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 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 rest-

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 less 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

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 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,

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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 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."

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 "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.

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would not trust the prying eyes and sharper curiosity of the local postmaster with that letter to the state medical board in the matter of Old Doc Ross. It must go by registered mail, which made an errand for Elizabeth to the post office. If Dr. Hall would wait a minute while she smoothed up her countenance, she said, she would trot along with him that far on his way back to the boxcar beside the track.

Dr. Hall was willing enough. He never had appeared in public with Elizabeth, he never had seen what her behavior abroad was like. He wondered if she would appear presently weighted down by a gun, and from that speculation galloped on to a more disturbing one: whether she ever had shot a cigar out of a voter's mouth in Damascus.

He discounted the probability to zero. That was some distortion of public report, a tradition without foundation taken up by new arrivals like Jim Justice, and colored to fit their own melodramatic tastes. Justice had called her a wild girl, profanely wild. Dr. Hall reflected that he had seen quieter, more retiring and colorless ones, but he never had met a more modest one.

He could not recall a girl half as charming out of all the clouds of them that had drifted like autumn butter flies across his road. He remembered sorority houses

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 full of them, a campus full of them, hospitals full of them, flitting in white uniforms and dainty caps, eyes all set for a young doctor, but none of them that made the heart quicken like this Elizabeth of the country west of Dodge.

His discernment must have been at low ebb that first night, he thought with scorn, when he had compared the color of her hair to new cider. It was comparable to no beverage so base as cider, but something more rare, more precious and volatile. Champagne, perhaps, although his acquaintance with that liquor was vague.

Elizabeth came back almost immediately, wearing a dark-blue sailor hat which made her look very summery, together with some kind of a light dress—with adorable little sprangles of pink flowers in it—that gave her a joyous and sprightly air. If Dr. Hall had known that she had put the dress on in anticipation of his coming, he would have been completely undone. As it was, he did not even suspect it. When a man is young, he knows so little about the ladies; when he is keen enough to understand them, he is too old for the wisdom to do him any good.

There was a picture of General Custer in the room where the prodigious piano stood; Major Cottrell wished the doctor to see it before going, for he held it above all the trophies and treasures of his campaigning days. Mrs. Cottrell and Elizabeth did the honors, Major Cottrell calling attention to the portrait's subtle excellence in loud voice—to the peril of his lately punctured lung—from his place by the window in the adjoining room.

The picture probably was a libel on the illustrious original—it had been enlarged from a small photograph,

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 in oil, and plenty of it—and unquestionably a profanation of art. In the mildly cynical core of him Dr. Hall would have admitted the truth of this anywhere else, but in the presence of Elizabeth he pronounced it good. That came out of his desire to serve her, even to calling poor pictures excellent, down to the last one in the gallery of life.

The parlor was narrow and deep, but surprisingly bright and cheerful. It comprised all the shorter wing of the house, the door entering abruptly into it from the outside, without hall or vestibule to ease one gradually into its somewhat overfurnished interior, which must have been grandeur once for that far-off ranch-house on the lonely plains.

The lime to plaster it must have been brought from a laborious distance, and the heavy furniture of the early fifties conveyed at great trouble and expense from the nearest unloading point on the railroad nearly a hundred miles to the north. Yet nothing much to a pioneer in those days, Hall thought; perhaps little more to the men who were crowding into this country at the present time to saddle its buffalo-backed hills to the service of husbandry.

There were walnut chairs with tapestry upholstering in the parlor, and a sofa with lions' heads carved in its arms, covered with haircloth that was wearing thin; there were bookcases which reached almost to the ceiling, filled with alluring volumes which had the stain of age; in the farther end of the room, before a wide fireplace, a table of such ancient type, so huge, so broad and strong, that it might have come from some ambassadorial hall. What a strange fancy in a man, to carry it all into the unpeopled

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 wastelands of the west and hide it away in that grim sod house.

There were other pictures besides the prized one of General Custer, some of them praiseworthy, others of pale, watery fruits and sickly flowers, such as young ladies do before marriage, when romance tinges the world with an Indian summer mist. Dr. Hall was afraid Mrs. Cottrell had done them; when he caught the half hopeful, half doubtful, look in her eyes as she ranged them over the collection, he was sadly sure.

A popular song was spread on the music-rack of the piano, the red cap close by it, and on the floor beside the stool the riding-whip that somebody had stripped from the wrist to hit off this sentimental melody. On top of the solemn old instrument there were blue and white flowers in an Indian vase, plucked from the gardens of this wild, wide-sweeping prairie.

So, this was the home of Elizabeth. She must have reached up with tiny fingers when her head came no higher than the fingerboard, to touch the keys of this instrument, strange and thrilling, as she stood with her hands stretched out now to touch the harp of life. He wondered if her heart had yearned back to it in the years she must have spent away, and if she was glad to be there now in the sad gray house that had nurtured so much comeliness.

Her shoulder was three inches below his own as she walked beside him, and the sun was in her hair. If an army officer had not married her, it was because she would not have him. Dr. Hall was as firmly convinced of that as if the conviction rested on the history of the

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 case. The shadows of anxiety were gone out of her face, now bright and winsome as the day. Not one of those round, well-fed faces such as the Charles girls flared like bold sunflowers beside the road, but he must have been perverse, indeed, the night she came, to think her a little too thin.

