Cord 2 by Owen Rountree

Author:Owen Rountree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nevada, homesteaders, the wild west, wild west fiction, picadilly publishing, outlaws and lawmen, owen rountree, westerns fiction, cord and chi
Publisher: Piccadilly

The first thing Cord saw was a painful white glare.

It was a plastered ceiling. Cord was lying on his back on a table of some sort. His legs dangled over one end. The table was covered with a rough-woven blanket of burlap.

Cord struggled to sit up, grunting loudly with pain and surprise. His head throbbed, there was a sharp driving pain in his side as he moved, and his jaw ached when he tried to open his mouth.

There was a roll top desk across the room. A woman with sharp features was sitting at it ciphering. She wore wire-rimmed spectacles and a snood.

The woman looked up at him with ill-concealed disgust. Cord got himself slowly to his feet, the movement bringing on more pain and a surge of nausea. He crouched for a moment in which he almost went to the floor. The woman’s looked changed from disgust to apprehension, “You stay right there,” she said, and she got up and went quickly through the door into another room.

Through a window Cord could see a little piece of lawn in front of the place and other houses across the dirt street. This was not Texas Town. On the wall near the window there was a frame with what looked like a biblical verse. But at the end was the name Joseph Smith.

The sharp-featured woman returned. The man trailing her was bald except for a fringe of white hair like a crown. He wore a white blouse with a smear of red blood across the front, and wire-rimmed spectacles like the woman’s.

“Come on in here,” the man said, and Cord slowly followed him into the other room. This one had no windows. There were shelves with apothecary bottles along one wall, a cabinet with metal instruments inside, a chart showing all the muscles and organs of a man’s body.

Cord had never been in a doctor’s surgery before. “Doc ...” His jaw hurt so badly he had to shut up.

“Young man,” the doctor said, “if you persist in getting into this sort of fight, the next place you visit may well be the undertaker’s parlor.”

Cord looked at him. “Not ...” Cord could hardly talk. To hell with this. Cord sucked in his breath. “Not if I don’t get whipped,” he blurted.

“Well now,” the doctor said, “this time you surely did.” The man took a water glass from a shelf and handed it to Cord. “Piss in this.”

Cord did as he was told. The doctor took the glass and held it to the light, swirling it as though he was studying fine and expensive brandy. He sat it down, held up a fist and flashed fingers.

“How many?”

“Two.”

“How many this time?”

“Four,” Cord said.

The doctor took Cord’s face roughly in one hand and turned it to look at the big purple bruise on Cord’s jaw. He felt the swelling along the bone, and the pain jumped fiery hot, flashing like a signal light before Cord’s mind.

“Bone bruise,” the doctor said. “Nothing broken.”

“I can’t open my mouth all the way.

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