Free Carla Kelly by The Wedding Journey Page B

turned away, and threw himself into a folding chair, the private opened his eyes and gave a long, slow wink. While the QM fanned himself vigorously with one of his numerous order books, Wilkie whispered to Jess, “Sir, me and Harper have solved your money problem. If you can get me to Number Eight before the QM takes a good look, we’ll solve your problem.”
    Why is none of this registering, Jess thought as he stared at Wilkie, surprisingly cheerful, despite a knife deep in his gut. Gingerly he pulled back the private’s blood-drenched shirt. Wilkie’s hand clutched the blade. He groaned out loud, which set the quartermaster to uttering anxious twitterings of his own. Jess leaned closer over the wound. “Private, you need to let go of that blade.”
    Jess’s eyes widened in surprise as Wilkie chuckled. “It was Harper’s idea, and wasn’t it a good one?”
    “What on earth…”
    Wilkie moved his hand away, and Jess stared at the blade, which, from all appearances, had been carefully inserted into the mouth of the little fistula that formed Wilkie’s amazing wound. “Cow’s blood, sir,” the private said, his voice low in a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re slaughtering’m out back for the retreat.”
    “What have you done?” Jess asked in a fierce whisper of his own, even as the quartermaster began to whimper and call for smelling salts.
    Wilkie continued to grin at him. “Sir, I have the other fifty pounds! You don’t need to do anything drastic!”

Chapter Five
    “N ell, she what you can do for the quartermaster,” he said, then looked up to see that Nell was already at the man’s side. He turned his attention back to Wilkie. “You are a disgrace to your uniform,” he snapped, keeping his voice low. “Where is Harper?”
    “He’ll be here directly, I am sure,” the private said, then groaned again for good effect. “The QM ’ere—Lord love him—sent ’arry inside the tent to find some cotton wadding for me wound.”
    Hippocrates, I wouldn’t trust ’arry in a roomful of Jesuits, Jess thought sourly. “Harper!” he bellowed. “Show yourself!” He glanced at Nell, who gave him a reproachful look, and returned her attention to the quartermaster.
    In a moment Private Harper came out of the quartermaster’s tent, his hands full of cotton wadding, with a righteous look on his face. “Captain, remember how you never could get any of this stuff from the quartermaster? He has rolls of it.”
    As Jess glowered at the private, he couldn’t help ask himself if he was more irritated at Harper, or the quartermaster. He turned his attention to Private Wilkie, who began to writhe about as a small crowd gathered. “Do give him room,” Jess ordered. “Surely all of you have something better to do.” Oh, Lord, I am encouraging these two thieves, he thought as he carefully grasped the knife, gave it a yank, and played along.
    The knife came away quite easily, as he knew it would, because it barely rested inside Wilkie’s curious abdominal fistula. The quartermaster shrieked, which only earned the man a hard stare from Nell. Well, Hippocrates, did
you
ever fall among thieves? he asked himself as he daubed at the wound, allowing the cotton wadding to soak up the cow’s blood that had pooled so dramatically under Wilkie. Hating himself for such malpractice, Jess directed Harper to hold his hand tight over Wilkie’s spurious wound while he dug in his medicine satchel, extracted a good length of bandage, and wrapped it quickly in place. “That should do until I get him back to the hospital,” he told the quartermaster. “You won’t mind if I take along this wadding, will you? I thought not.”
    It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Harper to make another rapid reconnaissance of the QM’s tent to look for laudanum and new scalpels, but he resisted. Instead, he motioned for his stretcher bearers, and wondered what else the enterprising private had liberated from the QM’s too-abundant