"Isn't it awful?" she asked suddenly, as if taking it for granted the matter of which she inquired had been running in his mind.

He looked at her in startled inquiry, guiltily, thinking she had surprised him in his thoughts and was attempting self-disparagement, after the facetious way of youth.

"What's that?" he blurted.

"The picture of General Custer. Isn't it a fright?"

"I've seen worse."

"Yes, and better."

"We can say that of so many things, and still not be severe," he said.

"Pop sent it to Kansas City to have the photograph enlarged in grease," Elizabeth told him, so seriously she seemed saddened by the recollection. "He wrote out full instructions for the color of General Custer's mustache and hair, so he always feels that he's one of the contributing artists in that memorable work. They got the color just right he says."

"It isn't bad, either," Hall said, but mildly, with little fervor.

"I wouldn't want pop to know what I really think of that picture for a horse! It doesn't hurt us to dissemble a little for somebody we love, does it, Dr. Hall?"

"Love," said he, looking into her eyes with what he

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 thought was nothing short of paternal gentleness, "has made more infidels than any other force in the world. We all forswear ourselves for love."

"You talk like you've had a lot of experience," she said gravely, with a rueful shake of the head. She looked across her nose at him then, archly, and laughed, throwing her head back to give it free vent, like a meadow lark.

"Are you laughing because I'm funny, or because you're gay?" he asked her, eyes on the curve of her chin and throat with an interest remote from anatomy, far removed from the thought of anatomy, indeed.

"Maybe the boarding-train ladies are responsible for all this forswearing. They say there's all kinds of swearing going on down there."

"I don't believe the girls swear, I never heard them, at least. Mrs. Charles sometimes exercises a lady's privilege that way, but the girls appear to leave it all to her."

"Nice people," she said, just a little edge of sarcasm in her tone.

"Considering that they were raised on wheels, as Mrs. Charles says, they are surprisingly nice girls. Nice in a railroad way, I mean, Miss Cottrell. That's a somewhat boisterous way, I'm afraid, but it can be honest, even though loud."

"Sure," she granted, cheerfully indifferent to the fine points of nicety among ladies raised on wheels.

"I know the three of them are mighty good to the poor jerries I've got in my hospital."

"Hospital? I never heard anything about a hospital in Damascus."

"It's a new institution, a boxcar with bunks in it, and

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 plenty of ventilation. Broken arms, minor cases of all kinds not serious enough to send down to Topeka to the company hospital. They'll get on better here where they can talk with the jerries in their own language, the language of the track—it's entirely unknown to me in wide stretches—and sit under the trees and read Mary's books. She lets them out free to the cripples—crips, they call them, down at the train."

"Mary; that's the red-headed one, isn't it?"

Elizabeth spoke with a respectable indifference, in the way the ladies have when they want us to understand that the thing under comment does not concern them in the least. Which is nothing short of confessing their great interest in it, in the cold masking of which nobody is deceived.

"Yes, Mary is the red-headed one. She's got the queerest collection of books ever assembled on a shelf. She's got Robinson Crusoe and the Roman Catholic catechism; a great deal of Laura Jean Libby and the poems of Robert Burns. She's got the sometime biennial report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, and several of those uplifting tales by Mr. Alger of orphan youths who begin in grocery stores at fifty cents a week and end in large houses and long black coats, genial capitalists without a drop of rancor in their benignant breasts. You'd be surprised how these old tarriers like that kind of stuff. The boarding-train literary standard may be humble, but the appetite is strong."

"I've been wondering what you are going to do when they move the railroaders away from here. They never stay long in one place, you know. Are you going with them?"

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 "I'll probably have enough of it by then," he replied.

"You mean you'll settle here in Damascus?"

"I hadn't thought of it."

"Why not?"

"It's too far west of Dodge," he replied, his face serious, the flame of laughter in his eyes. "There's no chance for a doctor out here."

"There's the biggest chance for men of any calling that ever was," she corrected him, as openly serious as he was mockingly light.

"You're the first one I ever heard say it," he told her, quickened by her originality, although he felt that it was grounded in loyalty for the land of her birth, with little more justification.

"This is a different kind of a country, there isn't any like it in the world," she declared, not with the commercial enthusiasm of a land agent, but with the cool Positiveness of belief. "Men can't come here and do the same old things over that they've been doing somewhere else and make it go. That's why they fail, and get sore and go to knocking. You've got to be original here; it's no place for small people. If a man can do some big and original thinking out here, and go in and put it through, he'll succeed. It calls for preëminence to make a go of it in this country west of Dodge. We're not looking for anything else."

"I'm afraid I can't qualify," he admitted, apparently saddened, or perhaps rebuked, by her glowing recital of requirements.

"I've been around the other places, even England and the European countries—"

"I never have," he confessed, in admiring tribute to

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 her modest repression of the fact for the more than two weeks he had known her.

"They don't compare with this country, there's nothing in America to compare with it. This is the one place on this earth I've ever seen where there's room enough to live."

"Do you really like it that well?" he asked curiously, not altogether convinced. "I thought you were only waiting your time, I looked on you as a sort of trusty outside the prison walls, just waiting till your time was up. Do you mean you'd stay in this country by choice?"

"Nowhere else," she replied, pressing the words down so hard they seemed to cut a stencil in the recording plate of his mind.

