West of Dodge/Chapter 4
Justice appeared to have been put in a high good humor by the shooting, perhaps because it moved recollections of his bushwacking days, when he rode on forays with the villainous Quantrell, scourge of the Kansas border. He assigned Dr. Hall a room adjoining the one in which Major Bill Cottrell lay, bringing up fresh coffee made from his private stock by his own notable hand. This refreshing drink he served the truly grateful physician on a precarious little table that he carried in for the purpose.
Dr. Hall had not left the wounded man's side for more than two hours. After doing all that surgical skill could accomplish to check the flow of blood that was doing so much damage to the hotel keeper's mattress and the body of Major Bill Cottrell at one time, Dr. Hall posted himself at the side of the bed, where he sat watching every breath of the perilously wounded, unconscious man. Now, as he sat drinking coffee in his own room, Dr. Hall could see the figure of Major Bill Cottrell through the connecting door, stretched as if ready for the grave.
"He's about gone, ain't he, Doc?" Justice inquired, tiptoeing away from the door.
"No, I wouldn't say he's about gone. He's near the edge, but there's life enough in him to hold him from going over for a while."
"Went slap through him, you said?"
Dr. Hall nodded, the cup near his lips.
"They used to say when I was in—in the—army, it was better to be shot clear through the lights that way. It makes a dreen, they say, when the bullet goes clean through."
Dr. Hall nodded again.
"It's an advantage, if there is any advantage in being shot."
"The other bullet grazed his head, furrered kim, you said, didn't you, Doc?" Dr. Hall nodded gravely. Where his patient was involved, he was as tight as a whisky-barrel, Jim thought.
Justice interpreted this reticence to gossip about the case in his own way as a display of egotism and airs. He might be all right for railroaders, Jim thought, but for all-around household doctoring, give him Old Doc Ross.
"I've seen 'em lay dazed that way when I was in the—war," Jim said. "Sometimes it made 'em foolish, never did outgrow it. You don't reckon that'll happen to Major Bill if he ever gits well?"
"Not at all."
"Can't tell whuther he'll pull through or not for four or five days, I guess, can you, Doc? Have to wait to see if fever and mortification sets in. It used to nearly always take 'em when they was shot that way in the army."
"I think he'll live," Dr. Hall said quietly.
"He's the daddy of this town," Jim explained. The main prop'd be gone out from under it if Major Bill was to die. Them Simrall fellers have been after him, they swore they'd git him, ever since the election went agin 'em and they lost the county seat. They said he put forty-two bogus ballots in the box and got 'em counted."
"Is it one of these county seat squabbles you've got on hand here?"
"It in't no squabble, Doc; it's a war."
"Is he alone? Hasn't he got any relatives?"
"Who? Major Bill? Yes, he's got relations, if you can call a wife a relation. Well, he's got a daughter, such as she is, and a son captain in the army. The old lady and 'Lisabeth they're down in Leavenworth now visitin' Captain Cottrell. I ain't never seen him, but I ain't got any use for them army men, 'specially them—"
"Has anybody notified them?"
"Yes, Judge Waters sent a telegram right off."
"They ought to be here to-morrow evening, then," Dr. Hall sighed, as if relieved of something that had worried him. "So they were after Major Bill, were they?"
"More than the rest of the town put together."
"Is he a real major, or a cattleman major?"
"He's a genu-wine brevet major, not one of them West Point manufactured ones. He got his title on the fightin' field time of the war. Wasn't on my side, but he's a ranks-up soldier, and a good one, I'm here to tell you."
"I'd like to know something about him, and this trouble you've got on your hands over the county seat," Dr. Hall proposed. He shifted to the edge of the bed, vacating the chair to his host.
"It won't hurt him, I guess, me buzzin' around in here? No, I didn't reckon it would. So you never heard of the war goin' on here between Simrall and Damascus over the county seat?"
"Not that I recall. There's been a good deal in the papers about county seat wars out in this part of the state the past four or five years."
"Yes, there's been a host of trouble over 'em. Major Bill Cottrell he's the daddy of this town, as I told you, and the daddy of this county, when it comes down to cases. He's been here patience knows how long, used to fight Indians all over here when they was buildin' the first railroad through Kansas. Him and Custer; he fought with Custer down in the Nation, cleanin' up the Pawnees. They say he was all shot to pieces in them Indian campaigns. You must 'a' run acrost some of them old scars, I guess?"
