Hell on the Prairie by Ford Fargo

to his upper arm to cut off the blood supply, then I
need a short scalpel to cut through the skin down to the muscles. I
always try to use the flap amputation technique. That means the
incision is done obliquely round the arm rather than in a circle,
which will allow me to keep a flap to cover the stump. “
    He selected the instruments one by one and
placed them in a row. “Then I’ll need a bistoury knife, that’s this
long one with the curved blade. I’ll use that to separate the
muscles down to the bone. I’ll also need this tenaculum to pinch
the end of arteries and catgut to tie them off and stitch the
muscles’ ends.”
    He opened a small jar and drew out a strip
of linen, which he cut upwards from one end with a pair of
scissors, so that it had three tails.
    “ I’ll use this to retract the muscles
back from the bones,” he explained. “One strip goes between the
radius and the ulna bones and the others go round them so that I
can pull the muscles back to give me a sight of the bones. Then
I’ll need that medium bone-saw.”
    Barclay Patterson tossed the empty whiskey
bottle aside, the contents of which he had forced Rob Parker to
drink. “Right, Dr. Munro. Then I suggest you start operating. He
looks about out of it.”
    “ Let me put a wood splint between his
teeth, this will hurt like hell when I start cutting into
skin.”
    As he did so he looked pleadingly at
Patterson. “I ask you, man to man, don’t subject Mrs. Parker and
Tommy to this.”
    The gambler’s fist tightened on the gun in
his hand and he shook his head. “Start cutting.”
    Logan applied the tourniquet to Rob Parker’s
upper arm and screwed it tight until the veins stood out on the
forearm and the skin started to change.
    “ I’ll have to move quickly,” he said,
placing the scalpel against the arm. “Whiskey is no substitute for
chloroform.”
    He quickly incised the skin in a rapid
oblique circle all the way round the mid-forearm.
    He heard the rapid intake of breath from the
bed and imagined Mollie Parker and Tommy Brewster fainting, but he
had no time to look.
    Barclay Patterson laughed eerily as Rob
Parker’s eyes shot open and his body bucked against the ropes that
restrained him.
    “ Excellent work, doctor. Pray
continue.”
    Logan reached for the sharp, long-bladed
bistoury knife. “I warn you, there will be a lot of blood with
this. I have to go deep and I’ll be cutting through his radial and
ulnar arteries. The tourniquet will have stopped most of the
supply, but you can never completely cut it off.’”
    “ Go on! Cut! Cut!”
    Logan wiped the perspiration from his brow
with the back of his hand. He moved his hand slowly up across his
forehead, then rapidly kept moving upwards, at the same time
spinning round to throw the bistoury with all his might. It flew
like an arrow and pierced Barclay Patterson’s right eye all the way
to the hilt. There was an accompanying sickening squelch and
crackle as it went through orbital contents and orbital cavity into
the brain. Blood and yellow eye jelly spurted out.
    The gun went off as the gambler’s body
toppled forward and crashed to the floor where it began convulsing,
the wooden leg beating an horrific, macabre staccato noise on the
floor.
    Then he lay motionless. Immediately, Logan
bent and felt his neck, searching for the carotid pulse. He was
dead.
    To his great relief, he saw that both Mollie
and Tommy had indeed passed out and had been spared the spectacle
of the man’s grisly death. He released them and lay them gently on
the bed, sure that they would recover and need his aid in moments.
But first he needed to tend Rob Parker, who was lapsing in and out
of consciousness, struggling to overcome the effect of the bottle
of whiskey.
    Logan set about stitching the incision on
his arm before releasing the tourniquet, so that he had a
relatively bloodless field on which to work. It was only then that
he started to even consider what would have happened had he