Dr. Hall stopped, looking over the wide sweep of country that could be seen from the brow of Major Cottrell's hill. They had been walking by the side of the road over the knotty turf, the new grass lively with flowers white and blue, as strange to him as the examples of Mrs. Cottrell's early art. The river was a torrent of brown water to-day, tribute of mountain snows and wayside rains. It flashed among the tender green of cottonwood and willow, headlong in its haste to carry its waters safely through that land of harsh repute, without having them sucked down into the barley-brown sands of the bars.

Across the river several miles away, there was a heaving up of rugged hills, treeless, their backs patched with white outcroppings through the gray-green coat of grass like some earthy scabies, their nearer face white as chalk where erosion of dead ages had broken them down. Over there these hills filled in a boundary, making the world

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 on that side seem snug, but here, on the other hand, there was no boundary. The gray land merged dimly into the sky.

"Yes, I had that thought the evening I came here," Hall said softly. "The sun was only a hand's breadth high; I could look under it to the uttermost bounds of the earth, it seemed to me. I filled up on something I never had tasted before. It made me glad."

Elizabeth turned to him eagerly, appreciation in the line of her parted lips, her animated eyes.

"I felt as if I'd come home that evening, after long wanderings. I was glad to be here. I said, just as you have said, that it was a place for a man."

"Then you'll stay," she said conclusively.

"It didn't look so good to me next day. I think the people at the inquest spoiled it for me, together with the way the country seemed to pull me into its troubles and feuds as a sort of sardonic joke. I don't know, Miss Elizabeth, whether it will ever look as good to me again as it did that first evening. It seems a long time ago."

"We've got to have a doctor in Damascus," she said with business-like decision. "When the board investigates old Ross they'll find him nothing but a quack and a fraud. He'll have to go back to his peddling. But it makes little difference whether he goes or stays, we need a doctor here."

"It's not very alluring."

"This is going to be the biggest town west of Dodge."

"That's what the railroad people say. Even at that, it wouldn't be much of a place for a doctor to realize on his aspirations."

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 "What are this particular doctor's aspirations, then?"

"Well, service, in the first place; service to the greatest number of people possible in the life of one man. I think that's every earnest physician's aim."

"Where you have to divide service to humanity among a lot of physicians, there isn't humanity enough to go around sometimes," she said.

Dr. Hall glanced at her with a smile.

"If that's true in the big places, can't it be doubly true in the little ones?" he asked. "Ross has kept competition down with his gun, they say. I couldn't do that, you know."

"You could make yourself so indispensable nobody could compete with you," she declared. "We're just an example of it; we feel we couldn't do without you now."

"Do you feel that way?" he asked, his voice eager, bending toward her slightly, as if he feared his words might blow away.

"It's a family feeling," she said hastily, almost frightened, it appeared, by his gravely eager inquiry. "Aren't the railroaders going to have a dance to-night?"

Her interest in his career was gone, dispersed, he knew, by his blundering inquiry; his rude, thoughtless, unpardonable inquiry. She was too considerate to put him in his place with equal rudeness, as Annie or Mary Charles would have done. It was bad enough to apologize for, yet too crude to attempt to explain, when the intent was so obvious, the meaning so unequivocal.

"I'm happy in your family's confidence, Miss Cottrell," he said, feeling that he must venture something to make it appear less personal. "Yes, there's going to be a dance

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 on the station platform to-night, but it isn't altogether a railroad affair. Charley Burnett appears to be chief of the enterprise, with railroad coöperation."

"There'll be kegs of beer, as always."

"I don't know. Are kegs of beer the usual trimmings?"

"Everybody drunk toward the end. They begin to use pick-handles about the sixth keg; they lay the wounded out in rows."

"I suppose I'd better get ready for a busy night, then."

"Yes, there's always a lot of repairing to be done after a railroad dance. It's fun to watch them till the pick-handles begin to fly."

"Will you come down and stand on the sidelines?"

"Maybe I'll ride down after it gets a good start, and look on a while."

"I hoped you'd let me come for you. There's a moon; it would be a pleasant walk."

"You'll be needed every minute. They carve one another up horribly sometimes. No, I'd better ride down. I'll find you, if you're not socially or professionally engaged. The young ladies on wheels may be giving you a giddy time."

"My energies must be reserved for the hour of pick-handles," he said, pleased beyond anything to hear her speak that way, that lightly bantering, yet subtly disparaging way, of the buxom lasses of the boarding-train. The family feeling could not be carried as far as all that, he knew.

They were near the post office, lagging to prolong the walk, in which there was so much to say, it seemed, and so little said.

"Dr. Hall, why don't you carry a gun?" Elizabeth

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 asked suddenly, turning to him with a look as challenging as her words, as if she had led him up to it with the intention of surprising the answer from him.

"Because I don't need one," he replied, not in the least surprised. "Do you think so?"

"Nobody in this town needs one more than you do."

"Why, I can agree with you on that," he laughed. "I don't believe anybody in Damascus needs one any more than I do. I consider them as archaic as swords."

"It's the most foolish thing, walking around this way without a gun. What are you going to do when you meet Gus Sandiver one of these days?"

"I don't believe I've been figuring on meeting the gentleman."

"You'll meet him, all right."

