Slocum and the Teton Temptress by Jake Logan

Author:Jake Logan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

13

Nobody moved. Nobody spoke for several seconds.

Old Eagle grunted softly in his throat.

Jenkins stood there like a frozen statue.

Slocum felt sweat ooze onto his palms until they were clammy. His stomach felt empty but swirled with a sickening roil of bile.

“John, come over here, will you, and give me a hand?”

“Hovis?”

The man behind the table stood up straight and stared at Slocum.

“Yeah, who’d you think it was? I got a wounded Crow here and I can’t stop the bleeding. Bullet’s in a bad spot. I almost had it.”

Slocum let out a breath in a long sigh of relief and walked over to the table. He looked down at the young man lying faceup, his eyes closed. Black straight hair, buckskin shirt covered with blood, a bloody arm with a tourniquet wrapped around it. It was an Indian, his face bathed in an oily sheen of sweat.

“Glad you got here, John,” Hovis Benton said. “You come at a good time.”

“Where’s the bullet?” Slocum asked, bending over the place where Hovis had tied the tourniquet.

“In the arm, just under the armpit. But I think it cut through an artery or something. Every time I go in to dig it out, the blood starts spurting like a damned fountain.”

“What do you want me to do?” Slocum asked.

“Little Fox is out cold now. I’ve got to dig that bullet out and do some sewing, like those socks you and I darned in the army.”

“So?”

“So, I want you to pinch off that artery while I dig the lead out, then hold it while I start sewing.”

Slocum looked at Little Fox, still passed out on the table.

“He’s lost a lot of blood already, hasn’t he?” Slocum asked.

“Too much. But if I can get the bullet out and sew him up, we can feed him deer meat and elk so he’ll grow back his blood.”

Benton laughed, and so did Slocum.

“Let’s do it,” Slocum said.

“Put your finger right in as soon as I take off this tourniquet,” Benton said. He slipped the chunk of kindling from the knot and untied it. As soon as he pulled the scrap of cloth away, Slocum put his finger down into the wound, grasped something that felt like a slippery worm and squeezed it shut.

“You got it, John,” Benton said, a lilt of elation in his voice. “Now, if I can just get that hunk of lead out.”

Benton dug into the wound with a slim kitchen knife. Slocum could feel the hind end of the blade against his index finger. Then he heard a faint clink from inside the wound. A moment later, something hard rolled up through the slash in the man’s arm and Benton flicked the blade, and something black and bloody popped out and dropped to the floor with a resounding plop. The lead ball rolled on the wooden floor and stopped next to a table leg.

“You got something to sew that up with?” Slocum said. “I can feel that blood pumping against my finger. It wants like hell to spurt.

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