay here and clean up this place real good, and tomorrow I bet there’ll be some patients here.”
She couldn’t help grinning at him. “Thank you. You’ve done a world of good for me.” On impulse, she stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.
He smiled at her. “You know, for a minute there, you looked just like Houston.”
Blair laughed. “I think that may be the highest compliment I’ve ever received. I guess I do have some work to do. If that shoulder bothers you, let me know.”
“I’ll bring every broken bone to you, Dr. Westfield, and all my pink walls,” he said as he left the clinic.
Blair began to whistle as she started clearing her desk of paperwork, and immediately realized that she didn’t know whether the account list was seven cents over or under and had to add it herself. The rest of the day, she felt better than she had in days.
Once, she stopped and thought how kind Kane had been in trying to cheer her, after the way she’d treated him. Perhaps there was reason for Houston to love him.
At home, in his dark panelled office, Kane turned to his assistant, Edan Nylund. “Last week, after I bought the Chandler National Bank, didn’t they send us some papers?”
“About a twenty-pound stack,” Edan said, pointing, but not looking up, as Kane took the papers and thumbed through them.
“Where’d Houston go?”
He had Edan’s interest now. “To her dressmaker’s, I believe.”
“Good,” Kane said. “Then we’ve got the rest of the day, maybe the rest of the week.” He strode out of the room, papers in hand.
Edan’s curiosity got the better of him and he found Kane in the library, using the telephone. Since the system only connected one house in Chandler to another, and Kane’s business dealings were usually out of state, Edan’d never seen Kane use the instrument before.
“You heard me,” Kane was saying to the person on the other end. “The mortgage on that ranch of yours is due next week, and I have every right to call it in. That’s right. You get an interest-free ninety-day extension if your wife shows up at the Westfield Infirmary tomorrow and is treated by Dr. Blair. She’s about to have a baby? Good! She drops it in the office in my sister-in-law’s lap and I’ll give you a hundred and eighty days. Damn right, you can send your daughters. Yeah, all right. Another thirty days per daughter that shows up tomorrow with somethin’ wrong with her. But if Blair gets wind of this, I foreclose. You understand me?
“Damn!” he said to Edan, as he put down the receiver. “This is gonna cost me. Look in there and see who else has a loan due or’s been turned down for an extension, and then I want you to see how much whoever owns the Chandler Hospital will sell it for. We’ll see if their board of directors will refuse to hire the owner’s sister-in-law.”
By the next morning, Blair’s good mood was gone, and she had to nearly drag herself to work. Another long day with little to do, she thought, walking the distance rather than driving her new carriage. But when she was half a block from the clinic, Mrs. Krebbs came running.
“Where have you been? The place is overrun with patients.”
For a moment, Blair couldn’t move, but then she ran to the door. The waiting room was a mess: children screaming, mothers trying to quiet them, and one woman groaning with what looked to be labor pains.
Fifteen minutes later, Blair was cutting the umbilical cord of a newborn girl.
“180,” the mother murmured. “Her name is Mary 180 Stevenson.”
Blair didn’t have time to ask any questions before the next patient was brought in.
The next afternoon, a woman brought a little boy to the clinic, an undersized eight-year-old who looked six, a boy who’d already spent two years inside a coal mine. He died in Blair’s arms, his frail little body having been crushed by coal falling from a train car.
Blair called Nina, said, “I’ll do it,” and hung up.
Chapter 30
Blair drove her carriage down the road, away from the Inexpressible Mine and back to
ward Chandler. Nina had lost no time in arranging for her to take the pamphlets to the mine, perhaps because she was afraid Blair would change her mind. So this morning, Blair had called Dr. Weaver, a young man she’d met at the Chandler Infirmary, and asked him to look after the clinic because she’d been called to a mine emergency. The man’d been happy to oblige.
At the Westfield house, Nina’d done her best to hide the pamphlets under a makeshift piece of wood that was to serve as a false bottom in the back compartment of Blair’s new carriage. Throughout Nina’s instructions, Blair was so scared that she could barely speak.