"In that case, I don't know. But I'm not going to carry a gun around in anticipation of the event. You wouldn't expect to see the Methodist preacher walking around with a gun dangling on him, would you?"

"If you don't carry it for Sandiver you ought to carry it for these bums here in town. There's a crowd here that don't like the way you treated Ross."

"I'm aware of that," he replied, so easily, so self-satisfied with his own penetration, it appeared, that she knew he would have stretched himself up that way to his toes, like a tiger flexing its cage-bound muscles, if he had been standing still.

"You take my tip," she counseled seriously, "and get a gun. Get it to-day, right now, and hang it on you. Do you hear my words?"

"And thank you for them," he assured her sincerely. "But don't feel hurt when I fail to heed them. I'm not

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 going to get a gun, Elizabeth, to-day, to-morrow, or any other day. If it comes to the point where I can't waddle around this town without the bluff of a gun, I'll pull my freight. I'm not a gunman; I'm a physician. If I can't win without a gun I'll have to lose."

"There's not much chance for any man to win out in this country west of Dodge without a gun," she said, severely positive, almost to the point of rudeness. "Especially if there's somebody layin' for him. I'll see you to-night. So long."

Dr. Hall waved to her when she looked back from the post office door. He knew she had given her advice with the utmost friendliness and good intention. She seemed to have stepped out of her refined, girlish character to do it, astonishing him not a little by this revelation of a double self. There were two Elizabeths in one, he thought: the girl of cowboy days, and the young lady of the seminary. It was not hard to imagine the one just a minute ago revealed in her slangy seriousness belted around with a gun. Two Elizabeths there, as sure as night and day. He thought of the couplet he had learned when a little boy about Elizabeth, Lizzie, Betsy and Bess, who went somewhere or another to find a bird's nest. Which was the dominant Elizabeth? he wondered.

It was queer, he thought, how the best of them harped on a man's chances out there west of Dodge. Without this, lacking that, there was no chance for a man out there. This time it was a gun. Not much chance for a man without one, especially when there was somebody laying for him.

But it wouldn't do; the time for guns had gone by. Outside of this foolish feud over the county seat, there

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 was no trouble in that country. Let them fight over the barren prospects and trivial possibilities of the county seat; it was not his war. When it came to meeting Gus Sandiver, that emergency would have to take care of itself.

He was not going to let himself down to the class of gun-toters. That would be advertising himself as out for trouble, the one best way in the world to find it.

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, who had been mentioned incidentally by Pete Farley as the person to whom Dr. Hall was to look for sanitary offices about the boxcar, was a sort of janitor to the railroad yards. He had come by his diminutive appellation in some place remote from Damascus, perhaps in some gang of tarriers where there had been another Jack Ryan of greater altitude. It was a common designation among Ryans, Dugans and Murrays of the railroad fraternity. It was not the fashion in that caste to call a man Shorty. It was simply Jack for the big one and Little Jack for the little one, or lesser one, an arrangement satisfactory to all concerned.

Ryan made his appearance regularly every third day, bringing with him his pail and mop, precisely at four o'clock in the afternoon, moving in comfortable deliberation, smoking a corncob pipe. He grew more communicative and confidential with each succeeding visit, although he had not been a reluctant man from the beginning.

He was a stockily built man, rugged as a slab from a sawlog, supporting a large iron-gray mustache at what appeared to be a heavy expense to his face. His features were gaunt and seamed, his eyes hungry and harassed. Only his chin, which was cleanly shaved, appeared to be thriving among all his facial appurtenances. It seemed as if this chin had grown in its clean prosperity while the

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 mustache had drained the substance out of his cheeks. It protruded in a challenging way, giving an insolent look below the mouth. Judging him by the anxious light of his eyes, that chin must have been getting him constantly into scrapes which kept him racked and strained to get out of with a whole hide.

When Ryan arrived at the boxcar office at precisely four o'clock this afternoon, he put his foot on the bottom step, removed the pipe from his mouth, nodded affably, on the footing of entire equality, his acquaintance with the doctor having progressed so far that Ryan could admit him to that plane.

"And how are you findin' thricks this evenin', Dochter?" Ryan inquired.

"Pretty fair, Jack. How are you?"

"Middlin' for an old felly with one fut in the cimit-a-a-ry. Wor you wantin' me to mop up the flure for you to-day?"

Dr. Hall said that, unless Ryan's present happiness and future prosperity depended on mopping up the flure, he would suggest a postponement of the operation until one of his patients, just about due, had come to have his broken arm looked over. Ryan said he guessed he could spare the time, although Ga-hd knew he was a much overworked and burdened man. He put down his pail, leaned his mop against the car, and sat wearily in the door, where he began to tell again about the troubles he had to bear incidental to the proper running of the railroad in that place.

The chief worry of Ryan's life was switch lamps. These had to be cleaned and filled, put up at evening, taken down in the morning, in unvarying program

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 throughout the seasons. Section bosses might come, station agents might go, but Ryan kept right there on that job pouring oil into switch lamps and mussing the soot of them around his melancholy eyes. Just as if all that responsibility was not enough to break a man down, said Ryan, they made him rustle baggage when there was any to rustle, and there most always was.

