“Well,” Sisson said. “Wouldn't a been my first choice, but I guess that will work.”

The eye was swollen to the size of a teacup. The lid and the area around it had turned blue with coagulated blood. Sisson took water and a clean sock and gently brushed away the blood that had crusted John's face from his lower eyelid to his jaw. It was difficult to tell what had come from his eye and what from his nose. There was a wound half an inch wide across the bridge of John's nose, and Sisson could clearly see cartilage and bits of bone splinter. In the eye itself a wooden splinter—a quarter-inch-thick piece of pine dislodged from the cabin's door frame by the impact of a bullet—protruded almost three-quarters of an inch between the swollen lids of John's eye. It was easy to see that the splinter of wood had exploded off the door frame, gone across the bridge of John's nose, taking skin and bone with it, and then lodged in the eye. Sisson pried the eyelids apart the best he could with his left hand. The splinter had pierced the eye just to the outside of the iris. The white of the eye, hemorrhaged a bright cherry red, was swollen to nearly twice its size. John was biting deeply into his hand, and Sisson had barely touched him. Sisson sighed heavily.

“Don't cut it out,” John said.

“Your eye? I'm after that piece of wood. I ain't going to cut your eye.”

“Just don't cut it out.”

Sisson looked back at the eye. It was a terrible thing to look at. He had cut the eye out of a heifer with a suppurating wound once, and the heifer had died a week later. He didn't know if he had killed it or if it was going to die anyway. He didn't want to cut this eye out. He was sure of that much. “I guess you better bite hard,” he told John.

Holding the eyelids open with his left hand, he reached as gently as he could for the splinter. He wasn't sure how to do this—quickly, so that John wouldn't jerk his head back and make things worse, or slowly, to minimize the damage, which would then likely maximize the pain. He couldn't decide, so he closed his fingers on the end of the splinter and pulled. The splinter seemed to move, then stopped. John gave a muffled scream, and Sisson could see drops of blood where John's teeth had broken skin. Sisson's hand glistened with blood and other gore. He wouldn't be able to grab the splinter with his fingers again.

“I think I can get it out of there,” he said. “You going to let me give it one more try?”

John looked up at him, a glare, a look of pure hatred. Then he relaxed and nodded his head. Yes.