A PLAINSMAN OF THE OLD SCHOOL
I have eaten your bread and salt,
I have drunk your water and wine;
The deaths ye died I have watched beside,
And the lives ye led were mine.
--Kipling.
The little postoffice at Carey's Crossing in Wolf County was full of men
waiting for the mail due at noon. Mail came thrice a week now, and
business on the frontier was looking brighter. The postoffice was only one
feature of the room it occupied. Drugs, hardware, horse-feed, groceries,
and notions each had claims of their own, while beside the United States
Mail Department was an inksplashed desk holding a hotel register, likewise
inksplashed. Beyond the storeroom was a long, narrow dining room on one
side and a few little cell-like rooms on the other with a crack of a hall
between them leading back to the kitchen, the whole structure, only one
story high, having more vertical boards than horizontal in its making. But
the lettering over the front door bore the brave information that this was
the Post Office, the General Merchandise Store, and the Jacobs House, all
in one.
The rain of the night had shifted to a light snow that whiffed about in
little white pellets, adding nothing to the land in the way of moisture,
or beauty, or protection from cold. Just a chill fraying out of the rain's
end that matched the bitterness of the wind's long sweep from out of the
vast northwest. A gray sky was clamped down over all, so dull and
monotonous, it seemed that no rainbow tint could ever again brighten the
world.
"The stage is late again," observed one of the men.
"Always is when you want her particular." This from a large man who held
the door open long enough to stare up the open street for the sign of the
coming stage and to let in a surge of cold air at the same time.
"Well, shut the door, Champers. The stage doesn't come inside. It stops at
Hans Wyker's saloon first, anyhow," one of the men behind a counter
declared.
"If you'd open a bar here you'd do some business and run that Wyker fellow
out. Steward, you and Jacobs are too danged satisfied with yourselves. We
need some business spirit in this town if we want to get the county seat
here," Champers declared.
"That may help your real estate, but it's not my kind of business, and no
bar is going into this tavern," Jacobs replied, leaning his elbow against
the back of Stewart, who was bending over the desk.
Stewart and Jacobs were young men, the former a finely built, fair-haired
Scotchman from whom good nature, good health, and good morals fairly
radiated; not the kind of man to become a leader, but rather to belong to
the substantial following of a leader.
Jacobs was short, and slender, and dark--unmistakably of Jewish
blood--with a keen black eye, quick motions, and the general air of a
shrewd business man, letting no dollar escape him. He had also the air of
a gentleman. Nobody in Carey's Crossing had ever heard him swear--the
language of the frontier always--nor seen him drink, nor had taken a
parcel from his store that had been tied up with soiled fingers.
The Jacobs House register might be splashed with ink, but the ledger
records of the business concern were a joy to the eye.
At Stewart's words Champers shut the door with a slam and blustered toward
the stove, crowding smaller men out of their places before it.
"I am glad I don't have to run other men's affairs--"he began, when the
rear door flew open and a slender young Negro hurried in with the
announcement:
"De stage done sighted approachin' from de east, gen'lemen. Hit's done
comin' into town right now."
"All right, Bo Peep; take care of the team," Stewart responded, and a
general re-swarming of the crowd followed.
Just before the stage--a covered wagon drawn by two Indian ponies--reached
the Jacobs House a young man crossed the street and entered the door. Some
men are born with a presence that other men must recognize everywhere. To
this man's quiet, "Hello, gentlemen," the crowd responded, almost to a
man:
"Good morning, Doctor."
"Hello, Carey."
"Hello, Doc."
Each man felt the wish to be recognized by such greeting, and a place was
given him at once. Only Champers, the big man, turned away with a scowl.
"Always gets the best of everything, even to the first chance to get his
mail," he muttered under his breath.
But the mail was soon of secondary interest to the dealer in real estate.
Letters were of less importance to him than strangers, and a stranger had
registered at the desk and was waiting while Stewart called out the mail
in the postoffice department. Champers leaned over the shoulders of
shorter men to read the entry in a cramped little hand, the plain name,
"Thomas Smith, Wilmington, Delaware." Then he looked at the man and drew
his own conclusions.
