Free Air Ambulance by Jean S. Macleod Page A

over beside the skerries—the Air Ambulance. Will you see what you can do for Miss Lang? I shall have to get Dougal and something we can use as a stretcher. There’s no time to go on to Garrisdale,” he added. “It would be impracticable, anyway. I don’t think the children heard anything amiss. They would have been asleep. Try to keep them out of the way, if you can.”
    “I will that!” The little Highland woman followed them into the room from which she had come. It was a large, cheerful-looking kitchen with a peat fire already burning in the grate and a black kettle steaming on the hob, suggesting a perpetual welcome. “ Is the lassie badly hurt?”
    Alison shook her head, trying to smile her acknowledgement of the little woman, although all she wanted to do was to sink down on the velvet sofa against the wall and allow the blessed relief of oblivion to envelope her.
    Blair put her down on the sofa, and stopped to take her pulse. “Will you find Dougal, Mrs. Cameron?” he asked without looking around.
    “Ay. It won’t take me long. He’s over at the peats.” Mrs. Cameron hesitated at the door. “You’ll be needing blankets and plenty of hot water when you get back,” she suggested. “There is a kettle on the boil if you are needing it now.”
    “I don’t think so.” Blair was still looking down at Alison. “Where’s the pain?” he asked.
    “My ribs, I think.”
    He ran his hands gently and expertly over her diaphragm, pressing a little, and she tried not to cry out when he came to the seat of the pain.
    “I see,” he said, straightening. “I think we might be able to put that right without a great deal of trouble. What about the arm?”
    “It’s rather painful—yes,” she admitted. “But I don’t think there’s anything broken. It’s only that I can’t move my fingers very well.”
    “We’ll look at that too, when I’ve got Gowrie up to the house,” he decided. “You must promise me to stay where you are.”
    She nodded.
    “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “There must be no doubt about it,” he told her as he turned away.
    “Well, then, I promise.”
    “That’s better. Mrs. Cameron will be back in a second or two. She’ll make you a cup of tea.”
    He went out, leaving her alone in the warm room, and she closed her eyes, allowing her senses to swim, but just not passing into unconsciousness. The kitchen was the sort of room Ronald Gowrie had described to her when he had spoken of his mother’s home on Heimra Mhor, the real living-space of the house. Everything about it was warm and scrupulously clean, with brass gleaming from every corner to reflect the orange glow of the peat fire. There was a dresser with white and blue china along one wall and a “set-in” bed on the other, veiled by lace curtains and covered by a hand-made counterpane of fine crochet work. A loom and a spinning-wheel stood near the window, and a large black cat sat in the hearth gazing implacably at the two china dogs on the high chimneypiece above him.
    When Mrs. Cameron came back into the kitchen Alison opened her eyes.
    “I’m really quite able to get up,” she began, but the older woman shook her head.
    “You lie where you are, and I’ll make you a cup of tea in no time,” she commanded, disappearing into an inner room. “Just let me get Mr. Blair a blanket or two and a wee drop of brandy, in case he needs it.”
    “He’s given morphine,” Alison murmured automatically.
    She could hear voices outside, Fergus Blair’s and another, possibly Dougal’s. He was no doubt Mrs. Cameron’s husband or her son. Neither of the men came back into the house, and she supposed that they must be improvising some sort of stretcher to carry down to the beach.
    I wish I could go, she thought. I ought to be there with them, helping. But all she could do was to lie back and close her eyes again and try not to breathe very deeply because of the pain in her chest.
    She might have drifted into sleep or even a brief