"Dhrummers," said Ryan, "comin' to this currsed country to sell goods! Man dear, I tell you some of them fellys carry more in their thrunks than the biggest store in this town has got laid out on its shelves. And I'm the man that has to lift em, and h'ave 'em up to the thruck, and aise 'em down like a sore fut, besides fillin' the lamps and puttin' 'em out and bringin' 'em in every blessed evenin' and mornin' the year through. And sweepin' and moppin' the office flure, and the flure of this harspittle you have here; and keepin' the fires goin', and dumpin' the ashes in the winther days, and all of it done for the grand sum and reward of sixty dollars a month!"

Dr. Hall had heard it all before, for Ryan was not a man to permit his great public services to pass without acclaim, even though no other voice ever joined in his praise. The expected patient presently came across from the bunk-cars, passing the loquacious Ryan with high bearing. This man was straw-boss on a steel-gang, a strong broad fellow who looked down on Ryan, and all other men of his class who sought the easy waters beside the heavy current of railroad toil. He had got his forearm broken while at work, and was enjoying a vacation on full time, according to the railroad custom in those days. Mike Murray was his name. He was known to the boarding-train as Mickey Sweat.

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 "Are ye waitin' to have an aperation perfarmed on ye, Ryan?" he inquired with mocking solicitude, a gleam of humor in his light-blue eyes, over which his thin chalky eyebrows arched so sharply he seemed always on the point of exclamatory astonishment.

"I'm mindin' me own business," Ryan replied coldly.

"Oh, I thought the hard life ye lead had broke ye down, and ye'd come in to have y'r appendoolix cut out. Take it aisy, man; take it aisy. It's too much y're tryin' to do, holdin' up the dochter's office with the broad of your back agin it for hours at a time that way."

"I'm waitin' to sweep out the legs and arrums of ye, and throw them on the doomp," Ryan returned, equally high in his sarcasm. "There'll be nothing left of you but the stoomp when the dochter's through with ye to-day, Mickey me lad."

"O-o-oh, is that so?" said Mickey, comfortable in his distinction of being crippled and on full time. "Well, if ye ever take hold of an arrum of mine that's been coot off, Jackie me son, ye'll get the worst wallop ye ever felt since the cow kicked ye through the hedge. There'll still be enough stame left in me mimber to lay ye out cowld, man."

Ryan ignored the slur on that strength and endurance which he had stressed as so broadly essential to that trying situation of his but a few minutes before. He turned his back to fit it squarely against the end of the car, implying as plainly as a man could without words that he had no wish for further traffic in chaff with Mickey Sweat. He even allowed the straw-boss to go on his way when the doctor had finished with him, never turning an eye to acknowledge his parting shot.

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 "It's lucky the big stiff has the arrum of him broke," he said to Dr. Hall.

"The jerries seem to think you've got a pretty soft job of it, Jack," the doctor remarked.

"They're jillis. There's not a man on Bill Chambers's gang that has the brains in 'im to do me worruk. Wasn't I a jerry myself before I got me fut crooshed innunther the han'kyar and Pete Farley put me here to compinsate me for me sooferin'? I was. Many a year I hoomped me back over a tampin'-pick, dhrivin' rocks innunther the ties."

Ryan sighed over the recollection, in no hurry to get up and hump his back over the mop. Dr. Hall knew his habits very well; Ryan had explained the routine of his day many a time before. One hour every third day Ryan dedicated—that was the word he used—to the scrubbing of the car. He spent ten minutes in the actual work, the rest of the time getting ready to begin, and easing his tremendous energies down to stop.

Just then he was sitting as he had adjusted himself in his cold scorn of Mickey Sweat, back squarely against the car. Now he shifted a little to plant himself in the door, shoulders against the jamb. By degrees he would work around to the job that way, talking all the time. Dr. Hall sat in his surgical chair, never tired of Ryan, his plaints and self-praising, his views on the activities and ambitions of other men, always in relation to his own importance among them.

Ryan lived in a little tin house down the railroad. Snug on the bank of the river it stood, contrived out of cans from which railroaders and others in Damascus drew their chief sustenance. He had melted the tins apart in a

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 bonfire and tacked them over the boards which he had picked up along the track, salved from the wreckage of boxcars, and appropriated by night from open loads of lumber which stopped convenient to his site.

In his domestic economy Ryan was a forehanded and original man. He had a wife, big as a feather bed, soft as dough, one of those half-Indian leavings which remained after the tribes were swept out of the way to make place for farms and towns. On these sunny spring days she could be seen from afar, moving ponderously about in a little fenced enclosure where Jack had spaded up the ground for a garden.

"You've come up in the world since then," Hall commended him. "This job is far and away better than jerrying. There's no telling where a man of your capabilities might go. Are you in line for another promotion?"

"There's nothing here for a man except the job of poompin' wather for the ingins. I'm no scientifical man; I'd do no good to set me heart on that job. It pays sivinty-five a month—it's a grand aisy job Tom Harris has, settin' in his nate little house watchin' the sthroke of the poomp, and never a lick of worruk to lay his hand to but shovelin' a bit of coal now and then. But it's not for me; I'm no scientifical man."

"There ought to be something else for a man of your merit, Jack. Why don't you strike Farley for a change?"

"No; I'm too far west of Dodge. There's no chance for a man to better himself out here, savin' he might be a brakey, or one of them fellys. I've thought of takin' me up a bit of land and goin' back to farmin', as I was brought up to in Donegal, but they tell me murphys won't

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 grow here, although I'm goin' to try a hatful in me little garden. I've never seen a bit of a pig since I came out here. They say pigs can't live in this air so far west of Dodge."