Dr. Carey was standing beside the letter counter when Todd Stewart read
out, "'Mr. James Shirley,'" and, with a little scrutiny--"'Southwest of
Carey's Crossing.' Anybody here know Mr. James Shirley?"
The stranger made a hasty step forward, but Dr. Carey had already taken
the letter.
"I'll take care of that for you, Stewart," he said quietly. And turning,
he looked into the eyes of the stranger.
It was but a glance, and the latter stepped aside.
Men formed quick judgments on the frontier. As Carey passed the register
he read the latest entry there, and like Champers he too drew his own
conclusions. At the door he turned and said to Jacobs.
"Tell Bo Peep to have your best horse ready by one o'clock for a long
ride."
"All right, Doctor," Jacobs responded.
Half an hour later the Jacobs House dining room was crowded for the midday
meal. By natural selection men fell into their places. Stewart and Jacobs,
with Dr. Carey and Pryor Gaines, the young minister school teacher, had a
table to themselves. The other patrons sat at the long board, while the
little side table for two was filled today with Champers, the real estate
man, and the latest arrival, Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington, Delaware.
"Who's the man with the dark mustache up there?" Thomas Smith asked.
"Doc Carey," Champers replied with a scowl.
"You don't seem to need him?" There was a double meaning in the query, and
Champers caught both.
"No ways," he responded.
"Has some influence here?" the stranger asserted rather than questioned.
"A lot. Has the whole town under hoodoo. It's named for him. He has all
the doctoring he can do and won't half charge, so's no other doctor'll
come here. That's no way to build up a town. He'd get up at one o'clock in
the morning to doctor a widder's cow. Now, sure he would, when he knows
even a dead cow'd make business for the butcher to render up into grease
and the cattle dealer to sell another cow."
"Not your style of a man then?" the stranger observed.
"Oh, pshaw, no, but, as I say, he's got the whole country hoodoo'd. Notice
how everybody give him right of way to get his mail first? Why him? And
hear him order the best horse? I'll bet a tree claim in hades right now
that he's off somewhere to doctor some son of a gun out of cussed good
will."
"Who is this James Shirley whose mail he seems to look after?"
There was a half-tone lowering of the voice as Smith pronounced the name,
which was not lost on Champers, whose business was to catch men at all
corners.
"Jim Shirley lives out in one of the rich valleys west. Him and a fellow
named Aydelot have some big notions of things out there. I don't know the
doc's claim to control his mail, but nobody here would deny Carey any
danged thing he wanted." Champers twisted his face in disgust.
"You are in the real estate business here?" Thomas Smith asked after a
pause, as if the subject fell into entirely new lines.
"Yes," Champers answered absently with eyes alert on the opposite wall.
"I'd like to see you later, Mr.--"
"Champers--Darley Champers," and the dealer in land shoved a soiled card
across the table. "Come in any time. This cold snap will soon be over and
I can show you no end of land worth a gold mine any time you are ready.
But make it soon. Land's goin' faster here'n you Delaware fellers think,
and"--in a lower voice--"Doc Carey's drivin' over it all the time, and
that Jew of a Jacobs ain't in business here on account of no lung trouble,
and his hatred of saloons is somethin' pisen."
They finished their meal in silence, for they had come to an
understanding. The afternoon was too short and cold for real estate
business to be brisk, and nobody in Carey's Crossing noted that the front
window of Darley Champer's little office was covered with a newspaper
blind all the rest of that day, nor did anybody pay attention to the
whereabouts of the stranger--Mr. Thomas Smith, of Wilmington,
Delaware--during this same time. Nobody, except John Jacobs, of the Jacobs
House, who gained his knowledge mostly by instinct; never, at least, by
rude inquiry. He had been up on the roof helping Bo Peep to fasten the
sign over the door which the wind had torn loose. From this place he
could see above the newspaper screen of the window across the street that
Champers and Smith were in a tremendously earnest consultation. He would
have thought nothing of it had not Champers chanced to sight him on the
roof and immediately readjusted the newspaper blind to prevent
observation.
