West of Dodge/Chapter 19
Elizabeth seemed always to have an air of wistfulness about her when her features were in repose, as if she nursed a secret sorrow. But it was nothing but one of the tricks nature plays with the feminine face for the allurement of men. There was nothing brooding nor melancholy about Elizabeth at heart. Laughter lay close to the surface; it woke in her eyes with even the stealthiest breath of mirth. Not the vacuous loud laughter such as exploded out of the mouths of Annie and Mary Charles, but the refinement of sympathetic merriment, when her expressive eyes sparkled through small slits of closedrawn lids, seeming to say: "I am laughing with you, not at you, my jolly friend."
Elizabeth laughed that way when she told Dr. Hall of standing back in the shadows, watching him waltz with Mrs. Charles.
"It was duty, not pleasure, a social obligation that had to be discharged," he protested, embarrassed in spite of her friendly appreciation.
"Of course," she said. "I wished there were a Mr. Charles to invite me out. It wasn't half as rough as I expected it to be. Railroad manners certainly are improving."
They were at the gateless gap in the wire fence, from which the posts on either hand leaned away as if to accommodate people wide at the waistline, a style not current in Damascus in those hard-riding days. Elizabeth's horse was snipping around with free rein, forelegs spread to bring its nose down to the short grass.
"Yes, everything was going fine until the delegate from Simrall arrived," Hall said, ashamed of his part in the subsequent activities, looking down at his toes like a bashful boy.
"You oughtn't take such risks," she reproved him.
"I thought he'd shot the station agent, but I don't suppose it would have mattered. He seems to be an unpopular sort of man. The old fool was slinging his gun around kind of recklessly—he might have hit some of the women. But you know how it was."
"I've heard several versions and variations. I wasn't there when it happened; Gus put in his appearance after I'd left."
"Somebody shot him through the arm," he said, with such weakness of effect as to sound almost foolish in his ears.
"But you took a long risk when you walked out with that sponge in your hand," she told him, looking at him gravely, shaking her head with solemn disapprobation. "It was a fine bluff, but suppose it hadn't worked?"
"Providence, or some power, appears to raise up friends and protectors for me when they're most needed. I suppose somebody would have stepped up and piloted me out of the scrape, Elizabeth."
Elizabeth shook her head again, not touched by the deep note of gratitude in his voice, unmoved by his meaning glance. She did not change color; there was no embarrassment in her steady, frank eyes, such as one might show when trying to cover a service for which she desired no acknowledgment.
"It was a fine shot, just a snap at the fellow's arm as he swung it up in the lantern light. There isn't one in a thousand could have hit him."
"I don't know anybody in town that could have done it," she seemed to speculate, a puzzled look in her face as she turned all the probabilities in her mind.
"Burnett says he knows who did it," he said, lightly scoffing.
"Maybe he does."
"So does Jim Justice, but their stories don't match."
"What does Charley say?" she looked up quickly, eagerness in her words.
"He says it was one of the boys."
"Maybe it was one of his men from the range," she said thoughtfully. "And windy old Jim says he did it himself?"
"No. He says it was a lady." A knowing glance went with the words, which seemed only to provoke her mystification.
"A lady? Who was she—did he say?"
"The same one I've been hoping it was." There was the vibration of hopeful eagerness in his voice, an appeal. "But she is so modest, she makes so little of her great and timely help to a foolish, impetuous greenhorn, that he's afraid to come right out and thank her the way he wants to."
"Meaning me?" she asked, truly amazed, touching her wishbone with a pointing finger.
"Wasn't it you, Elizabeth?" he almost pleaded, catching the hand with pointing finger that still rested against
her bosom in its astonished question of identity. "I'd rather owe it to you than anybody in the world, Elizabeth. Wasn't it you?"
She shook her head, her wistful face pale, her friendly eyes stretched wide.
"It wouldn't have been his arm if'd taken a shot at Gus Sandiver," she replied. She placed her hand impetuously over the one that clasped her own, as if to comfort him for the illusion he had held. "No, no, Doctor Hall; I wasn't there, I didn't even hear the shooting."
"I'm sorry," he said.
"So am I."
"I told Justice you were not there, but he was positive. I've been swelling around all day in the belief I was debtor to somebody I was proud to owe."
"Maybe it was one of the girls in the boarding-train."
she suggested, the thought appearing to make her cold. She drew her hands away.
"They couldn't shoot with anything but a chunk of coal," he said miserably. "Who the dickens do you suppose it was?"
"There are not so many ladies running around loose in this town," she said, her manner implying they were altogether too numerous, at that.
"Justice is an infernal old liar!" he declared. "I don't believe he knows who fired that shot any more than I do."
"Maybe not," she said, assuming indifference.
"There's only one lady in the world I'd accept such a service of," he declared hotly.
"I don't see how you could help yourself," said she.
"I'd feel like a cad if I had to owe it to any other girl. If it wasn't you, Elizabeth, Burnett's right about it."
"I expect he is," she agreed.
