West of Dodge/Chapter 9
During the days of Major Cottrell's convalescence Dr. Hall did nothing to enlarge either his acquaintance or his popularity in town. He had removed his belongings from the West Plains Hotel to his boxcar apartment, where he was installed in comfort. Mrs. Charles had taken him into her boarding-train for his meals on the footing of one of the railroad fraternity. She favored him as she did the roadmaster when that general of the jerries stopped in for a meal, "settin' him in" as she expressed it, at her private table in one end of the kitchen, along with her—self and daughters. There always was a cloth on the table, and a great deal of blackberry pie.
Dr. Hall was conscious of an unfriendly feeling as he passed through town on his daily visits to Major Cottrell at the hotel. The humorists of Damascus were not good dissemblers; their animosity stood in their eyes. Old Doc Ross was still out on his bender. Dr. Hall had seen him on the street several times, always headed toward the saloon, traveling as straight as a bee, stability of locomotion, even under a load, being a trait for which Ross was greatly admired in Damascus. More than once when he had passed the saloon Hall had seen the old rascal watching him over the swinging half-doors, furtive as a harried old badger at the mouth of its den.
It was a matter of indifference to Hall whether they liked or disliked him in that town. His future fortunes were in no way connected with it, he reasoned, his stay there being in its nature only vacational, a short break in the heavier exactions of his life. Beyond that little experience on the railroad frontier the serious business of his profession awaited for him to take it up again. Certainly that resumption would not be undertaken in the bleak town of Damascus. It was too far west of Dodge; that was what everybody said. Dr. Hall repeated the dismal refrain with a feeling of disdain. It always sounded to him like the defense of insufficient men who were to be tried presently for cowardice and failure, and shamefully convicted before the world.
Taking it by Jim Justice's demeanor, which Hall felt was a good barometer of public sentiment, Damascus appeared meanly resentful of the railroad doctor's presence. It was as if he had done the town a service which it was too mean to be grateful for, after the nature of small people everywhere, or an injury that it could not forgive.
Hall could not believe these slinking fellows with their come-easy little businesses, their traps for the unwary, their crooked small games, had any deep interest in the town. It could not be much to them whether Damascus held the county seat, or Simrall came with its wagons and teams, put skids under the brick court house and carried it away, as he had heard of triumphant factions doing with court houses in that country, where court houses seemed to be prized among the people above the justice which was vaguely supposed to have its seat within them.
The true defenders of Damascus, Judge Waters had told him, were the farmers and ranchmen in the country around it. Their interests were lively, their partisan ship fiery. To these whiskered, shaggy, sharp-eyed men who lived in the mysterious envelopment of the prairie, the court house at Damascus was the sacred Kaaba. They covered it with the holy carpet of their defense.
With this feeling of interest apart from the town, Dr. Hall walked through Custer Street one fair morning on his way to pay his first visit to Major Cottrell in his own home. The hardy old soldier had made a quick recovery under the ministration of modern surgery. Damascus called it luck, with a sneer, and disparaging comparisons with the past achievements of Old Doc Ross. Mrs. Cottrell called it a marvel, and placed her gratitude where it belonged.
Hall met few people with whom he was acquainted that morning, although Custer Street was busier than he had seen it before. Many teams were hitched around the square, the sidewalks were thronged with rough-clad men carrying new tools and implements, weapons for the big battle they were engaging with the soil.
Major Bill Cottrell's sod house looked as if it had been built in the angle of a square. It was proportioned in the same manner as that principal working tool of a mason, being much longer in the main stem than the branch. There was nothing imposing about it, either in style or scope, where it stood gray and crumbling on top of a small knoll at the edge of town.
More like something designed for military, rather than domestic, purposes Major Cottrell's house appeared, its bleak angle presenting to the northwest, its doors and windows out of plumb, its situation as bare as if the restless bosom of the wind had swept away every shrub and plant like a lashing flame.