"I'll offer to sell Darley a window shade cheap tomorrow and see how he
bites," and the little Jewish merchant smiled shrewdly at the thought.
* * * * *
Out on the trail that day the snow lay deeper to the westward, hiding the
wagon ruts. The dead sunflower stalks made only a faint black edging along
the white monotony of the way and sometimes on bleak swells there were no
markings at all. Some distance from Carey's Crossing a much heavier
snowfall, covering a wide swath, under which the trails were entirely
lost, had wandered in zigzag lines down from the northwest.
In the early afternoon Dr. Horace Carey had started west on the surest
horse in the Stewart-Jacobs livery stable, taking his old-fashioned
saddle-bags with him through force of habit, and by mid-afternoon was
floundering in the edge of this deeper snowfall.
Nature must have meant Horace Carey for the plains. He was of medium
height, compactly built, without an ounce of unnecessary weight. The
well-rounded form took away all hint of spareness, while it did not
destroy the promise of endurance. His heavy, dark hair and dark gray eyes,
his straight nose and firm mouth under a dark mustache, and his well-set
chin made up an attractive but not handsome face. The magnetism of his
personality was not in manly beauty. It was an inborn gift and would have
characterized him in any condition in life. There was about him a genial
dignity that made men look up to him and a willingness to serve that made
selfishness seem mean. He could not have been thirty, although he had been
on the plains for five years. The West was people by young men. It's need
for daring spirits found less response in men of maturer life. But the
West had most need for humane men. The bully, the dare-devil, the brutal,
and the selfish were refuse before the force that swept the frontier
onward; but they were never elements in real state building. Before such
men as Carey they lost power.
The doctor rode away toward the west, bowing his head before the strong
wind that he knew too well to fear, yet wondering as he rode if he had
done wisely to dare the deepening snow of the buried trail.
"I might have waited a day, anyhow," he thought. "It's a devil of a ride
over to Jim Shirley's, and we got only the tag ends of that storm down at
the Crossing from the looks of this. However, I may as well keep at it
now."
He surged on for a few miles without any signs of an open trail appearing.
Then he dropped to a slow canter.
"I'd better get this worry straightened and my mind untangled if I am to
have any comfort on this ride," he said aloud, as was his wont to do when
out in the open alone. "Everything happens to a man who gives too much
leeway to that indefinite inside guide saying, 'Do this! Let that alone!'
And yet that guide hasn't failed me when I've listened to it."
He let the pony have the rein as he looked ahead with unseeing eyes.
"What made me take this day? First, everybody is well enough to be left
for two or three days, good time for a vacation, and Stewart can take care
of emergencies always. Second, I promised Jim I'd see that his letters got
to him straightway. Third, yes, third, something said, 'Go now!' But
here's the other side. Why go on the heels of a snowstorm? Why not keep
Jim's letter a day or two? It's in my hands. And why mistrust a man who
calls himself innocent 'Thomas Smith?' That's it. He's too innocent.
There's no place on these wide Kansas prairies for that man Thomas Smith.
He'd better get back to his home and his real name at once."
The doctor smiled at the thought, then he frowned at the cold wind and the
shifting snows above the trail.
"You are a fool--a stack of fools, Dr. Horace Carey, to beat out of town
miles on miles on a fool's errand over a lost trail, trusting your
instinct that never lost you a direction yet, and all because of an inward
call to an unrevealed duty. Some other day will do as well. And here's
where I may as well cut off these notions of being led by inside signals.
What should make me sight danger in a man I never saw before, and who will
probably go out on the stage tomorrow morning? Oh, well, the Lord made us
as we are. He knows why."
He wheeled the pony about and began to trot toward Carey's Crossing.
Suddenly he halted.
"Let me see. I'm not twenty miles along, though I've come at a good rate.