"How long have you been in this country, Jack? this country west of Dodge, I mean."

"Three years!" Ryan replied, rolling his words solemnly.

"Not so long."

"It's more nor tin years in Arge'tine, where I was before. A man's cheated out of his life in this country where they put five winthers in one. Summer is the same. I've briled more grase out o' me body here than could be fried out of a whale. It's a ha-ard country; the ha-ardest country God made, and the last. The l'avin's he put in this place."

Ryan shook his head sadly, as if out of words to describe and denounce the atrocities of that country farther. He appeared to have fallen into a dream, his eyes fixed vacantly on some far-off place, while he moved his pipestem with precise stroke along his heavy gray mustache, now on the right section of it, again on the left, as if he drew that adornment into his features with deliberate pencil and careful hand.

"Tough country," said Dr. Hall. He got out of the chair, signifying to Ryan that he was ready for his professional stroke upon the floor.

"Tough," Ryan echoed feelingly. "It's cruel tough." He sighed, as for his bondage in a land he could not leave. "But I'll say for it, Dochter," hopefully, almost enthusiastically, looking around at Hall with a quickening light in his sad eyes, "it's the aiseyest country to shave

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 in of a-a-ny country I ever set razor to me face in, barrin' none."

Dr. Hall looked at Ryan with appreciative grin, not quite certain whether it was praise or satire. Ryan was gathering up mop and pail, solemn as a professional scrubman about to begin the exercise of his art should be. It was certain he meant it for praise, a sort of justification, perhaps, in explanation why a man with a large chin and many burdens should remain there to bear its cruelties.

When Ryan mopped, he made a hissing noise, as if he operated by compressed air, like the brake of acar. He accomplished this by flattening his lips away from his teeth, which gave his face a desperate appearance, such as a man might present under the stress of some woeful pain. He slopped and sloshed, slinging his soapy compound into corners with heedless profusion, spreading a smell of strong lye around him. Dr. Hall retreated outside.

The rough work was soon over, when Ryan came to the door to wring the mop for taking up the little pools left standing. He put the mop under his foot and twisted the Stick, sighing as if the operation brought its deep regrets.

"They're jillis of me lifetime job," he said quite cheerfully. He did not wait for any comment, perhaps not expecting any, but turned to his drying-up with vigorous arm. "Well, a hoondred days is a hoondred dollars, as the old Jerry said, and it would be a dom mane man that'd charge ye for the boite ye'd ate."

"Are you going to the dance to-night?" Dr. Hall asked him, when Ryan appeared in the door presently with mop and pail, his work of purgation done.

"I'll be there to keep me eye on them they don't burn

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 down the daypo," Ryan replied. "They'll be throwin' segyars around innunther the platform, and maybe upsettin' lanterns. The divil will be to pay before midnight. Yes, I'll be there to keep an eye on 'em to see they don't destr'y the company's property."

Ryan took up the implements of his art and went down the track, singing softly to himself as he rolled along in his weaving, deliberate gait:

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was room for all the dancers in Damascus, both railroad and secular, on the station platform, which surrounded the building entirely and extended in a long wing on each side, up and down the track. Pieces of scantling had been nailed upright along the edge of the platform at frequent intervals, where lanterns were hung. The illumination was smoky and vague, but it had a gala effect in the eyes of Damascus. The engineer of the work-train had run his loose-jointed old mogul up the house track and backed and fiddled until he brought the headlight beam to bear on part of the rough floor. That was too much light; they told him to take it away.

Annie and Mary Charles were clearly the stars of the occasion, although Damascus had done its best to eclipse them by turning out the finest it had. The daughters and wives of resident railroad people, who held themselves a social notch higher than those who followed the frontier of construction, were there; the young woman who served the dining-room of the West Plains Hotel was present, ably escorted by a scented cavalier in bell-bottomed trousers. He was Mit Sniveley, who ran the Railroad Barber Shop. It was situated in a corner of Kraus' livery barn.

Pink Fergus, mother of the astute humorist, Dine, was there, the falsity of her curls apparent even in the smoky

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 light of railroad lanterns. These curls were as much an institution of Damascus as the bank. They were two strong shades lighter than the original hair which they amplified and adorned, a dusty brown, dry and lusterless as the winter coat of an old horse. Pink was the only honest woman in Damascus who painted her face. It was a weakness that brought her close to the dividing line. She had crow's-feet around her languishing dark eyes.

Larrimore was there in his shirt sleeves, the waistband of his trousers around his hips. His wife was not present, due to the jealous sequestration her husband exercised over her like a Turk. Larrimore was notable as a prompter of the dances most favored among the railroaders and others of the frontier at that time, the figures of which must be called out. If the caller had a high-pitched, wavering voice he could be heard to advantage above the fiddles, as a katydid among crickets. Dine Fergus, smelling of benzine, due to his mother's ministrations over his summer suit, was kicking a high heel among the first.

Charley Burnett was host of the occasion. It was through his influence as a big shipper that the company's permission to use the platform had been obtained, over the refusal of the local agent. Burnett always said he was more a railroader than a cattleman, having made his beginning as a telegraph operator before he was old enough to vote.