The structure showed joints in the clumsy masonry of sod, where it had been enlarged from time to time, although all of it appeared to be of one age. Rain had guttered its walls; it was pitted as if by cannon-shots where the grass roots which bound the sod had given away, dropping earth along the base of the wall. The attrition of winds which never quieted had rounded its corners: rains had made gullies of the narrow buffalo trails which ran down to the river past its door.
The roof was slightly conical, an arch greatly flattened, sod-covered, making all of it but the shallow plank gables seem one with the walls, and the dun earth from which they were fashioned. This sod covering served the triple purpose of insulating against heat in summer, turning the winter cold, and anchoring the roof against the gales which raged over the unfended country in the fall.
There were three doors and four windows, almost as long as doors, their sills being but a few inches above the ground, in the front of Major Cottrell's house; two windows in the shorter wing. Behind the house some low sod buildings for sheltering livestock and fowls could be seen, flanked by a corral with high gate which could be opened from the saddle by a long lever. A fence surrounded the house, embracing about two acres in its enclosure. Tumble-weeds of last autumn were banked against its wires, which were bulged inwardly by pressure of the wind against this melancholy drift. There was not a tree nearer than the river, not a shrub nor flower; not even a bramble of wild prairie rose. Nothing but a mangy growth of buffalo grass, through which a deep pathway was worn from gateless gap in the wire fence to the front door.
To this dreary appearing abode Major Cottrell had been conveyed the day before in his own phaëton, making quite a show of his virility by walking down and taking a seat in it without assistance. Dr. Hall feared he might have overdone himself. He expected to find the old man stretched out in bed.
Major Cottrell was sitting in an armchair by a sunny window, chewing a strip of dried beef. There was nothing equal to it, he said, for building a man up after the weakness of a wound. He was cheerful among the Indian scalps and war bonnets, robes, weapons and barbaric pictures on tanned skins, which adorned his walls.
The sod house was much more comfortable within than its crude exterior promised, even cheerful with its bright Indian trappings and trophies. A door stood open between Major Cottrell's apartment and another, where an ancient grand piano, huge and sombre, could be seen standing well out from the wall. A red tam-o'-shanter cap was thrown carelessly on the keys, yellow as the teeth of some old smoker. The cap suggested youth and sprightliness, but youth had not appeared.
In spite of his romantic appearance, Major Cottrell was a well-balanced, modest man. Living in the isolation of his prairie home, for almost a generation the outpost of civilization, he had kept to the fashions and habits of a time long past, not aware that romance and chivalry had perished out of the frontier when Custer fell on that bleak Montana hill.
His long hair and great white mustache, his little pat of beard, were not the theatrical affectations of a vain, spectacular man. They were the caste-marks of his rank; he clung to them as one treasures the endearments of a day that cannot be lived again, unconscious of any incongruity in a smirking, short-haired age. He was a Merovingian prince among barber-shop slaves.
When Dr. Hall told him he could not see any need of coming again, Major Cottrell agreed that it was so. He made a dignified request for the physician's bill, to bristle up in affronted dignity when told there was no bill.
"You must not conclude from my poor sorroundings, sir, that I'm not able to pay you, and pay you sufficiently," Major Cottrell said, injury giving place to his stern dignity.
Dr. Hall was standing beside the major, Mrs. Cottrell facing him, a tinge of shame in her cheeks. Dr. Hall smiled all her question and confusion away, rising to his tiptoes in his elastic, overtowering habit, as if he lifted himself above the perplexities of people for the satisfaction of smiling down on their petty troubles.
"I am the railroad doctor, you know, Major Cottrell," Hall explained, "on salary by the year. I have no right, really, to take any case outside railroad employes, and certainly no right to charge anybody for such casual service. It's all square; it was nothing but one neighbor giving another a hand."
"You mean, then, if I owe anybody I owe the railroad company?"
"When you come right down to cases, as these folks say, that would be the way to consider it. But—"
"Then I'll take this first chance in a lifetime to beat a railroad company out of something," Major Cottrell said, looking up at the towering tall doctor, crinkles of humor around his lively bright eyes. "Money might pay you," he continued, his face clouding with seriousness, "for your surgical attention, but money can't reach the other service I'm indebted to you for, young man."
