West of Dodge/Chapter 15
Sunday being wash day for the jerries, it was quiet that morning around the train. Nearly all the men were scattered along the river, washing out their extra shirts and overalls, modestly screened from the eyes of Mrs. Charles and her daughters by the willows, only their voices discovering their presence as they carried on jests and conversations in loud voice from point to point.
The regulation shirt for the jerry of those days was heavy wool cloth, generally navy-blue, a double-breasted garment with two rows of shell buttons, which a modern wringer would have made woeful damage among. There was an arrangement for throwing back the bosom flap to admit the breeze to a jerry's throat and chest. It was a very happy arrangement, a most satisfactory garment.
Two shirts of that sort would wear a jerry half a year, the only drawback about them being the length of time required to dry them, spread out on a bush or hooked along the wire of the railroad fence. This made winter washing entirely out of the question, a hardship that bore lightly on most of the jerries, indeed.
Many of these garments were variously and gayly patched as they blew in the sun that Sunday morning, for each jerry was his own tailor. He cut up old overalls and the arms of old shirts to repair the damage of time and mischance. There were always two parts of a jerry's garments which long outwore the rest: the sleeves of his shirt, and that portion of his overalls which he sat upon.
A jerry worked with sleeves rolled up. Even in the sunny days of winter he laid the muscles of his brave forearms bare to winds which would have daunted the hardiest sailor that ever rounded the Horn. An old-time jerry was smothered with his sleeves about his wrists. It was no workin' weather for a man when he couldn't strip up the flannel and let the breeze to his skin. As for sitting down, there was not much of his life dedicated to that sport. He was away at seven in the morning, on the job till six at evening; in his bunk taking his repose as soon as it was dark enough to hide him, as it was currently expressed, from the boogs.
Gallaher had been sent away on the early morning fast train to the hospital at Topeka, somewhat assured by the hopeful manner of Dr. Hall. Hall was vastly relieved to see the poor fellow on his way. The jerries would accept it as the expected when word came back to them that Gallaher's foot had been taken off in the hospital. To them a hospital was a place of dark atrocities and heartless impositions, few of them having been in one, the old traditions and fears filling such place with horrors to the doors. A hospital could bear their curses and deep denunciations; it would be a hard matter for a lone doctor on the works.
Dr. Hall was feeling in pretty good form that morning. His pipe tasted good to him; there was hearty anticipation in the scents of roasting beef and mince pies which came out of the kitchen on wheels. Mary and Annie were flying back and forth across the door, as on the day he first saw them, as they would continue flying on their tasks which came up day after day like some redundant growth of weeds in a field that no faithful application of the hoe can overcome, until somebody came along and married them, and carried them away to flit back and forth across other kitchen doors.
There would be no getting away from that flying in all haste to serve the hunger of mankind for Annie and Mary. They were mother birds serving a brood that imposed on them in loutish exaction, too simple ever to discover the fraud that fate and men had connived against them before they were born into their cabbage-and-beef saturated world.
Dr. Hall sat in the front door of his office, as Little Jack Ryan had sat the night before smoking his festival cigar, watching Annie and Mary as they came and went, thinking these thoughts of them, holding it a pity that the future had so little in store for them, unless by some extraordinary deflection from the charted course, when they deserved so much more for their years of ministration to the overgrown, greedy brood of men. So he sat, back against the jamb, probably more comfortable for the knowledge, not even subconsciously admitted, that fate had plotted a more agreeable voyage for him than for Annie and Mary, rushing like ants about their work.
And the most agreeable thought, the most pleasant reflection of that bright Sunday morning, was that he was not obliged to remain in that country west of Dodge. He was free to pick up and leave it on a few days' notice to the company. He was not bound there by any far-projected hope; his happiness was not centered in a quarter-section of that mangy land.
That thought was as comfortable as money put away in a safe place. He was a free man in a land that would make slaves of men in their labor of subduing it, ruin many of them and break their hearts, to cast them off in a tattered vagabondage, as other regions of that vast prairie had done by other men within the confines of the immense parallelogram called Kansas.