In deference to this early affiliation he appeared to-night without a coat, black sateen oversleeves to his elbows, a stylus and pencils in his vest pocket, clamped by the very three-barreled patented pencil-holder he had used as night operator on his first job. To make it ap-

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 pear just as if he had come out of the bay window of the depot, he wore a green eyeshade.

The railroaders were a cosmopolitan crew. Although the Irish predominated, there were representatives, singly and by twos and threes, of many lands, especially those: northern countries which produce big men for the world's heavy work. There was a little band of Welshmen, who worked in stone abutments for bridges; some Swedish carpenters, two or three German jerries, and one lone. Englishman. This was a short, grizzled little Cockney who had sailed the seas, Edwin Blewitt by name. He had a blue lady on one thick forearm, a blue anchor on the other.

Although the boarding-train supplied but three ladies, the resident railroaders brought many. Several came from the grading camp, social barriers being down. There was no need of going out of town to find fiddlers, for fiddlers in plenty always are to be found in places like Damascus. They go along with the frontier's painted women and come-on men. There is the same difference between violinists and fiddlers of this type as there is between a gentleman and a gent.

The jerries were not dancing men, as a rule, although there were a few nimble exceptions in the gang at Damascus. It was the old-timers who hovered around the battery of beer kegs over against the boarding-train. Two kegs at a time were hoisted on carpenters' trestles, with the proper slant for draining the last drop, every man free to draw for himself as frequently as he was able. The kegs came down from the saloon cold and dripping, and would continue to come until the last jerry was filled to the brim. Charley Burnett was paying for it all.

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 Being a Saturday night, there was no worry about steady legs for next day's work. In great amiability the older jerries crowded around the kegs, careful not to waste a drop. For his favored guests, his town cronies and close friends, Burnett had something in the baggage room considerably more potent than beer. Beer was no gentleman's drink at a dance.

Such of Damascus as did not regard it as an unholy affair, came down early in the evening to look on and take enjoyment out of the hilarious charge that enlivened the soft night air. These nonparticipants would go home before the jerries began to knock handles out of their picks. Burnett had a big bunch of cowboys in from his nearest camp.

Little Jack Ryan came to Dr. Hall's office when the dance was beginning to warm up to something worth while. It was then about nine o'clock; the third relay of kegs had come down from the saloon, Mickey Sweat, superintendent of the bung-knocking, giving his orders in loud voice, the way he sung to his gang when lining track. Jack approached from the direction of the kegs, wiping his mustache on the back of his hand.

Burnett's cowboys, as well as all other guests who came carrying arms, had been relieved of their weapons, which were hung around the walls of the baggage-room in barbaric array. The cowboys especially were limbering up to the night's merriment. When they swung the girls they whirled them high, heels clear of the boards, expressing their joy in sharp, quavering yelps.

"Them cow-whackin' boys are gettin' spiced up," said Ryan.

"It does sound like it," Dr. Hall agreed.

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 "It's a good job Burnett made them take their goons off, or they'd be shootin' up company property, let 'em take a few more dhrinks. Little good them cow-herdin' fellys are, with their goons swingin' on 'em. Give one of them a linin'-bar and order him to j'int ahead, and where would he turn? He couldn't arn his salt at a man's worruk, and if it's fightin' that's to be done, leave me take a pick-handle in me fist and I'll defate a rigimint of them."

"There isn't a doubt about it," Hall said heartily, without the slightest consideration of the valor or merits of either side.

He only thought that Elizabeth must have reconsidered her promise to come down and stand on the rim of the crowd a while. She was not among the spectators who fringed the platform, or sat off at a distance more aloof on piles of ties and rails. Several mounted visitors were present, but Elizabeth was not among them. Just as well, Hall thought. It was a rough affair, and likely to be rougher.

The station agent, whose name was Nance, inhabited the upper part of the depot with his young wife, who was famed as the prettiest woman in Damascus. He had come to that station only recently from the indefinite region known as the east, which included all the world on the opposite side of Dodge City. Dr. Hall saw him at an upstairs window now, looking down on the boisterous crowd that thronged his planked domain.

Nance was a frail pale man, disproportionately consequential in comparison with his situation, a$ station agents in small places usually are. Even among agents, Nance was an aggravated case. He was bitter over being

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 sidetracked in the matter of the dance, his authority overridden by Burnett's appeal. Instead of bringing his handsome wife down and airing his heels on an equal with the rest of them, thus making a place for himself in their regard, he sulked, nursing his abused dignity.

Dr. Hall had discharged his social obligations early in the evening. He had cut some high capers in a quadrille with Mrs. Charles, danced a schottische with Mary, waltzed with Annie. He had a reservation, soon to fall due, with Delia O'Hare, the saloon keeper's daughter, for another waltz. It wasn't so bad. The jerries had gone over the platform with their spiking-mauls, driving down the big nails which winter moisture and spring sun had started. There were six sets of quadrille going at that moment on the long platform, the pale face of the station agent at his window like a sour moon.

Elizabeth had not yet appeared when the ordeal with Delia O'Hare was over. Dr. Hall was relieved, rather than disappointed, to find that she had not come. She might, in that spirit of something glimpsed now and then in her eyes, want to take a fling at the dance. In such event, would she expect him to invite her out? He would not like to assume the responsibility for her caprice, being no authority on social usage in Damascus.