I believe I'll cut across northwest and hit some of the settlers up on Big
Wolf Creek for the night. Lucky I've no wife to worry about me."
A wave of sadness swept over the man's face--just a sweep of sorrow that
left no mark. He turned abruptly from the trail and struck in a definite
direction across the snow-covered prairie. Presently his path veered to
the north, then to northwest.
"I know an ugly little creek running into Big Wolf that's the dickens to
cross. I'll run clear round it, even if it takes longer. After all, I'm
doing just what I said I wouldn't do. I don't know why I didn't go on, nor
why I am tacking off up here. Something tells me to do it, and I'll do
it."
But however changeable of mind he seemed to himself, Dr. Carey was a man
who formed his judgments so quickly and acted upon them so promptly that
he seemed most stable to other men. He rode forward now to a land wave
that dropped on one side to a creek, a quarter of a mile away, where black
shrubbery marked the water line. A long swell of wind swung down the
valley, whirling the snow in eddies before it. As the doctor's eye
followed them, he suddenly noted a red scarf lift above the tallest clumps
of bushes and flutter out to its full length, then drop again as the wind
swell passed.
"There's nobody in fifteen miles of here. I reckon that scarf blew there
and caught some time this fall when somebody was going out on the trail.
Mighty human looking thing, though. It seemed waving a signal to me. But I
must hurry on."
He hastened at a gallop up the ridge away from the creek, his mind still
on that red scarf flung about by the winter wind.
"It was a strange thing," he thought, "but every human token is startling
out here. What's that now?"
The doctor had a plainsman's ear as well as a plainsman's eye. As he
listened, through the wail of the wind borne along the distance, he caught
the words of a song, low and pleading like a plaintive cry for help:
Though, like the wanderer,
The sun gone down,
Darkness be over me,
My rest a stone--
Yet in my dreams I'd be
Nearer, my God, to thee,
Nearer to thee.
It was a woman's voice and Carey faced about to listen. He knew it came
from the bushes below the red scarf. So he changed his course and hurried
around a bend in the stream to the other side of the brush where Virginia
Aydelot stood beside Juno.
"I'm afraid there isn't even a stone to rest on here, Madam. Can I be of
any service to you?" he said, lifting his hand toward his cap in
semi-military salute.
Virginia stood looking at the stranger with a half-comprehending gaze. She
had been less than an hour beside the bushes, but it had seemed to her
like many hours. And the terrifying certainty of a night alone on the
prairie made the sudden presence of a human being unreal to her.
"I beg your pardon; I am Dr. Carey, of Carey's Crossing, and I was
striking across the prairie to the Big Wolf settlement when I saw your
scarf and heard your singing. I took them both to be distress signals and
came over to see if you needed me."
One had only to listen to Dr. Carey's voice to understand why Darley
Champers should accuse him of laying a charm on the whole settlement.
Virginia recovered herself quickly, saying with a wan smile:
"You came just in time, Doctor. I am lost and need help. I was going to
you, anyhow."
Each one's face was so muffled against the wind that the eyes and lips and
a bit of the cheeks alone were visible.
"Not a bad-looking woman for all the Kansas tan," the doctor thought. "She
has a voice like a true Virginian and fine eyes and teeth. But any woman
who bundles up for a horseback ride across the plains on a day like this
isn't out for a beauty show contest. I've seen eyes like that before,
though, and as to her voice--"
"I am Mrs. Asher Aydelot from the Grass River Valley," Virginia went on.
"There are only three settlers out there now, Mr. Shirley and my husband
and myself. Mr. Shirley is very sick with pneumonia, and Mr. Aydelot could
not leave him, so I started to Carey's Crossing to see if you could come
to him. I missed the trail somewhere. I was trying to help, but I failed,
you see."