Charley Burnett was approaching, coming from the depot, where a little gang of loafers had collected in anticipation of the west-bound train, which would stop for water. Its news-butcher would alight in black alpaca coat and cap, like some impertinent young crow, offering newspapers from the centers of midwestern civilization.
The warm sun had brought Burnett out without his coat. He was wearing a white shirt with extremely full sleeves, which were drawn up baggily at the elbows by fancy elastic bands. He came swaggering down the slope of the platform, hands in his pockets, his narrow-brimmed straw hat pushed back to show the elegant sweep of hair that came down in a sleek-plastered loop over his left eye. Hall felt there was something obscene about the fellow; it seemed to be his legs.
Burnett was not grinning this morning, although there was a bland, patronizing expression in his face, a natural endowment that gave him the look of an affable good fellow in the eyes of men and women of a certain type. He stopped a few feet away from Hall's door, saying nothing, just standing with hands in his pockets in a thoughtful way, as if he turned the advisability of some contemplated action in his mind. Hall ignored him, caring little about the man, one way or another, neither curious nor annoyed by his silence.
"Hall, you kind of turned one over on the boys last night, didn't you?" Burnett said at last, facing around with his one-sided grin. "They're sore as hell on you for that little trick."
"It's a calamity, but I guess I'll live through it," Hall replied, his sarcasm not altogether lost on the late telegraph operator who had become the most sensational capitalist in the livestock industry.
"It ain't no joke, I'm here to tell you, Hall. The boys kep' hands off that old skunk on your word you'd take him to jail. Some of us had hard work to hold 'em back when they heard old Gus lope off."
"You might have let them go," Hall said quietly. "My interest in him ended when I got him on his horse."
"It wasn't him they wanted," Burnett sneered at the meddling stranger's simplicity, "it was you!"
"I wouldn't hang well, I'm afraid," Hall said.
"You'd purty darn certain had a chance to try it out if some of us hadn't held 'em back! They wanted to burn this shack over your head."
"Nice of you to come and tell me, Burnett."
Hall was undisturbed by the news, entirely unmoved except for a little edging of sarcasm to his words which nettled Burnett more than an angry retort.
"I don't pretend to be nice about it, Hall. Some of us stood between you and that crowd last night, but I'm here to tell you it won't happen that way twice."
"I don't feel myself under any obligation to you for your interference, Burnett, if you did interfere, which I doubt. I'm entirely capable of taking care of myself."
"You looked like it! Where'd you been at if one of the boys hadn't took a shot at Gus Sandiver when he was throwin' his gun down on you?"
Hall got up, almost eagerly. He put out his hand in a quick, impulsive gesture, which Burnett plainly mistook for an overture of peace. He twitched his crooked lips in a derisive grin, backing out of reach.
"If you know who it was, send him to me," Hall requested earnestly, his appealing hand enforcing the sincerity of his words. "I'm under a great obligation to that man. I want to thank him."
"He's not out for any thanks," Burnett returned stiffly.
"Tell him, anyhow, Burnett, that I do thank him. He meant well, but I wasn't in any danger. Sandiver's gun was empty when I rushed him. He fired his last shot at Nance."
Burnett looked foolish, flushing angrily at this confident declaration, coming so close on the acknowledgment of service to the unknown shooter. He doubtless had overlooked the doctor's possession of Sandiver's gun immediately after the shooting. It took the sting out of his insolence, the triumph out of his bluff.
"Like hell!" he said, stalling for a new foothold.
"Yes. The shells are lying right there on the floor where they fell when I broke the gun. The gun was empty when I put it in Sandiver's hand. He couldn't have hurt a fly."
Hall pushed the door open, pointing to the empty cartridges.
"That would be darn poor evidence to save your neck on if you was up for murder," Burnett said.
"I'm not up for murder, Burnett."
"It'll be just about as hot for you if you don't keep your hands out of this town's business. You're an outsider, Hall; you don't belong. If you don't keep your fingers out of our pie you're liable to get 'em burnt."
"Last night's affair wasn't any of the town's business," Hall reminded him, coldly. "That man was on railroad property, shooting at a railroad man. I'm a railroader; it was my duty to put a stop to it if I could. The town didn't send an officer down here to arrest Sandiver. The marshal wasn't even in sight, keen as he is to loaf around the depot in the daytime. Sandiver was my prisoner. If you've got any case against him, send the sheriff after him with a warrant."
