Dinah slid a look to tell her to hold her tongue, but as Naomi met her gaze, a shout echoed in the distance.
She spun to find the source, somewhere in the trees the man had stepped from.
Again, the voice came, far enough away she had to struggle to distinguish words. "Help…hurt."
She couldn't make out the name spoken.
The man in front of them turned and charged back into the trees.
Dinah's chest thundered and she plunged her heels into her gelding's sides. If there were injuries, they would need her.
As she rode through the woods, she had to duck under branches and swerve around trunks. Her horse caught up with the man quickly, and she reined down to a trot to follow.
At last, the forest opened into a clearing, where two horses were hitched to a wagon. A man knelt beside the rig, and the stranger she'd been following sprinted to his side.
A body lay before them. Not moving, from what she could tell.
She reined her horse hard and jumped to the ground. Naomi rode up behind her, and Dinah called out as she ran to the patient. "Naomi, get my case."
The men knelt on one side, so she positioned herself on his other.
The man they'd met at the stream held out one arm. "Lady, you'd better—"
"I'm a doctor." She had no time for the fellow’s opinions, so she started her assessment. The patient’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. Harder than a resting rate, which could happen due to pain or shock.
Dinah looked at the man who’d been here at first. "What happened to him?"
"The wagon backed over him. I think over his leg. Not sure why he won't wake up." His voice sounded frantic.
She scanned the length of the injured man for blood. None visible, his face had paled, and a sheen of sweat glimmered on his skin.
She turned her attention to his lower half. His leather trousers bulged in the middle of his left thigh. She ran her fingers over the spot, and the man flinched, even in his unconscious state. A fracture in the body of the femur most likely. Not good, but at least no damage to other limbs that she could see.
A sneaking suspicion began to creep in. She slid a look to his face again, then pressed fingers to his cheek.
Cold and clammy. She shifted those fingers to the carotid artery in his neck. Pulse light, but racing. That matched her own heart rate, but she wasn't in nearly the same condition as this man.
Naomi was out of breath as she dropped down at her side with the medical case and began unfastening the buckles to open the pouch.
She needed to make sure her sister didn’t overtax herself through this emergency, but the man before them was in far more danger at present. His body had begun to tremble. "He needs blankets."
"I'll get mine." Naomi pushed to her feet.
She glanced at the two men kneeling across from her. "I need to see this leg. Does either of you have a knife?" She could cut his pants open at the thigh with her surgical blade, but she'd rather not dirty it if there was another tool available.
Both men studied her, gazes wary, their looks so similar they had to be brothers. The man who’d found them at the creek must be the elder, unless the thick growth of beard simply made him look so. The other fellow wore his beard much shorter.
Neither man offered up a knife.
Frustration clenched inside her. "I'm not going to cut his leg open, I just need to see inside the pant leg to tell if the bone pierced the skin."
The older brother’s gaze narrowed even more.
She glared. "I’m a doctor. I've served six years at the side of Richmond's finest physician. I know what I'm doing here. If I don't work quickly, this man could bleed to death. Maybe we'll be lucky enough that the bone broke through the skin and the blood is flowing out. Otherwise he's bleeding internally, and I'll need to make an incision to release the flow before his organs drown in bone marrow."
The younger looked to his brother, questioning, but Scruffy Beard never took his eyes off her face. Thankfully, he finally withdrew a hunting knife from his waistband and held it out to her.
She grabbed the handle and moved in to slice the leather encasing the injured thigh. The blade was sharp, so it cut through the leather without catching.