"There's no obligation at all," Dr. Hall protested, as he had protested at least ten times during the past ten days. "I ask you to forget it, sir, and say no more. Why," he hurried on, bending to look into the major's face, "do you know what they're saying down-town about me, Major? They say I was so eager to get a patient I fanned the bullets off like flies that day."
"The devil they do! Let me hear one of the scoundrels as much as intimate—"
"Pretty good joke on a new doctor, don't you think?" appealing to Mrs. Cottrell, whose appreciation of the town's humor was no less apparent than the major's.
"No, I do not, Dr. Hall," she replied indignantly. "It's the friends and supporters of that old quack Ross, and nobody else."
"There's a scoundrel who has imposed on this community too long," Major Cottrell declared hotly. "I'm going to have Elizabeth—Elizabeth! 'Lisbeth, honey! Where is that girl?"
"Co-o-oming, pop," an indistinct voice replied from a far-off portion of the house.
"Combing, rather, I think she means," Mrs. Cottrell said, laughing. "She sounds like a mouthful of hairpins. What do you want her for, William?"
"I want her to—Elizabeth," as the young lady suddenly flung open the door that led into the mysteries of the house beyond the major's room, stopping on seeing the doctor, but catching herself instantly in her well-poised way, laughter in her eyes—"Lizzie, my dear, I want you to bring your typewriter in here and take a letter. I'm going to report Old Doc Ross to the board, I've been threatening to do it for a year. I don't believe the old villain's any more a doctor than I am. He's got to get out of this community with his bulldozing and quackery."
"Right now, pop?"
"Right now," the major replied, emphatically.
"We'll burn him up," Elizabeth said, turning away to get her machine.
"Dr. Hall will help us with the proper phraseology," Major Cottrell announced, rather than requested.
"And the typewriter, if I may?"
"Sure," Elizabeth agreed cheerfully. "Right this way—right along this way."
Mrs. Cottrell attended, for the sake of propriety, smiling appreciatively, young at heart as she was thirty years ago, the expedition leading into Elizabeth's boudoir, where the typewriter stood beside a window, with something in it that looked like verse. This the young lady snatched out of the roller with a rip, and sequestered in a drawer of her commode, which stood open. She slammed the drawer shut on its poetic, as well as its material, secrets, some of which had stood revealed in white and pink, laughing in gay relief, a teasing, challenging gladness in her eyes.
"'Roses is red, and vi'lets is blue'," said Dr. Hall.
"It was not—it was not!" Elizabeth protested, redder than any amount of roses that could be imagined, and lovelier—thought Dr. Hall—by far.
What of this Elizabeth? he wondered, following after her with typewriter and stand, she going ahead with mock ceremony of opening the door and ushering him like a plenipotentiary. What of this Elizabeth? so radiant, so warm with the pulse of youth, something unroused, unexperienced, lying in the still depths of her brown eyes. It was something he could not answer, coming after her with the burden he had relieved her of, as he felt he should very cheerfully and happily undertake to do again, the happy chance presenting.
What of this Elizabeth, indeed! What of any young lady with the dare of youth in her eyes, the gleam of youth in her smile, the glory of youth in her glittering hair? That is man's eternal question. Let him answer it in his own way, in his own time, for there is none to help him, however great his perplexity or need.
When Major Cottrell had the letter drafted to his satisfaction, after several appeals to Dr. Hall, Elizabeth was put to the job of making a straightforward copy. As she wrote, Major Cottrell sat looking out of the window, which gave a view of the main road running between Simrall and Damascus, marveling on the number of vehicles and horsemen abroad in the land that day.
"They're beguiled by the promise of this country, poor devils!" he sighed. "It looks smiling and friendly and full of blooms these spring days, with water in every runlet, but it isn't a farming country, Dr. Hall; its temptations are spread to lure them to destruction. There's hardship ahead for these poor, deluded people who have rushed in here on the railroad land agents' promises and representations of a paradise."