The doctor was looking at her with a puzzled expression which she thought
was born of his sympathy. To the mention of her failing he responded
quickly:
"No, Mrs. Aydelot, you succeeded. I had started to Shirley's myself on
personal business, and I was letting some whim turn me aside. If you had
kept the trail we should have missed each other, for I was on my way to
Big Wolf Creek, a good distance away, and your leaving the trail and
wandering down here was providential for Shirley. Shall I show you on to
the Crossing?"
"Oh, no, Doctor, if you will only come back with me. I don't want to go
on," Virginia insisted.
"You are a regular westerner, Mrs. Aydelot," Carey declared. "But you
haven't been out here long. I heard of your passing through our town late
last summer. I was up on Big Wolf then and failed to see you. I know
something of your husband, but I have never met him."
He helped her to mount her horse and together they sought the trail and
followed it westward in the face of the wind.
* * * * *
Near midnight down in Jim Shirley's cabin Asher Aydelot turned from a lull
in the sick man's ravings to see Dr. Horace Carey entering the door with a
pair of saddle bags in his hand.
"Hello, sir! Aydelot? I'm Carey, the doctor."
Then as his quick eye took in the haggard face of the man before him, he
said cheerily:
"Everything fit as a fiddle up your way. I left your cabin snug and warm
as a prairie dog's hole, and your wife is sound asleep by this time, with
a big dog on guard. Yes, I understand," he added, as Asher silently
gripped his hand. "You've died a thousand deaths today. Forget it, and
give me a hand here. My own are too stiff, and I must get these wet boots
off. I always go at my work dry shod."
He had pulled a pair of heavy shoes from the saddle bags, and was removing
his outer coat and sundry scarfs, warming his hands between whiles and
seemingly unconscious of the sick man's presence.
"You are wet to the knees. You dared the short trail and the strange fords
of rivers on a night so dark as this," Asher declared as he helped Carey
to put off his wrappings.
"It's a doctor's business to forget himself when he sees a distress
signal." Then Carey added quietly: "Tell me about Shirley. What have you
been doing for him?"
He was beside Jim's bunk now and his presence seemed to fill the whole
cabin with its subtle strength.
"You know your business, doctor; I'm a farmer," Asher said, as he watched
this frontier physician moving deftly about his work.
"Well, if you mean to farm so far from pill bags you have done well to
follow my trade a little, as you seem to have done with Shirley," Carey
asserted, as he noted the evidences of careful nursing.
"Oh, Virginia--Mrs. Aydelot--helped me," Asher assured him. "She's a nurse
by instinct."
"What did you call your wife?" the doctor inquired.
"Virginia--from her own state. Pretty sick man here." Asher said this as
Dr. Carey suddenly bent over Shirley with stern eyes and tightening lips.
But the eyes grew tender when Jim looked up into his face.
"You're all right, Shirley. You must go to sleep now."
And Shirley, who in his delirium had fought his neighbor all day, became
as obedient as a child, as a very sick child, that night under Horace
Carey's hand.
The next morning Virginia Aydelot was not able to rise from her bed, and
for many days she could do nothing more than to sit in the rocking chair
by the windows and absorb sunshine.
On the fourth day after Carey had reached Shirley's Asher went down the
river in the early afternoon to find how Jim's case was progressing,
leaving his wife comfortably tucked up in the rocking chair by the west
window. The snow was gone and the early December day was as crisp and
beautiful as an Indian summer day in a colder climate. Virginia sat
watching the shadows of the clouds flow along the ground and the prairie
hues changing with the angle of the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly a sound
of ponies' feet outside was followed by a loud rap on the door.
"Come in!" Virginia called. "Lie down, Pilot!"
Pilot did not obey, but sat up alert before his mistress as Darley
Champers' bulk filled the doorway.
"Excuse me, Madam," the real estate dealer said, lifting his hat, "Me and
my friend, Mr. Smith out there, are looking up a claim for a friend of
ours somewhere out in the Grass River settlement. Can you tell me who owns
the last claim taken up down the river, and how far it is from here?"
"Mr. Shirley's claim is a few miles down the river, if you go by the short
trail and ford at the bends, but much longer if you go around by the long
trail," Virginia explained.
