Marshal's Law

by Maddie Taylor

  “I’m not kidding, Aaron Jackson! I am your wife, and unless you want to see me turn into the nurse from hell, you’ll have your brothers do as I say.”

  Aaron nodded at his brothers, and they quickly but carefully turned around. As they laid him carefully on the bed, Heath whispered, “Damn little brother, I thought you wore the pants in the family.”

  “I heard that, Heath.” They all looked at her as she stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed over her thin nightgown. “Now, if you’re done with your standup routine, please move so I can take care of my husband.”

  Heath frowned, obviously having no clue what she was talking about, but he must have recognized her tone as dead serious because his answer was a simple, “Yes, ma’am” as he moved out of her way.

  She flew to Aaron’s side. “I’ve got to get this shirt off you.” Letty, who stood watching from the other side of the bed, instantly handed her a pair of scissors. “Do you know what you’re doing, Janelle?”

  Without pause, she answered her mother-in-law. “I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Wyoming and worked in a level 1 trauma center’s emergency department for the past two years. I’ve seen my share of gunshot wounds.”

  Busily removing Aaron’s bloody shirt, she spared the family a quick glance. By the looks on their faces, she might have been speaking French for all they knew. Again, Aaron grinned through the pain. “You forgot something.”

  She glanced briefly at him as she cut through his shirt. “What’s that, honey?”

  “Summa Cum Laude,” he said loudly, pride ringing clearly with the pain. “She was number one in her class.”

  Seeing that the wound was only trickling blood, she sighed in relief. She had been afraid it would be spurting along with his pulse, which would have been a very bad sign. Leaning forward, she gently kissed him. “Thank you for remembering, my dear husband. Now hush and quit distracting me while I fix you up.”

  He echoed Heath’s “Yes, ma’am” before doing as he was told.

  Janelle started issuing orders. She put Letty in charge of mixing a saline solution. She was to mix up a gallon of it by dissolving a teaspoon of salt per cup of sterilized water. She also asked for clean sheets ripped into strips for bandages, a spoon, a large jug of boiled water, whiskey, a candle, matches, and tweezers. Letty had none of those items in her emergency box, so the others disbursed to help gather it all.

  “Heath, please wait in case I need you to help move him.” When he stayed by the bedside, Janelle spoke softly to Aaron. “Can you roll a bit, honey? I need to know if the bullet went through.” With her help immobilizing his arm, he rolled enough for Janelle to see the exit wound on the backside of his shoulder. “I think it went straight through. Your breathing is fine, so it appears to have missed your lung. If we can avoid infection, we’ll be home free.”

  “You really know about medicine, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, honey. I do.”

  She waited impatiently for her supplies, instantly going to work when they arrived. She cleaned and irrigated the wound with the saline solution. Once it looked clean, she used the only antiseptic available—whiskey. After getting Aaron to drink a couple of shots to help with the pain, she flooded the wound liberally with the alcohol and rinsed it again. Taking the ice, she numbed the surrounding skin, before closing the wound with neat, even stitches. She was just tying off the bandage as Doc walked into the room.

  “Take that off, little missy. I’ll need to examine the wound before I bleed the patient.”

  “Doctor? Do you have hypodermic needles and syringes in your bag?”

  “Why, yes. I always carry a few with me, and some opium for the pain.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll take the needle and the syringe.” Looking down at Aaron, she asked, “Do you want opium, honey? On a scale of one to ten, how is the pain? Ten being unbearable.”

  “With the whiskey, I’d say it’s a five. I’ll pass.”

  “There you have it, but you can leave some just in case.” She held her hand out for the supplies she’d requested. Any other time, she would have laughed at the doctor’s stunned expression.

  When Heath and Luke did so, the doctor took offense. “Now, see here.”

  “I will be treating my husband, sir. I’ll let you know if there are any other supplies I need.” She reached across Aaron’s body and grabbed the doctor’s bag from where he had left it on the bed. Grimacing, she set it down on the bedside table. “Here’s a tip, Doc. Don’t put your bag on a patient’s bed. You’ll pick up germs and then carry them to other patients’ houses. Haven’t you ever heard of cross contamination?”