"I've wondered what there is to all the talk about the hardships of this country," said Hall. "Nearly everybody I've talked to, Judge Waters, I think, is the one exception, has knocked the country hard. It's too far west of Dodge, they say, for anybody, or anything, to prosper. But you've been here a long time; it hasn't broken you."
"It would have, if I'd been foolish enough to try to farm it, at least the way these corn-country men are trying to do it. I'll have to revise my general statement that it isn't a farming country. I mean it's not a farming country in the corn and hogs sense. If the right crop can be found to stand the drouths and hot winds, the land's as good as any that lays out of doors. But I don't know whether the Almighty ever made anything but buffalo grass for this country. If he did, I've never seen it."
"That very thing was brought to my notice yesterday by a man who is confident he has solved it, Major."
"What's he got? who is he?"
"A young fellow by the name of Holbrook, from southeastern Kansas. He's planning to put in forty acres of a stuff called kafir corn."
"I never heard of it."
"It's new to me, too, but I'm not a farmer. Holbrook bought a section of railroad land that somebody got on by mistake and worked for two years before they ousted him—"
"Milt Welch's place, I guess. The county surveyor was to blame. Welch thought he was on school land, broke in forty or fifty acres of sod. His work all went for nothing. So he's got that section, heh? Good location. How did you come to run into him?"
"His little boy, two years old, had a bad throat. They thought it was diphtheria. You know that old fellow Ross isn't straightened up yet. In a terrible state, poor old sinner."
"So you went out there and looked after the baby? That place isn't more than a mile from Simrall."
"Holbrook and his wife are exceptional young people, both from the agricultural college at Manhattan. He says—"
"Did you have your gun?" Major Cottrell interrupted sternly.
"No, sir; I haven't even got a gun."
"I wouldn't go over that way without one, and it would be better if somebody went along with you. You must not ignore, or even attempt to ignore, the gravity of your situation in this community, Dr. Hall."
"But I haven't got any feud with Simrall, Major."
"I know, I know. You're carrying my troubles, but you'll not do it an hour after I'm on my feet again. If Damascus is afraid to take the responsibility for that worthless Bud Sandiver I'm not. But don't go out there again without some preparations for defense. If nothing else, carry a shotgun—it's nearer the deserts of that pack of hounds than any other weapon, anyway."
"Thank you. Holbrook says this kafir stuff stands six weeks or so of drouth and flourishes on it. He's got a contract with a Kansas City seed house for all he can grow, came out here for that purpose, where the country's new, so his seed strain will be kept pure, he says. He's to get two dollars a bushel for his seed, he says."
"But what eats the stuff? where's the market?"
"Every kind of domestic animal and fowl thrives on it, Holbrook says. They grind it for stock. It's an old-country grain, centuries old, he says."
"I'll have to look into that. There's something to replace range cattle in this country—the Almighty must have made something. I'll have to look into that. Two dollars a bushel is away too high for feed, though. It would have to come down to fifty cents to make it any practical use."
"I don't know, but I hope Holbrook can make a go of it. He appears to be a fine, clean young man."
"How is the baby?" Elizabeth inquired, turning abruptly from her letter. She had been sitting with fingers idle on the keys since the first mention of the visit to the hostile neighborhood.
"What baby?" Mrs. Cottrell asked, coming into the room at that moment.
"Some farmer's kid Dr. Hall went over to Simrall to see yesterday, mother."
"Why, Dr. Hall!" Mrs. Cottrell's eyes were as full of fear as if he had come from some notorious plague district, carrying contagion into her home. "You must not put your life in danger—"
"It was only tonsilitis," Dr. Hall said assuringly. "The child's all right."
"The child!" Elizabeth repeated with meaning stress, as if he had been caught in some woeful dereliction and offered a poor excuse. Her fingers rushed to their work again, with a sound like hail on a tin roof.
Mrs. Cottrell looked at the tall doctor tenderly, understanding him better than he understood himself.