"I asked him who it was, but he wouldn't tell me. He said the person who did it wasn't out looking for thanks."
"Let it go at that, then."
"I suppose I'll have to. But I'll feel like a sneak, going around in debt to somebody for my life who figures it's something that might hurt his reputation if it got out on him. That shows how I'm rated in this man's town, and yet there are people who tell me I ought to hang out my shingle here and settle down."
"That don't signify," she said, in her breezy, sure-footed way, her poise entirely recovered. "It's somebody that don't want to get in bad with that bunch of shooters over in Simrall. Pass it up."
"The trouble of it is I'll have to treat everybody in this town with a deference they don't deserve and I don't feel, on the chance of snubbing the real hero of the occasion."
"You'd make by it, maybe, if you would come down off your high horse now and then, call them by their first names and set up the cigars. A doctor's got to be more or less a politician, dad says, and I think he's right."
"Oh, if I wanted to stay here in Damascus and build up a practice I could do even that, I guess, but it's a kind of cheap way of getting where you want to go."
"Don't you want to stay in Damascus?" she asked, glancing at him archly, her words almost coaxing.
"Do you want me to stay?" he returned, boorishly, as he realized next moment.
Elizabeth nodded, not a shade of pink in her face.
"Uh-huh!" she grunted, like a tobacco chewer looking around for a place to spit. "All the permanents want you. Judge Waters says you're the finest surgeon he ever saw."
"Judge Waters is a townsite boomer. Extravagant talk is his line of trade."
It pleased him to hear the judgment of that lean, slow-striding, meditative, old man, none the less. He would have stretched himself to his toes in another moment, catching his leg muscles as they were setting to the act, but for Elizabeth's expectantly provoking grin. She was watching for him to preen himself in his pride, probably with the intention of calling him down.
"Try walking around town with the mortals a while," she suggested. "You might as well get used to our ways, for we're not going to let you leave."
Hall was in no humor for trying out her suggestion as he went back to the town square, heading for his office. He hadn't mounted a high horse, he defended himself to his own conscience. He had been indifferent and aloof because he had not felt himself a part of the town, or ever likely to have any deeper interest in it than now. They had conspired against him from the first, throwing their own guilt at his door, trying to give it all the air of a great piece of public levity. It was about as funny as somebody leaving an unwelcome infant in a fellow-traveler's arms.
He held his deliberative way toward Custer Street, thinking of his situation in that town, an outsider who had come to camp on the edge of it, never intending to mingle in its life and affairs. How the swirl of events, small and local as they were, had laid hold of him like the vicious current in a despicable, brawling, muddy little stream, and rolled him until he came to his feet standing more than waist deep in it, every move appearing to take him farther from the bank.
Burnett had served notice on him to keep hands off; others had invited him to lay hold and carry with them. He never had considered stopping permanently in Damascus until Burnett had come at him with that sneering order. His defiant answer to the diamond-shuffling speculator had committed him, in a way. Should he resign his railroad job and take up the challenge of Burnett and the invitation of the really responsible citizens at the same time? It was something to think about.
Here was Major Cottrell offering money to buy out Old Doc Ross, assistance that he did not need, although the proffer was assuring. These people had confidence in the future of their town, and there was some good sport among them who thought enough of the outside doctor to lift up his gun and put in a shot when it was needed most. Burnett had no inside knowledge of that gunner; Burnett's front was all a bluff.
But it wasn't Elizabeth. That took a lot of the edge off. It would have been a pleasantly romantic situation for him as debtor to Elizabeth. Even with her out of it, he could not believe it was anybody who would pop up some day and slam it in his face. Maybe Judge Waters had slung that timely gun. He liked the thought. But it was not Elizabeth.
Old Doc Ross was sitting in his little shack of an office next door to Pink Fergus' place of many enterprises, his door open to the warm air of late afternoon. There was nothing about his appearance indicative of any great amount of humiliation or anguish over the treatment he had received at the young doctor's hands.
Ross was smoking a long stogy, the end of it tilted in jaunty defiance, his feet on his flat-topped desk. His boots were polished, his clothing was in array, his entire appearance that of a person pretty well satisfied with himself and things which touched his orbit. There was no trace of his late dissipation in his face; his hand appeared steady when he reached for his long cigar to flick the ash from it delicately, and restore it with fixed and lofty eye. Not a bad-looking man, Hall thought; not a competitor to be despised anywhere, if he kept himself sober and in trim. The fact that he was a regular doctor, though bent toward quackery, had lifted him considerably.
As Hall passed the door he lifted his hand in a hail, nodded, and saluted his fellow practitioner with a hearty:
"Good evening, Doctor."
Old Doc Ross did not move a whisker, nor deflect his lofty eye one point from an apparently deep study of a picture tacked to the wall before him. This was a chaste advertisement of yeast, a calendar beneath the young lady who stood knee deep in June with an armful of hops.
Hall grinned as he went on, suffering no feeling of being snubbed. Contrarily, he was considerably pleased with himself. That was making a start in the direction Elizabeth had advised.