"Is it occupied?" Champers put the question in a careless tone.
Pilot's bristles, that had fallen at the sound of Virginia's voice, rose
again with the query. It is well to be wary of one whom a dog distrusts.
But the woman's instinct in Virginia responded little to the dog's
uneasiness, and she replied courteously:
"Yes, Mr. Shirley is there, very sick."
"Um, who have I the honor of addressing now?" Champers asked awkwardly, as
if to change the subject.
"Mrs. Asher Aydelot."
"Well, now, I've heard of Aydelot. Where is your man today? I'd like to
meet him, Mrs. A."
It was the man's way of being friendly, but even a duller-fibred man than
Champers would have understood Mrs. Aydelot's tone as she said:
"You will find him at Shirley's, or on the way. Only the long trail winds
around some bluffs, and you might pass each other without knowing it."
"How many men in this settlement now?" Champers asked.
"Only two," Virginia replied, patting Pilot's head involuntarily.
"Only two! That's sixteen more'n'll ever make it go here," Darley Champers
declared. "Excuse me for saying it, Mrs. Aydelot, but I've been pretty
much over Kansas, and this is the poorest show for settlement the Lord
ever left out of doors. I've always heard this valley was full of claims
you simply couldn't give away, but my friend, who has no end of money and
influence fur developin' the country, wanted me to look over the ground
along the Grass River, It's dead desolation, that's all; no show on earth
in fifty year out here, and in fifty year we won't none of us care for
more'n six feet of ground anywhere. I'm sorry for you, Madam. You must be
awfully lonely here, but you'll be gettin' away soon, I hope. I must be
off. Thank you, Madam, for the information. Good day," and he left the
cabin abruptly.
The sunshine grew pallid and the prairies lay dull and endless. The
loneliness of solitude hung with a dead heaviness and hope beat at the
lowest ebb for Virginia Aydelot, trying bravely to deny his charge against
the future of the land she had struggled so to dream into fruitfulness.
She was only a woman, strong to love and brave to endure, but neither by
nature nor heritage shrewd to read the tricks of selfish trade. And she
believed that while Asher and Jim Shirley were hopeful dreamers like
herself, here was an ill-mannered but unprejudiced man who saw the
situation as they could not see it.
"That woman and her fool dog were half afraid of me at first. They don't
know that women aren't in my line. I'd never harm a one of 'em."
"They're in my line always. Was she good looking? I never pass a pretty
woman," Thomas Smith said smoothly.
"Don't be a danged fool, Smith. I might cut a man's throat to some extent,
if it would help my business any, but I'd cut it more'n some if he forgets
his manners round a woman. We're a coarse, grasping lot out here fur as
property goes, and we ain't got drawing-room manners, but it takes your
smug little easterners to be the real dirty devils. Come on."
And Thomas Smith knew that the big, coarse-grained man was sincere.
"Yonder's Aydelot now. Want to see him?" Darley Champers declared,
sighting Asher down the short trail beyond the deep bend.
"I've no business with him, and he's the man I don't want to see," Thomas
Smith said hastily. "I'll ride on out of sight round this bend and wait
for you. It's a good place when you don't want to be seen."
"Depends on how much of a plainsman Aydelot is. He ought to have sighted
both of us half a mile back," Champers declared.
But Smith hurried away and was soon behind the low bluff at the deep bend.
Asher Aydelot had seen the two before they saw him, and he saw them part
company and only one come on to meet him.
"You're Aydelot from the claim up the river, I s'pose. I'm just out
lookin' at the country. Not much to it but looks," Champers declared as
the two met at the deep bend.
"Yes, sir; my name is Aydelot," Asher replied, deciding at once that this
stranger was not to be accepted on sight, a judgment based not on a
woman's instinct but on a man's experience.
"Any of these claims ever been entered?" Champers asked.
"Yes, sir; most of them," Asher responded.
