The Kelly Trail by Terrence McCauley & Ralph Compton

Author:Terrence McCauley & Ralph Compton [McCauley, Terrence & Compton, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE MEN OF the Diamond B had ridden few miles from the cow camp before Rance noticed that Bledsoe had sagged in the saddle, barely holding on with one hand on the saddle horn.

Rance moved his mount next to Bledsoe and grabbed hold of the rancher’s arm to keep him from tumbling to the ground.

“Everybody hold up a minute,” Rance yelled to the fleeing group. “Mr. Bledsoe needs some tending to.”

He pulled his horse up short and Mr. Bledsoe’s mount along with it. He climbed down and slowly eased his boss out of the saddle, placing him on the ground as gently as he could manage.

The wound from Bledsoe’s eye socket was too gory for him to look at for long, but he forced himself to look at it for his boss’s sake. Rance was no doctor, but he had seen how fast a bleeding wound could cost a man his life.

Rance tore off the sleeve of his own shirt before pulling out his knife to cut it in half. Even from this distance, he could feel the heat already radiating off his boss’s body. He could tell Mr. Bledsoe was already out of his mind with fever.

“What are you stopping for, you cowards?” Bledsoe yelled to the hurt and wounded and scared men who had crowded around him. “There’s no reason to stop now. Get back on your horses and go after them. Hit them now when they’ll least expect it. We have the element of surprise. That’s the way, boys. That’s the way.”

Rance tried to hold his boss still as he packed the wound with half of his sleeve. “Just stay easy, sir. You’ve been hurt really bad. I aim to save you, but you need to hold still while I go to work on you.”

“Hold still?” Bledsoe winced as Rance wrapped a piece of his sleeve around the left side of his head to cover his eye. “How do you expect me to hold still, you fool? Did you see all of the men he killed? How many of us he wounded? How do you expect me to sit still while I have a band of murdering outlaws on my doorstep?”

Rance ignored his boss’s rantings as he wrapped the rest of his sleeve tight around Bledsoe’s head. The bandage might not have looked pretty, but he hoped it would be enough to decrease the bleeding until they got back to the Diamond B. He hoped one of the men they had left behind at the ranch to tend to the cattle knew how to handle a wound like this. If they did not, Mr. Bledsoe would be in a hell of a fix. He wondered if Rita, the house cook, or Miguel, her husband, might know how to take care of Mr. Bledsoe’s wound.

But Rance was not so sure there was much that could be done for an eye wound. He imagined it either stopped bleeding or it did not. He had seen plenty of men live with one eye, so he wondered how serious it was to Mr.

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