Dr. Hall nodded assent, his mouth buckled on further particulars of the major's scars.
"He settled down here after he quit the army, years before this county ever was organized, picked on it so he'd be off of the main road of people comin' and goin' and passin' through. Built him a big sod house, biggest ever put up here, six or seven rooms in it, they tell me—I never was in it. It was seventy miles to a railroad in them days, but that wasn't any more than a nice little lope to Major Bill. He shipped his pieanno and furniture out from Leavenworth, and settled down here with his wife and boy. That girl 'Lisabeth she was born afterwards, right here in the sod house they're livin' in to-day. She's a wild heifer, wild as hell."
"She must be an old-timer," Hall said, wondering what she could be like to fill Jim's notion of wildness in that extreme.
"Not more than twenty to twenty-five, I guess."
"Good looker?"
"Not accordin' to my tastes she ain't," Jim declared with emphasis. "Kind of a ginger-topped gal, straddlin' around on horseback all the time. She can jerk out a gun and shoot quicker and better than any man on this range, knock a see-gar out of a man's mouth and never touch his mustache. Hell! She's done it, right here in this man's town!"
"Is that so?" Dr. Hall straightened up with a keen interest in this biography.
"Yes," Jim sighed, shaking his head over 'Lisabeth and her wild ways, "them old folks they've tried hard to make a lady of that girl, sendin' her down to Leavenworth to be educated and frilled up, but they've failed. The old man he's been hopin' to see her married off to some army officer, but she don't seem to go. Maybe they don't want a woman that handy with a gun around 'em. I know I wouldn't."
"It might make a difference to some people," Dr. Hall admitted, seeming to study over it as if it deserved the deepest consideration.
"You damn right it would! I don't want no see-gar shot out of my mouth just because a woman can't have something she wants."
"I should think not," Dr. Hall agreed. "The major went into the cattle business in those early days out here, I suppose?"
"Yes; he done well sellin' to the army. When they put this railroad through he organized the county, copied names off a hotel register down in Lawrence, I've heard, and put 'em on his petition, for this county didn't have sixty, much less six hundred inhabitants the law requires to organize a county, in them times. I don't care how he done it, he put it through. They put out bonds for a court house here in Damascus, and him and Judge Waters laid out this townsite on land the major owned. They made fifty thousand apiece off of them lots, if they made a dollar. Boomed 'em clear down to Kansas City, sold lots by mail to people that never saw Damascus and never will."
"That was all square, wasn't it? just so they got the lots."
"Square enough, I reckon. If a man's fool enough to pay two hundred dollars for a lot away out here west of Dodge he ought to be skinned, I guess. Specalated on 'em, them buyers; sold 'em for less 'n half they paid, most of 'em. Well, some's holdin' 'em yit, payin' taxes, hopin' for a railroad boom."
"Will it come?"
"Not this fur west of Dodge. If I could sell this dump out for thirty-five hundred you'd see me streakin' for the east. I'd go back to Dodge and open me a grocery."
"But how did this county seat fuss begin?"
"I started to tell you, mister," Jim replied, somewhat huffed over the implication that he did not know how to relate the history of Damascus, and he a citizen of it since the tumble-weeds were raked up and burned off the square to make ready for the court house foundation.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Justice. Please go ahead."
"A gang of specalators headed by a gambler by the name of Ora Simrall come out here from Dodge when they shut everything down there about four years ago and started 'em up a town about eight miles west of here. The railroad gradin' contractors had a big camp out there, the company had two or three boardin' trains full of jerries, four or five hundred men, all counted, I guess, in that camp in them days. It was purty good pickin' for Simrall when he opened a saloon and gamblin' joint. He's runnin' a saloon over there now, but his game's shut up, I hear.
"Simrall he got the notion he'd have a private town of his own over there. He put in a big store and a hotel, got the company to build a depot and name the place after him, got a post office, and begun to spread it around he's goin' to build a big packin' house and git the railroad to put up shops, providin' the voters they'll vote to move the county seat over there. Simrall's collected a gang of men that was the very drugs of Dodge around him over there. They got up a petition two years ago to vote on movin' the county seat, and we voted on it. We beat 'em. They took it to court on the grounds we voted railroaders that didn't have no vote, but we beat 'em on that. The court down at Topeka handed down its decision in the case two or three weeks ago.