At the mine entrance, the guards had teased her, saying that Dr. Westfield had certainly changed since his last visit, but they let her in. She had to ask some coal-dust-covered children how to find the house of the woman who was to help her, and she found the woman, lying on the bed faking illness, to be as nervous as she was. The woman hid the pamphlets under a floorboard and Blair left the camp as quickly as she could manage.
The guards, sensing she was nervous and, with the normal vanity of men, thought it was their presence that was making her so, teased her more as she left.
She was a mile from the mine before she began to shake, and within twenty minutes, she was shaking so badly her hands couldn’t hold the reins. She pulled off the road to hide among some rocks, stepped down from the buggy, and when her knees gave way, she sat down on the ground and began to cry tears of relief that it was over.
Her shoulders were still shaking when suddenly two strong hands caught her and pulled her upright.
She looked into Leander’s eyes blazing with fury.
“Damn you,” he said, before he crushed her against him.
Blair didn’t ask questions about how he knew what she’d done—she was too grateful that he was there. She clung to him, and even though he was already nearly crushing her ribs, she wanted him to hold her tighter.
“I was so afraid,” she said into his shoulder, standing on tiptoe to bury her face in the soft skin of his neck. “I was so frightened.” Tears poured down her face, ran into her mouth.
Lee just held her close to him and stroked her hair, never saying a word while she cried.
It took a while before her tears stopped and her body quit shaking. When she had the courage to release her death grip on Lee, she pulled away and began searching her pockets for a handkerchief. Lee handed her his, and after she’d blown her nose and mopped up her face, she glanced up at him. What she saw made her step backward.
“Lee, I…,” she began, taking another step back, until she halted against a boulder.
His eyes were on fire. The teasing, smiling, tolerant Lee that she’d always seen was nowhere near this enraged man.
“I don’t want to hear a word,” he managed to choke out. “Not a word. I want you to swear you’ll never do this again.”
“But I—.”
“Swear it!” he said, advancing on her and catching her forearm in his hand.
“Lee, please, you’re hurting me.” She wanted to calm him down, to make him see the need of what she’d done. “How did you know? It was secret.”
“I’m in the mine camps every day,” he said, glaring at her. “I hear what goes on. Damn you, Blair, when I heard you were to deliver those papers, I couldn’t believe it at first.” He nodded toward the wet handkerchief that was crumpled in her hand. “At least, you did realize the danger you were in. Do you know what those men would have done to you? Do you have any idea? You might have begged them to kill you after they got through. And they have the law on their side.”
“I know, Lee,” she said with passion. “They have every legal right to do whatever they want to do. And that’s why someone has to inform the miners of their rights.”
“But not you!” Lee bellowed into her face.
She blinked from the blast and curved her backbone against the rock. “I have access to the mines. I have a carriage. I am the logical one to do it.”
Lee’s face turned so red she thought he might explode as he lifted his hands toward her throat, but caught himself and moved away. As he turned his back to her, she saw his upper body rise and fall with his deep breaths. When he turned back, he appeared to have controlled himself somewhat.
“Now, I want you to listen to me and listen very carefully. I know that what you did was for a very good cause, and I know that the miners need to be informed. I even appreciate the fact that you’re willing to risk your life to help others, but I cannot allow you to do this. Am I making myself clear?”
“If I don’t, who will?”
“What the hell do I care?” he yelled, then took another couple of deep breaths. “Blair, you are the person I care about. To me, you are more important than all the miners in the world. I want you to swear that you’ll not do anything like this again.”
Blair looked at her hands. She had been more afraid this morning than she’d ever been before in her life. Yet, some part of her felt that today she’d done the most important thing in her life. “Yesterday, a little boy died in my arms,” she whispered. “He’d been crushed in—.”
Lee grabbed her shoulders. “You don’t have to tell me a thing. Do you know how many children have died in my arms? How many arms and legs I’ve cut off men trapped under beams and rocks? You’ve never been inside a mine. If you had to go inside…It’s worse than you think it is.”