  Digging through his bag, she pulled out what she needed and handed it back to him with a kind smile. The old man didn’t know any better, and she wanted to take the sting out of her words for rejecting his skills.

  Thankfully, Letty stepped in to help out. “Janelle’s a trained nurse, Doc. She’s worried about Aaron and just wants what’s best for him. You do understand?”

  “But the only nursing schools are back East. I thought you were from Cheyenne?”

  Letty coaxed a confused Doc from the room as Luke walked in with the boiled water. “What are you going to do with this, Janelle? If it’s for washing up, be careful. It’s scalding hot.”

  Janelle was busy unwrapping the paper from the needle and syringe. Uncertain of the aseptic conditions it was packed in, she soaked both in a glass of whiskey while she answered Luke’s question. “I’m going to make history today, Luke. I am going to be administering the first dose of penicillin before it is even discovered. That won’t happen until 1928.”

  “What exactly is that, Janelle? Penicillin, I mean.”

  Janelle looked down at a dozing Aaron. She gently brushed the hair from his forehead, testing for fever as she did so. He languidly turned his face into her hand and pressed a kiss against her wrist, flicking his tongue out teasingly as he did so. Pulling her hand back in surprise, she looked at Heath and Luke with heated cheeks. Had they noticed? Their knowing grins told her they had. “It must be the whiskey working.”

  “No, honey, it’s you, but the whiskey ain’t hurting none.” Aaron opened his eyes and they lazily trailed down her body. “Janelle, I need you to do something for me.”

  “Anything, sweetheart.”

  “Put on a robe. Your nipples are hard, and you’re giving my brothers an eyeful.”

  Janelle immediately looked down at the front of her gown and squealed. She had totally forgotten that she was still in her nightgown. Reaching hastily for her robe, she put it on, trying to ignore the crimson flags of color she knew had flown across her cheeks.

  “Thank you, darlin’.” Aaron turned toward his grinning brothers and issued a dire warning. “You two just forget what you saw and don’t mention it again. Or when I’m healed, I’ll kick both your asses.”

  Heath and Luke looked at each other for a moment before bursting out laughing.

  “Now that, dear sister, is the whiskey talking,” Luke said this with a wink to Janelle and an elbow for Heath.

  Even Aaron snickered at that, as he trusted his brothers implicitly.

  Heath appeared fascinated by Janelle’s knowledge and began asking questions. “Tell us more about this penicillin. How does it work?”

  Walking to her dresser, she pulled out her purse and dug around for her bottle of amoxicillin. She opened it, and taking out a piece of clean stationary, she brought it back to the bed. “I got this medicine for an infection. Fortunately, it is in capsule form, which will make this easier.” Creasing the paper crisply, she put it down on a clean towel, then opened four of the capsules and dumped the powdered medicine into the crease. “This powder is a form of penicillin and fights infection. It stimulates our own bodies to produce white blood cells to fight infection of certain organisms. I am going to cook it until it’s in liquid form and inject it into one of Aaron’s muscles, where it will be absorbed into his body and start to work q
uickly.”

  “Amazing,” Heath said.

  “Yeah, I wish I knew how to make more.” Looking into the bottle, she counted 16 more pills. Good thing it had upset her stomach and she had called her doctor to be switched to something else. The other good thing was that she hadn’t taken it for her recent pneumonia. “In my day, there are tons of different medicines to fight disease and illness. They are manufactured in huge quantities and sold at high dollar, making the drug companies filthy rich. When this is gone, it will be another fifty years before we can get more.”

  She got to work, drawing up saline and adding the powder. Next, she cooked it in a sterilized spoon over a candle flame until it melted and liquefied. After drawing it up in the glass syringe, she set it aside until it cooled to room temperature. Although Aaron slept through the entire process, his brothers were duly impressed. Janelle was sure they would fill him in later on his wife’s extraordinary science experiment.