"Simrall got busy right away to have the question voted on agin at a special election. It's comin' off in June, goin' to cost us taxpayers a lot of money for no use on earth.
"Ever since Simrall and his gang has been tryin' to take the county seat away from us there's been hard feelin's between the two towns. There's been a good deal of fist-fightin' and shootin', two or three men's been shot up purty bad, but nobody ain't been killed till you laid Bud Sandiver out cold to-day."
"Why, man, I didn't kill him!" Hall protested, feeling a sweep of indefinable apprehension that seemed to lift his hair.
"It's all the same; you've got the credit for it," Jim assured him, comfortably, as if glad to be able to give praise and reward where they belonged.
"But I don't want the credit for it, Mr. Justice! Damn it all, man, I tell you I don't want the credit for it!"
Hall was sweating. In his excited denial of this honor, as Justice seemed to hold it, the railroad doctor got up, pushed the little table out of the way as if clearing a space to enforce his vehement word by physical demonstration.
"Well, I wouldn't git excited over it, as the Dutchman said when his wife swallered the dollar. I don't know, of my own knowledge and belief, who laid Bud out. I just heard the boys sayin' it was you."
"Burnett knows better—Burnett can tell you I didn't even know the man had been killed till he told me. He said Sandiver made a break to get away."
"It don't make no difference who done it, Bud's dead. He was a bad egg, it's a darn good thing for this county he's out of the way. But it's goin' to aggervate this trouble, it's goin' to bring them Simrall fellers over here like a swarm of hornets. Every man in this town'll have to hang a gun on him now, and be ready to hop up and fight."
"Did you want the scoundrel to kill that old man and get away?" Hall demanded hotly, challenging Jim's manner, which was half complaining, half doleful, as of a man who had been wronged and yet was too generous to come out with open censure.
"No, you done the right thing; you done the thing any man with a grain of sand'd 'a' done," Jim hastened to make it right. "I was aimin' to tell you how it's goin' to be from now on till we settle this question for good at the polls next June. It's goin' to be shootin' and killin' right and left, or I miss my guess, and I tell you right now, son, I'm gittin' too old and fat to sling a gun around like I used to thirty years ago."
Hall resumed his seat on the bed, that dragging apprehension sagging his spirits down, although he had no regret for his interference which, he knew for a solemn truth, had saved Major Bill Cottrell's life. He was not sorry that Bud Sandiver was dead, but he was considerably disturbed to have it going around that the credit belonged to him.
"Sandiver seems to have been pretty well known here," he said. "Was he a notably tough person, or what?"
"There was a pair of 'em, Gus and Bud," Jim explained. "Gus wasn't along this evenin', but I guess you'll—I guess this town's due to hear from him before long. Back in Dodge when I was there a few years ago, them Sandiver boys had the reputation of bein' horse-thieves. I don't know whuther they reformed when they hitched up with Simrall or not, but I don't guess it's likely.
"Gus and Bud was Simrall's special team. Their job's been ridin' around among the settlers and cowboys, throwin' a scare into them to keep 'em away from votin' when this county seat question comes up. They've been goin' around makin' all kinds of threats what they'll do to anybody pollin' a vote agin Simrall, and I guess it's been hurtin' our chances considerable. Them boys had a bad name around Dodge. It was said they held up a train, and robbed settlers on the road. They killed three or four men between 'em, they tell me."
"Oh, well, if that's the kind of a man he was," said Hall, greatly relieved to learn that his contributory efforts toward Bud Sandiver's end had not been applied against one who had a single virtue or redeeming grace to rise and plead for him.
"Nothing to lay heavy on a man's conscience," said Jim, shrewder of insight than Hall had thought him. "They're goin' to have an inquest over him in the morning, Judge Hawthorn was tellin' me. He asked me to tell you to consider yourself under subpcena, and not leave town. I told him you was here to settle; no danger of you leavin'."
"Certainly not," said Hall, coming a little farther from under the cloud that had gathered over him in chilling depression. Of course, Burnett and the others knew very well the crack he had given Sandiver with Major Cottrell's gun hadn't killed him. They had seen the fellow get up—they had helped him up—and tied his hands with his own handkerchief. There was nothing in Justice's relation of rumors and beliefs to throw a man into a cold sweat. It would all come clear at the inquest, when credit for the coup de grace would be placed where it belonged.
