Venters listened
at the breast of the girl. She still lived. Did he only imagine
that her heart beat stronger, ever so slightly, but stronger? He
pressed his ear closer to her breast. And he rose with his own
pulse quickening.
"If she doesn't die soon--she's got a chance--the barest chance
to live," he said.
He wondered if the internal bleeding had ceased. There was no
more film of blood upon her lips. But no corpse could have been
whiter. Opening her blouse, he untied the scarf, and carefully
picked away the sage leaves from the wound in her shoulder. It
had closed. Lifting her lightly, he ascertained that the same was
true of the hole where the bullet had come out. He reflected on
the fact that clean wounds closed quickly in the healing upland
air. He recalled instances of riders who had been cut and shot
apparently to fatal issues; yet the blood had clotted, the wounds
closed, and they had recovered. He had no way to tell if internal
hemorrhage still went on, but he believed that it had stopped.
Otherwise she would surely not have lived so long. He marked the
entrance of the bullet, and concluded that it had just touched
the upper lobe of her lung. Perhaps the wound in the lung had
also closed. As he began to wash the blood stains from her breast
and carefully rebandage the wound, he was vaguely conscious of a
strange, grave happiness in the thought that she might live.
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