  “This is a large shot, so I need to give this into a large muscle.”

  “All his muscles are large.”

  “True, Heath,” she chuckled, “but it needs to be a really big muscle, like a gluteal muscle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well… let’s just say we’ll have to roll him over for this.”

  “You mean, you’re going to shoot it in his ass?” Luke asked, amusement clear in his voice.

  “Don’t curse in front of Janelle. Aaron says she does it enough, and we don’t want to encourage her,” Heath warned as he winked at Janelle. “Just trying to watch out for you, little sister.”

  She ignored the last part, focusing on what Aaron had told his brothers instead. “He said something about me cursing, did he?”

  Luke piped up. “Yeah, he said you’re a little salty, Janelle. But you should have heard him when he found out what Jessup did to you. I have never heard those words out of Aaron before. So, if he calls you on it—”

  “Luke, he’s not going to thank you for sharing that when he wakes up, you know.”

  “Oh, probably not. Sorry.”

  “Can you help me get his pants off?”

  Both men snickered then, and she scolded them. “Seriously? What are you, twelve years old?”

  “Sorry, sis. You better warn him, or he’ll come up swinging.” Luke nodded seriously at her, as if he’d received this kind of treatment from Aaron in the past. Janelle decided that story would have to wait for another time. She wanted to give the injection quickly, uncertain as to how stable her solution was under her homemade conditions.

  “Aaron, honey, can you wake up?”

  His eyes opened slowly, and his sleepy smile turned quickly to a frown as he groaned in pain.

  “Sorry, sweetie, but I need to give you a shot.”

  “What?”

  Heath came up on his other side to help if needed. “She needs to give you that medicine she was talking about, Aaron. The penicillin.”

  “Okay, go ahead.”

  “Uh, it needs to go in your backside, honey.”

  “Like hell. Why there?”

  “Well, it’s more like your hip. I need a big muscle so it will absorb.”

  He looked at her as if she were crazy, grumbling while she undid his button fly. Arching his back to let her strip them down, he complained, “This is certainly humiliating.”

  Janelle couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of that statement, but she blushed when all three men looked at her curiously. She wasn’t about to get into a spanking discussion with them, so she shook her head and readied the shot.

  “You’ll have to roll a bit, honey.” She watched as he grabbed onto Heath’s outstretched hand. Quickly pulling down the sheet, she exposed just enough of his glorious backside to locate the right spot, cleaned it with whiskey, and injected the medicine. In a few seconds, she was done.

  “You can take pills from now on, honey.”

  “Thank God for small favors.” He turned his sexy brown eyes toward his beautiful wife, saying with all earnestness, “You are God-sent, sweet pea. Thank you. Now shoo away these big oafs and come to bed. You look like you could use a nap yourself.”

  “Seems your time for bossing the boss man has come to an end, dear sister,” Heath said as he turned to follow Luke out of the room.

  “Well, look at that. They didn’t need a mallet over their heads to get the hint.”

  Carefully crawling up beside Aaron, she snuggled against his good shoulder, smiling as he wrapped his arm around her. “Be nice, husband. They helped a lot. And they love you a lot. I can tell.”

  “I know. It’s just they’re usually more of a pain in my backside than that needle you jabbed me with.”

  “I heard that, ungrateful brat,” Heath called indignantly from the hall, but it was par for the usual banter between the brothers.

  Laughing softly, they snuggled together in their bed. Exhausted from the stress of the past few weeks, they both were asleep before the door latch clicked shut.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Aaron insisted on going down for breakfast the next morning. Exactly as Heath had predicted, the boss man was firmly back in charge. Despite her very vocal protests, she couldn’t convince him to rest, so she made a sling out of a sheet and walked beside him downstairs.

  As soon as everyone was seated and had filled their plates, she looked over her cup of milk straight at Henry. “Okay, tell me what happened yesterday. You were conspicuously absent last night, so you must have been cleaning up all this business in town. Spill it, Pa.”