“Then, something has to be done,” she said stubbornly.
He dropped his hands, started to speak, but closed his mouth, then tried again. “All right, let me try another tactic. You’re not cut out for this. A few minutes ago, you were a mess. You don’t have the personality that it takes to do something like this. You’re very courageous when it comes to saving lives, but when you’re involved in something that could lead to a war and the loss of lives, you fall apart.”
“But it needs to be done,” she pleaded.
“Yes, maybe it does, but it has to be done by someone other than you. What you feel shows on your face too easily.”
“But how will the miners be told? Who else has access to the mines besides you and me?”
“Not us,” Lee exploded again. “Me! I have access to the mines, not you. I don’t know why you were allowed past the guards. I don’t want you up here. I don’t want you going down into the mines. Last year, I was trapped underground for six hours after a timber gave way. I can’t allow the possibility of something like that happening to you.”
“Allow?” she asked, and found her fear leaving her. “What else aren’t you going to ‘allow’?”
He arched an eyebrow at her. “You can take what I’ve said anyway you want, but the end result is the same: you cannot go into the mines again.”
“I guess it’s all right for you to sneak off to wherever you go in the middle of the night, but I’m to be the docile little wife and stay at home.”
“That’s absurd. I’ve never thwarted you in any way before. You wanted a women’s clinic, I gave it to you. And now you can stay there.”
“And let you go to the mines, is that it? I guess I’m too much of a coward to go into the mines. You think I’d be afraid of the dark?”
Lee didn’t say anything for a moment, and when he did speak, his voice was little more than a whisper. “You’re not a coward, Blair, I am. You’re not afraid to do something that terrifies you, but I’m too terrified of losing you to ever let you do it again. You may not like the way I say it, but in the end it’s all the same: you have to stay out of the mine camps.”
Blair seemed to feel every emotion she’d ever experienced go through her at once. She was angered at Lee’s highhandedness. Just as Nina had said, his forbidding her to do something infuriated her. But she also thought about what he’d said, that she just plain wasn’t any good at the job. Houston went into the camps, but even if her wagon were searched, the guards’d only find tea and children’s shoes. It wasn’t the same as what Blair had carried. And Lee had said he was worried about what damage the pamphlets
could cause. She’d read one of the things and it was full of vicious hatred, the kind of angry words that made men act first and consider what they’d done later.
She looked up at Lee as he watched her. “I…I didn’t mean to scare you so badly,” she stuttered. “I—.” She didn’t say any more, as Lee held out his arms to her and she ran to him.
“Do I have your promise?” he asked, burying his face in her hair.
Blair started to say that she couldn’t give it, but then she thought that maybe there was a different way to get the information into the mines, a more subtle way, one that wasn’t likely to get anyone shot.
“I promise that I will never again carry unionist papers into a mine camp.”
He pulled her head back to look at her. “And what if someone calls me to a mine disaster, and you answer the telephone?”
“Why, Lee, I’ll have to—.”
His hand tightened on the back of her head. “You know something, I really like this town, and I’d hate to have to move, but it may become imperative to leave and go to, say, some place in east Texas where there aren’t any people to speak of. Some place where my wife can’t get into trouble.” He narrowed his eyes. “And I’ll ask Mrs. Shainess and Mrs. Krebbs to live with us.”
“Cruel and inhuman punishment. All right, I’ll stay out of the mines unless you’re with me. But if you ever need me—.”
He kissed her to silence. “If I ever need you, I want to know where you are—always. Every minute of every day. Understand me?”
“There are many times I don’t know where you are. I think that in all fairness—.”
He kissed her again. “When I left the hospital, they were unloading two wagons of injured cowboys, a stampede, I believe. I really ought to—.”
She pushed away from him. “What are we standing here for? Let’s go!”
“That’s my girl,” Lee said, as he followed her back to her carriage and his horse.
“Open the gate!”
Pamela Fenton Younger sat atop her horse before the gate to the Little Pamela mine, glaring down at the two guards.