"What is Burnett's business?" Hall inquired, feeling very much eased by this process of reasoning.
"Charley Burnett he's a stockman, the biggest stockman in this part of the country. He's grazin' five different herds of cattle between here and the Colorado line, worth a couple of million, they say."
"Is it possible? He doesn't look like a cattleman, he hasn't got any of the familiar marks."
"No, Charley, he's a gentleman cattleman, I guess you might say. He's got his office over the bank, with his shorth-and-typewritin' girl and bookkeeper the same as any business man. Charley didn't grow up on the range, like most cowmen you meet. He made his start as a telegraph operator for the railroad, they tell me. He had a gamblin' spirit in him that made him take long chances and risks where an old-time range man wouldn't 'a' risked a dollar, and he won out, every throw. Don't understand me to say Charley's a gambler in any other way. He ain't. He never touches a card. All the plays he makes are in cattle. He plays them cattle of his agin them Kansas City bankers like a man plays chess. I don't know, but I kind of look for Charley to hit the sky one of these days."
"He must be a remarkable sort of man," Hall mused, thinking he had not been so very far off in his estimate of Burnett, after all. He had taken him for a gambler, but not a gambler in such ponderous assets as herds of cattle.
"Charley's a funny feller in some ways," Jim said. He laughed, or rather made certain short and rapid expulsions of breath through his hair-nested nose, smothered, but unmistakable, sound of mirth.
"He seems to have at least one queer habit, if it is a habit," Hall admitted. "I mean of carrying a handful of broken glass around in his pocket, and pouring it from hand to hand while he talks."
"Glass!" Jim discounted the word, almost in derision. "Glass! Them's diamonds."
"No-o-o! Diamonds? Why, what on earth—"
"Diamonds, genu-wine, eighteen carat diamonds," Jim declared, conclusively. "Charley's been carryin' a tablespoonful of diamond rocks around in his pocket for two or three years—ever since he hit it big with cattle. He's got a chamois-skin pocket in every pair of his pants. Carries them diamonds around like most men carry a plug of t'backer."
"They must be imitation diamonds. No man of sense would risk that much around loose in his pocket."
"Every one of 'em's a diamond," Jim defended, with a triumphant pride. "Charley'll hand 'em over to anybody that wants to test 'em out. There was a Jew drummer here not long ago told me Charley must have ten thousand dollars' worth of diamonds in his pocket, at the very lowest estimate. That Jew feller's eyes bugged out till you could 'a' scraped 'em off of his face with a trowel when he saw Charley pourin' them diamonds in that off-handed way of his when he's talkin' to somebody."
"It's enough to startle anybody that knows what they are. I never even thought of diamonds—I thought the man must be off a little, amusing himself playing with a handful of glass."
"No, I guess Charley's about as sound in the head as any of us out here west of Dodge," said Jim. He got up, making a show of being suddenly recalled to a sense of his responsibility to the house. "Well, I guess I've nearly talked an arm off you," he excused himself.
"Not at all. You've given me a lot of valuable information. I'm much obliged."
"If it's any help to you, you're welcome."
"This Gus fellow: he's a pretty tough case, is he?"
"He's as onery as castor oil. He'll lay for you, sure as taxes. If I was you I wouldn't put my foot out of doors without a gun on me—I wouldn't go a eench outside of my office without it."
"I didn't come here to fight," Hall replied, loftily. "I'm not a fighting man."
"Well, I wouldn't let it git out on me if I was you," Jim advised, with an inflection meant to show that he was not above a bit of humor if a man wanted to try it on. "But I'll tell you, Doc, for a feller that don't know nothing about fightin', you've made a purty good start in this man's town. You take my tip and git a gun, less you've got one in your valise. A man that's got a reputation like you've made can't live up to it out here west of Dodge without a gun buckled around his belly."
"I guess I'll manage, somehow," said Hall, not exactly pleased with Jim's manner. There was something in it not altogether sincere, something that seemed a wordy expression of the grins which Hall had seen reflected from phiz to phiz on the hotel porch a little while before.
"Well, the boys're hangin' around waitin' to hear how Major Bill is," Jim said in further excuse for his going, where no excuse was wanted. "I guess I'd better go on down and let 'em know. Um-m-m,"—with speculative drawl—"I'd like to know how old Bud Sandiver feels! Knocked cold with a gun throwed at him, heh-heh-heh! That sure was a joke on Bud!"