Wet cloth on her forehead. Change it every 10 minutes. Cold water if you have it. Not ice. We don't have ice anyway.
Keep her talking if she's awake. What if she she's going to be all right? Calder said it firmly. He said it the way you say things when you need them to be true. Keep her warm and keep her talking.
He went for his coat and his boots and was out the door before the clock on the mantle struck the quarter hour. The storm received him without ceremony. The rain was the kind that came at an angle, and found every gap in a coat, no matter how well fastened, and the road between the ranch and Red Hollow, had gone soft in the upper half, and genuinely dangerous in the lower half, where the ground flattened out near the creek. Calder's horse, a gray geling named Rook, who was reliable in most conditions and nervous in exactly one, which was lightning. And there was lightning now in the south, felt the road change under him, and slowed without being told.
Calder let him slow. You did not push a horse on a wet, dark road. You let it pick its footing and you stayed forward in the saddle and you did not think about what was behind you because thinking about what was behind you would make you rush and rushing on this road tonight would put both of them in the ditch. He thought about it anyway. He thought about Maisy's face, the wrong color in the lamplight.
He thought about Clara's voice tight in a way he had never heard before. He thought about Wesley standing in the doorway doing the math of a situation he couldn't fix. He pushed the thoughts aside and focused on the road. The creek crossing was worse than he'd expected. The water was a foot over the flat rocks that usually made the bottom of the crossing, running fast and dark and carrying things, branches, debris, the sound of itself loud enough to compete with the rain.
Rook stopped at the edge and planted his feet, and Calder sat for a moment and looked at the crossing and calculated. Not too deep. The far bank was visible. The current was fast, but not the kind of fast that took horses off their feet. He pressed his knees in.
Rook went. The water came to Calder's boottops at the deepest point of the crossing, cold enough to cut through the leather and the wool sock underneath, and Rook's hind quarters swung slightly with the current before he found his footing on the far bank, and came up out of the water with the shaking indignant energy of a horse that has been asked to do something unreasonable and has done it anyway. Good, Calder said. Good boy. Rook shook himself and moved.
The last three miles to the doctor's house took 40 minutes in conditions that should have taken 20. Back at the ranch, the night was happening without him. Wesley had done what Calder told him. Fire up. Cloth on Maisy's forehead changed every 10 minutes.