"I see. Couldn't make it out here. I s'pose you'll get out next. Hard
place to take root. Most too far away, and land's a little thin, I see,"
the real estate dealer remarked carelessly.
"Yes, it's pretty well out," Asher assented.
"The river ever get low here?" was the next query.
"Not often, in the winter," Asher replied.
"Most too uncertain for water power, though, and the railroad ain't comin'
this way at all. I must be gettin' on. One man's too few to be travelin'
so fur from civilization."
"Come up to the cabin for the night," Asher said, with a plainsman's
courtesy.
"Thank you, no. Hope to see you again nearer to the Lord's ground; losin'
game here. Good-by."
Asher did not look like a disappointed man when he reached the Sunflower
Inn.
"Best news in the world," he declared when Virginia related what had
happened in the cabin that afternoon. "A man who goes prospecting around
the Kansas prairies doesn't discourage the poor cuss he pities; he tries
to encourage the wretch to hold on to land he wouldn't have himself.
Listen to me, Virgie. That man has his eye on Grass River right now. I
know his breed."
Meanwhile the early dusk found Champers and Smith approaching Shirley's
premises.
"I don't know about Aydelot," Champers declared as they lariated their
ponies beyond the corral. "He's one of the clear-eyed fellows who sees a
good thing about as soon as you sight it yourself, and then he turns clam
and leach and you won't move him nor get nothin' out of him, and that's
all there is to it."
"Yes, I know that. I mean, you say he does?" Smith seemed too preoccupied
to follow his own words, but Champers followed Smith shrewdly enough.
They made a hasty but careful examination of the premises, keeping wide of
the cabin where the sick man lay.
"He's got three horses in there. He's well fixed," Champers declared,
peering into the stable, where it was too dark to discover that the third
horse was Dr. Carey's. "Let's hike off for some deserted shack for the
night and get an early start for the Crossing in the morning. Easy trick,
this, gettin' in and out of here unseen. And it's one of the best claims
on Grass River."
"Couldn't we slip into the cabin?" Smith asked in a half whisper. "If he's
too sick"--Something in the man's face made it look diabolical in the
fading twilight, and he seemed about to start toward the house.
"Now, see here, Mr. Smith," Champers said with slow sternness. "What'd I
say back there about women? Neither we ain't man-slaughterers out here,
though your _Police Gazette_ and your dime novels paint us that way.
There's more murderers per capiter to a single street in New York than in
the whole state of Kansas, right now. If it's land and money, we're after
it, tooth an' toenail, but forget the thing in your mind this minute or
you an' me parts company right here, an' you can hoof it back to Carey's
Crossing or Wilmington, Delaware."
Smith made no reply and they mounted their ponies and galloped away.
And all the while Dr. Horace Carey, inside the unlighted cabin, had
watched their movements with grim curiosity, even to the hesitating,
half-expressed intention of entering the dwelling.
"Champers would pull up another man's stakes and drive them into his own
ground if he wanted them, but that Thomas Smith would drive them through
the other fellow's body if nobody else was around," was the doctor's
mental comment as he went outside and watched the course of the two men
till the twilight gathered them in.
* * * * *
When the turning point came to the sick man, the up-climb was marvelous,
as his powers of recoil asserted themselves.
"It is just a matter of self-control and good spirits now, Shirley, and
you have both," Dr. Carey said, as he sat by his patient on the ninth day.
"You staid the game out, Carey," Shirley said with an undertone of
hopelessness behind his smile. "What possessed you to happen in, anyhow?"
"I was possessed not to come and turned back after I'd started. If I
hadn't met Mrs. Aydelot coming after me I'd have rampsed off up on Big
Wolf Creek for a week, maybe, and missed your case entirely."
"And likewise my big fee," Jim interrupted. "Some men are born lucky. And
so Mrs. Aydelot went after you. Asher's a fortunate man to have a wife
like Virginia, although he had to give up an inheritance for her."
"How was that?" Carey asked, glad to see the hopeless look leaving Jim's
eyes.