  Henry look startled by her words, and she wondered if it could have been her demanding tone. Seeing his eyes mist over, she quickly realized why he had reacted. She’d called him ‘Pa’. Her eyes flew to Letty’s, but she had already noticed and had slipped a hand over his and was rubbing her thumb along its back. Janelle was moved; despite all his bluster, her new father-in-law was a big softy inside.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you by calling you that. It’s just…” Janelle looked at Aaron for help. What had she done?

  “No, sweetheart. I’m the one who’s sorry. I didn’t mean to look shocked. In fact, I am pleasantly surprised and honored to have a daughter as beautiful, smart, and spunky as you.” Henry blinked back tears as his three sons looked on; none seemed particularly surprised by his emotional response.

  “I remember a couple of things from when I was sick,” Janelle said. “One is waking up with Aaron by my side, refusing to let Doc bleed me. That, by the way, still freaks me out. The other was waking up with you giving me a drink of water. You reminded me of my own father. As a child when I had chicken pox, or if I had a fever or the croup, he’d always be by my side when I woke. Just like you were. Thank you for that.”

  Henry sat motionless, staring at her, his deep brown eyes so much like his son’s shining like limpid pools. Clearing his throat, he grabbed the cast iron percolator and moved towards the kitchen, murmuring hoarsely, “More coffee.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “You’ll learn that my father is a pushover when it comes to soft words and a sweet smile, darlin’.” Aaron slipped his good arm around his wife’s shoulders and placed a gentle kiss on her temple. “You, my love, possess both without question.”

  “I suppose that works unless you’re his wife,” Letty said as she rolled her eyes.

  “Or one of his sons that has run his best wagon into a ditch.” Luke’s deadpan response instantly evaporated the sentimentality at the table. His brothers of course had to fill Janelle in on the incident. Apparently, fourteen-year-old Luke had taken his father’s new wagon for a joy ride, which had earned him quite a strapping for that lapse in judgment. Heath added that Pa had piled on extra chores for weeks, keeping him busier than a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest. They had all rolled with laughter at that. Letty sobered enough after a few chuckles to scold her oldest son for his foul language at the table.

  After the men had settled down and returned to their breakfasts, J
anelle addressed her mother-in-law. “Letty, if it wouldn’t hurt your feelings too much, I’d like to call you by name. I love you just as much, but you seem more like a girlfriend and confidante. I don’t have many friends in this century, and I’d be happy to call you mine.”

  Letty looked at Janelle with the exact same expression as her husband, tears pooling up in her eyes. Instead of hiding in the kitchen, Letty got up and raced around the table, pulling her new friend and daughter-in-law into a big bear hug and sobbing with happiness. Over her shoulder, Janelle watched all the men look at each other and shake their heads. She was sure they were pooh-poohing the feminine display, but she noticed they also had tender smiles on their faces.

  Henry walked in at that point. He looked to have regained his composure, but upon seeing his wife weeping in Janelle’s arms, demanded, “What in tarnation happened, now? I was gone all of five minutes.”

  “Janelle was just sharing her feelings, Pa. You know how emotional women can be. They get all weepy and feminine when you talk about love and family,” Heath said. The joke wasn’t lost on anyone else in the room, and when Henry turned his scowl on him, they all burst into laughter.

  Once again, the joviality died down, and they all returned to their meals—except Janelle, who apologized, “I didn’t mean to start a crying festival this morning. I was only trying to get someone to tell me what happened yesterday?”

  “The judge sentenced Jamie Jessup to hard time in the Wyoming Territorial Prison,” Aaron stated simply.

  “Hard time? What does that mean? Is that like being on a chain gang and breaking rocks with a pick axe?” Janelle was half joking and was surprised when Aaron nodded.

  “Or building the railroads. Either way, his incarceration won’t be easy.”

  “Hm… I thought they just made licenses plates and the rest was made up by Hollywood.” She brushed off the funny looks the family was giving her, as she was used to it by now. As she thought of her kidnapper toiling in prison, a feeling of relief and satisfaction washed over her. “Would it make me mean if I said I’m glad the judge’s sentence was harsh?”