Page 75 of Coyote

The leather vest across the man's back carried the boar patch, and fever heat rolled off him before I even reached the wound. Coyote unhooked the boot and took the legs. I took him under the arms, and the lift pulled at every stitch in my side. We laid him flat in the grass on the Pae Saco side.

Cruz let his horse drift closer before he caught himself, looking at the blood. "Doc, is he—"

"Alive," I said. "Hand me your canteen, and then get back where Mateo can see you."

I reached for my shears, and Coyote's arm came down between me and the wound.

"Not yet," he said, and searched him first. He cut the vest off in two strokes and quartered it along the seams, running his thumbs down every edge of the leather. He pulled the boots and checked the heels and the linings, emptied the pockets into the grass, turning each thing over once. He took a folding knife off the man's belt and put it in his own. Then he nodded.

I cut the trouser leg away from the stain. The entry wound sat on the outside of the left thigh, midway up, at least a day old, rimmed black and angry, and the exit sat forward of it through the same muscle, ragged and weeping. The leg lay straight and took my grip without grating, so the bone had been missed. The pulse at his ankle beat strong and even, and his toes moved when I told him to move them. The bullet had taken muscle and nothing else, and the walking had ground the infection deep into what was left. The infection was the fight now, and dehydration was helping the infection.

His eyes opened while I packed the exit wound. "Doc," he said.

I recognized him then. The face meant nothing to me, gray and fever-slack, but I knew that voice. For five months, a boy had pushed a water jug through the wire of Zaroff's pen every night after the crowds cleared and the lights died.

"Miguel," he said, as if I'd asked. "It's Miguel."

"Miguel." I kept packing. "You're on Pae Saco land. The bullet went through the muscle of your thigh and missed the bone and the artery. The wound's infected and you're dried out, but you're going to live. Do you understand me?"

His head rolled to the side, and he went back under without answering.

Loading him, Coyote took the shoulders away from me and left me the legs, and when Miguel lay flat in the bed, Coyote pressed his hand against my side, over the shirt, over the stitches. He held it there and looked up at me.

"I know," I said.

He took his hand back and cleared the tailgate.

We ran him back to the house in the flatbed with my knees braced on either side of him and two fingers on his throat. His pulse tapped fast and thin the whole ride. Coyote crouched at the tailgate with his eyes on the fence line, and Nimue held still at his collar with her head raised into the wind. In the yard, Rafe stood waiting with Sierra. Sierra had already dragged the cot from the wash porch room out where I could see it through the door, sheets on, a stack of towels at the foot.

Rafe looked at the boy, then at me.

"He's the one who brought me water in the pit," I said. "He's been shot for a day or more and walked most of it."

Rafe took his glasses off. "He'll know something useful. Keep him alive if you can so we can learn what it is."

We carried Miguel through to the cot. Cruz hovered at the door with his hands working in and out of his pockets until I gave them something to do, and then he held the light steady and asked his question anyway.

"He's one of them, Doc. Why are we fixing him?"

"He's shot and I'm a doctor." I cut the rest of the trouser leg away. "That's the whole list of facts I need. Hold the light on the wound, not on his face."

Sierra worked across the cot from me without being asked, laying out shears, irrigation, and dressing packs on a towel in the sequence I'd want them. Sarah brought water from the kitchen, hot and then cool, set both basins where Sierra pointed, and stood back against the wall out of the way. Her arms stayed folded. She watched my hands the whole time and said nothing at all.

The wound track needed opening, not closing. I ran lidocaine in a ring around both wounds, from the vials Winston had picked up in town against my list, and waited for the sting to leave Miguel's face before I touched anything else. Then I opened the track, cut away what the walking had killed, and flushed it with saline from the veterinary stock in the barn refrigerator until the water ran clear. I packed it loosely and left it open to drain. Closing it would seal the infection in; open, it could be stitched in three or four days if it stayed clean.

Miguel twisted the sheet in both fists and dug his good heel into the cot. He cursed once, softly, in Spanish, and that was it. Sierra ran a line into his arm while I worked, and I started the antibiotics from the same pharmacy bag.

Miguel talked while I worked on him. It was fever talk at first, slurred and circling, and then, as the fluids ran in and his pressure climbed, it turned into real talk that arrived in pieces between the places where my hands hurt him.

"Somebody left a dead man on our ground," I said when his eyes steadied. "Laid out across the patrol track for us to find. Did you know that?"

His face pulled, and not from anything my hands were doing. My hands were still.

"Dane," he said. "They called him Dane."

"You knew him."

"I fed him. I fed all of them. That was my job, the pens and the water." His throat worked. "Dane won his tenth fight two weeks back. Ten's the number. You win ten and you're promoted out. You don't fight anymore." His mouth kept working for a moment with nothing coming out of it. "He was going to buy his mother a house, Doc. He believed it. We all believed it. It's easier."