Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

When she returned to the cabin Harry was still asleep and she let him sleep until she had warmed herself with a cup of coffee.

Then she poured some cold water into a bowl, added boiling water from the kettle on the stove and carried the bowl over to Harry’s bunk, where she set it on a chair close to the bunk. Over the back of the chair she placed a neatly folded towel and wash cloth.

“What you doing?” Johnny asked.

“I’m going to give him a bed bath and change his dressing.”

Gently she shook Harry awake. He looked up at her dully and licked at lips she suddenly noticed were dry and caked. Quickly she laid a hand across his forehead.

“You’ve got fever,” she said. “A lot of fever. I wish I’d thought to buy a thermometer when we stopped for clothes.”

“Get me a drink of water, baby,” Harry said thickly.

He drank two glasses, which seemed to make him feel better and removed the thickness from his speech, but his forehead remained hot to the touch. Johnny Venuti watched interestedly as Cynthia stripped her patient and gave him a bed bath with such dexterity not a drop of water spilled on the blankets.

As Cynthia removed the old wound dressing, her face grew momentarily pinched when she saw the inflamed area around the wound and the narrow red streak leading upward along Harry’s thigh toward his groin. Harry noticed the streak at the same time.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Just an after-effect of your wound,” she said calmly. Reaching down, she grasped his bare big toe and gave it a sharp pinch. “Feel that?”

“Not very much,” Harry said. “My foot feels kind of numb.”

Without comment Cynthia redressed the wound and helped Harry back into his pajamas. As Johnny handed the wounded man a cup of coffee, she walked to the window and stared out at the sedan. It was nearly buried in a snowdrift which covered it clear to the top of the windshield.

Abruptly she turned around and announced with loud calmness, “You’ve got septicemia, Harry. Blood poisoning.”

Both men stared at her.

“How far is the nearest telephone?” she asked.

“Twenty miles,” Johnny said. Walking to the window, he swept his gaze over the jagged white landscape, then turned and glanced about the room. “We should have brought snow shoes, boss.”

Harry merely watched his face quietly.

In the same unnaturally loud voice in which she had made her announcement Cynthia said, “There’s nothing I can do with only a first aid kit. Without antibiotics and blood transfusions he’ll be dead in a matter of days. He’ll probably die anyway unless we get him to a hospital by tomorrow morning at the latest.”

Again Johnny’s eyes searched the countryside through the window. “Even a tank couldn’t get up here through this snow,” he said. “Some of those drifts must be twenty feet deep. It will take a helicopter, providing I can get hold of one.”

He crossed the room, pulled on a thick sweater and donned his Mackinaw over it. Cynthia and Harry watched silently as he selected a number of chocolate bars from one of the shelves over the sink and thrust them into his coat pocket. Then he removed a flyrod from the wall, stripped off its reel and laid the reel on the table.

“You won’t make it, Johnny,” Harry said in a low voice.

Johnny made no reply, but he flashed Harry a look which was a mixture of assurance and the unvoiced understanding that exists between men who possess a deep and mutual personal attachment. Then he walked to the door, pulled it open and was confronted by a wall of snow nearly waist high. For a moment he seemed taken aback, but with a slight shrug he plowed through, dragging the door shut behind him.

Through the window Cynthia watched his slow progress. A few yards from the cabin the snow became only knee deep and he stopped to brush himself off. Then he probed ahead with the flyrod, jabbing it through the crust clear to the ground before every step. He had traveled no more than a dozen yards when he encountered a hole which swallowed the rod clear to its handle. Withdrawing it, he probed again until he located solid foothold and moved slowly on.

Behind her she heard Harry’s teeth begin to chatter.

For the next eight hours Cynthia alternately combatted Harry’s chills and fevers, one moment burying him under blankets and the next bathing his fevered body with cool water, pouring more into him in an attempt to satisfy a raging thirst, and placing snow packs on his brow. The chills were less frequent than the fevers, the latter, which she estimated by feel might run as high as 105 degrees, being her most constant foe.

By the middle of the afternoon the patient’s right foot and lower calf had turned a dull purple and there was an inflamed area four inches in diameter around his wound. From it a thick red streak ran clear up his thigh to his groin.

Most of the time Harry lay torpid, conscious but seemingly in a stupor. Occasionally he roused enough to say that his leg hurt or ask for water, and even during his torpid periods he was able to respond to questions and seemed vaguely aware of what was going on. In spite of his high fever there was no indication of delirium.

From the moment Cynthia had announced he had blood poisoning Harry accepted the situation without complaint, understanding at once his sole hope for life lay in Johnny’s ability to reach the phone. But despite this understanding the suspense of waiting seemed to weigh less heavily on him than upon Cynthia. As the hours passed she found herself visualizing Johnny tumbling into bottomless snow drifts which smothered him, or wandering lost and eventually lying down to freeze.

During one such period of anxiety she was guiltily horror-stricken to realize she was not thinking at all of the inevitable consequences to her husband if Johnny failed to get through, but her sole fear was that Johnny would die.

When light began to dim inside the cabin, she took down the gasoline lamp, pumped it full of air and lighted it. She had just hung it back on its hook when Johnny returned.

The bodyguard entered even more abruptly than he had left, flinging open the door, letting the flyrod drop loosely from his hand and staggering forward to fall flat on his face. Cynthia shut and bolted the door, then turned to assist him, but he had already climbed to his feet and reeled to the table, where he collapsed with his head in his arms.

It took thirty minutes of thawing and four cups of coffee to get Johnny in shape to report. And when he finally was able to speak, he merely said in a weary voice, “I didn’t get there,” and collapsed full length on Cynthia’s bunk, unable to make it into his upper berth.

From his own bunk Harry eyed his bodyguard dully and without recrimination, then turned to gaze at his wife. With blunt fatalism he asked, “How long will I last, baby?”

“Don’t talk like that!” Cynthia said hysterically.

At nine o’clock, after three and a half hours sleep, Johnny suddenly rolled from Cynthia’s bunk, crossed to the sink and washed his face in cold water. He seemed fully refreshed from his eight-hour ordeal when he walked over to look down at Harry.

“Sorry, boss,” he said in a quiet voice. “Snowdrifts have changed the whole shape of the country, and with snow on them every one of these hills looks alike. I couldn't recognize a single landmark. I was out seven hours when I cut my own trail and realized I had circled back to within a mile of the cabin.”

“It’s all right, Johnny,” Harry said dully. “Most guys wouldn’t even have tried.”

“You don’t have to look so resigned about it, boss. Just because I walked in a circle today doesn’t mean I won’t follow a straight line tomorrow.”

Cynthia felt her heart begin to pound at the words. Johnny intended to try again in the morning. He meant to battle engulfing snow and zero weather not only tomorrow, but again and again until he either got through or died trying.