"I've always noticed," Burnett said, "that the crook they've got the stiffest case against has the most to say. But your talk won't get you anywhere in this town, Hall. You're due to meet a whole lot of trouble if you don't stick to your railroadin' and leave this town to run its own business. That's my tip to you."
"I didn't come here looking for trouble, Burnett. This damn country took me by the neck and pulled me into it the minute I arrived. It isn't my county seat war, I'm not trying to horn into it because I like a row. I wouldn't give a dime for your town if I had to take the people with it, I wouldn't give four dollars for the whole county if I had to live in it to make my title good. But I don't recognize the right of any man, or bunch of men, especially a bunch of petty gamblers and cheap sports, to tell me where I head in. If you're here as a delegate, take that back to the gang that sent you; if you're here on your own responsibility, put it in your pipe and smoke it."
Hall stood lifting himself to his toes; lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, like a duck preening itself on a sunny bank. There was no other sign of mental turmoil about him; his face was calm, and expressive of the self-confidence which his defiance implied. He seemed merely to be working off an excess of spirits in the rapid levitation, the cinders making a grinding noise under the soles of his brightly polished shoes.
Burnett put his hand in his pocket, drew out his diamonds and began winnowing them from palm to palm, his face flushed, the nonchalance he attempted only a bluff.
"Oh, hell!" he said, in the sneering discount of a man who has no answer in an argument. It is the small person's last shot, into which he compresses his declaration of fatuity in contending against a fool. To such a man or woman, the person who disagrees is always wrong.
"First, you people in this town side-step a murder and hang it on to me. You can't crack a man on the head when his hands are tied and get away with it under any easier name, I tell you, Burnett. And you slinking cowards in this little outcast burg swore it off on me. That was your first offense."
"You'd better go easy on that line of talk, Hall," Burnett advised.
"Next, you set Old Doc Ross on me, hoping to see him chase me down the track a mile or two. Poor old soak, he thought he was putting on the big show for the bums and four-flushers of this town."
Burnett's pink face lost its color. He put his spoonful of diamonds in his pocket, his mouth shut tight as if he compressed it on something better left unsaid. He looked away, as if the sight of the cool egotist before him might provoke an outburst that would be unseemly to his financial dignity, his eyes on the hills across the river. Presently he turned.
"Meanin' me?" he asked, his voice threateningly calm, as the voice of a man who has made up his mind to fight.
"You're free to apply it wherever you think it fits, Burnett."
"You're makin' some purty wide charges for a man that don't know any more about the people of this town than you do, Hall. Between me and you it'll pass—this one time. But when you make a talk about four-flushers and cheap gamblers again, you take pains to make exceptions to me—by name."
"I seem to recall another time," said Hall, a little laughing jeer in his tone, "when you made a big front warning me how I must talk about you. I haven't heard anything drop."
"You'll hear it, all right all right! And let me pass this out to you: Stick to your business down here with the railroaders. We've got our own doctor up-town."
Burnett put an end to the altercation with that, leaving his warning with Hall, to do what he liked about it. Hall stood at his door, looking after Burnett as he went swaggering back to the depot, feeling a contracting coldness coming over his spirits, portending more trouble for him in that miserable patch of scurvy town.
"Poor business to stand here jawing with that man," he thought.
Poor and undignified business, indeed, wrangling like an old woman, full of vain words, and declarations which time might check up on him with a demand to make good. Only a few minutes ago he had been sitting there in complacent comfort, congratulating himself on being free to leave that country at any time. But the prospect of leaving it under the threats of four-flushers like Burnett was not at all to his taste. It appeared as if the country first had laid hold of him and pulled him into its troubles, and now was conspiring to keep him there. For he was not the one to take to his heels before any common pack of yelping curs.
Not at all, said Dr. Andrew Hall; not at all. He lifted himself to the tips of his polished shoes again, drawing a deep breath, his complacency returning, his serenity restored. Not at all, said he; not at all.