"Oh, it's a pretty long story for a sick man. The mere facts are that
Asher Aydelot was to have bank stock, a good paying hotel, and a splendid
big farm if he'd promise never to marry any descendant of Jerome Thaine,
of Virginia. Asher hiked out West and enlisted in the cavalry and did
United States scout duty for two years, hoping to forget Virginia Thaine,
who is a descendant of this Jerome Thaine. But it wasn't any use. Distance
don't count, you know, in cases like that."
"Yes, I know."
Shirley was too sick to notice Dr. Carey's face, and he did not remember
afterward how low and hard those three words sounded.
"It seems Virginia had pulled Asher through a fever in a Rebel hospital,
and we all love our nurses." Jim patted the doctor's knee as he said this.
"And when the father's will was read out against ever, ever, ever his son
marrying a Thaine, Asher promptly said that the whole inheritance, bank
stock, hotel, and farm, might go where--the old man Aydelot had already
gone--maybe. Anyhow, he married Virginia Thaine and she was game to come
out here and pioneer on a Grass River claim. Strange what a woman will do
for love, isn't it? And to go on a forty-mile ride to save a worthless
pup's life! That's me. Think of the daughter of one of those old Virginia
homes up to a trick like that?"
"You've talked enough now."
Shirley looked up in surprise at this stern command, but Dr. Carey had
gone to the other side of the cabin and sat staring out at the river
running bank-full at the base of the little slope.
When he turned to his patient again, the old tender look was in his eyes.
Men loved Jim Shirley if they cared for him at all. And now the pathetic
hopelessness of Jim's face cut deep as Carey studied it.
"I say, Shirley, did you ever know a man back East named Thomas Smith?" he
asked.
"No. Strange name, that! Where'd you run onto it? Smith! Smith! How do you
spell it?" Jim replied indifferently.
"With a spoonful of quinine in epsom salts, taken raw, if you don't pay
attention. Now listen to me." The doctor's tone was as cheery as ever.
"Well, don't make it necessary for me to tell you when you've talked
enough."
In spite of the joking words, there was a listless hopelessness in
Shirley's voice, matching the dull, listless eyes. And Horace Carey rose
to the situation at once.
"A stranger named Thomas Smith came to the Crossing the day I came down
here. Rather a small man, with close-set, dark eyes; signed his name in a
cramped, left-handed writing. I noticed his right hand seemed a little
stiff, sort of paralyzed at the wrist. But here's the funny thing. He made
me uneasy, and he made me think of you. Could you identify him? He looked
as much like you as I look like that young darkey, Bo Peep, up at the
Jacobs House."
"None of my belongings. You are a delicate plant to be so sensitive to
strangers." Jim sighed from mental weariness more than from physical
weakness.
"I was sensitive, and when I heard Stewart call out your name in the mail
and saw this man step up as if to take the letter, I took it. And if
you'll take a brace and decide it's worth while you can have it. It's
addressed in a woman's handwriting, not a Thomas Smith style of pinching
letters out of a penholder and squeezing them off the pen point. Lie down
there, man!"
For Jim was sitting up, listening intently. With trembling fingers he took
the letter and read it eagerly. Then he looked at Carey with eyes in which
listlessness had given place to determination.
"Doctor, I was ready to throw up the game five minutes ago. Now I'll do
anything to get back to strength and work."
"You don't seem very joyous, however," the doctor responded.
"Joy don't belong to me. We parted company some years ago. But life is
mine."
"And duty?"
"Yes, and duty. Say, Doctor, if you'd ever cared all there was in you to
care for one woman, and then had to give her up, you'd know how I feel.
And if, then, a sort of service opened up before you, you'd know how I
welcome this."
Jim's face, white from his illness, was wonderfully handsome now, and he
looked at his friend with that eager longing for sympathy men of his mould
need deeply. Horace Carey stood up beside the bed and, looking down with a
face where intense feeling and self-control were manifest, said in a low
voice:
"I have cared. I have had to give up, and I know what service means."