In that connection, Hall noted that none of the aristocracy was present, at least not mingling with the proletarians on the floor. There were only a few families of the exalted in Damascus, such as the circuit judge's, the county officials', and Judge Waters', the judge being president of the bank. Hall had not been introduced into any of these families, except by the adventure that

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 opened the Cottrell's door to him. He was, by the very nature of his connection, an outsider.

It was a warm night, the wind not more than a breath in comparison with its daytime vigor, a portent of rain in the gabbling of the frogs along the river. Hall returned to his office sweating from his exertions with the pudgy Delia O'Hare, to find Little Jack Ryan sitting complacently in the door as he had left him, smoking a cigar in honor of the celebration. Jack said Edwin Blewitt, sole representative of England on the boarding-train, was making trouble over among the kegs.

"Somebody'll lay the little divil out flat," Jack said, "and a good job it'll be for him. He has one song in him that he wants to sing when he's dhrinkin', no thought in him of the accoutrements of it. Last winther he sung it when Aggie Mooney, the section boss' daughter, was married to a Swede carpenter be the name of Sorenson. It was a lucky job—"

"What is the song?" Hall inquired, genuinely interested in such a musical sensation.

"I don't know the title of it, if it has one, and the worruds of it I never heard, barrin' the big-innin'. I've heard Blewitt attimpt it many times, but he's never gone past the worruds where he says: 'Hold Hireland, wot 'ast thou come to!' He got along with it to that p'int at Aggie Mooney's weddin', where they sthrangled him off. Siven sthrong men leaped on him and throwed him out on his neck. He's sthrugglin' with 'em now to mount the flure and sing that same song. The man has no dacency in him at all."

"So they'll not allow Blewitt to sing it?" Hall said,

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 hoping the little Englishman would succeed in making a start at it, anyway.

"They will not, then," Ryan replied.

Dr. Hall was hanging up his long black coat, having paid his social obligations, and preparing for more serious work. There was a new case, brought in only that evening from the west, a young man with a mangled foot which required an operation. Hall dreaded an amputation. He knew too well the terrible fear a laborer on trackwork had of becoming a maimed man. The doctor would have to bear not only the reproaches of his patient, but the censure, the suspicious distrust thereafter, of nearly every man on the train. A man's capital was taken from him, viewed from the point of an untrained laborer, and rightly viewed, when a hand or foot was taken off. He was a pauper from that day.

It was Hall's hope that the patient would recoup strength during the night to be sent in the morning, with one of his comrades of the gang as nurse on the way, according to the usage, to the hospital at Topeka. But it was a long journey for a case so grave, and all this noise and hilarity was not conducive to the patient's rest.

Coat and vest off, white shirt gleaming in the light of the two guiding lanterns at his door, hung there each evening with religious punctuality by Ryan, Dr. Hall started to the hospital car to see what more he might do to relieve the young jerry's pain. Jack Ryan slewed his knees out of the doorway to let him pass.

"Will you hang around here, Jack, and keep an eye on things?" the doctor requested. "Some of the town boys are sneaking around here to-night."

"I will do that," Jack assented heartily. "Poor young

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 "Gallaher! I hear him groanin' and cryin' above the n'ise of the fiddlin', You'll be givin' him a dhrop of something to aise his sufferin', Dochter?"

"Yes, Jack."

"The fut av him is crooshed bad, they say."

"Yes. I'm afraid it'll have to come off, poor fellow!"

"Ah-h-h! Don't say it, Dochter. Save the lad's fut to him, if you have to cut off his head!"

"One would be about as bad as the other, I'm afraid, Jack."

"You know best. Poor Gallaher! You'll be back soon?"

"In a little while."

Jack waved him on with his cigar, grandly expressive of his sufficiency to meet any exigency during his absence. Dr. Hall laid a diagonal course across the track for his hospital car, which stood on a short spur that Bill Chambers had thrown out among some cottonwood trees to accommodate it. The dance was becoming more noisy every minute, with much cowboy yelping and deep railroad laughter, the delighted shrill squeal of the ladies splitting the heavier noise like little red bursts of flame. But it was all so good humored and carelessly happy there did not appear to be a spark of trouble for some hot breath to blow into a blaze.

Another quadrille had begun, a cowboy caller standing on a kerosene barrel high above the dancers, bringing gales and shrieks of laughter by his frills and comical embellishments, even mixing them up in the figures by applying the terms of his trade to the movements of the dance. It seemed such an honest hour of enjoyment that Hall paused a moment to watch them. The dust danced

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 up out of the heavy planks made rings around the lanterns.

As he stood there on the border of the merry scene, instrument case in his hand, almost out of reach of the lanterns' sickly light, Dr. Hall saw the station agent appear in the baggage-room door. This door was broad, like a freight car door, running on rollers at the top. It was the only opening into the room, except the smaller door that connected with the agent's office. Nance stood there a moment, peering cautiously around the jamb. Then he closed the door, the noise of its movement drowned in the merriment of the dance.

Dr. Hall grinned in appreciation of the agent's trick. Although the little man had done it in assertion of his authority over the station, he had locked up the possibility of a lot of trouble. There was no window in the room. They scarcely would risk breaking a lock to get at their whisky and guns. A pretty good move, although the agent doubtless never had considered it in that light when he sneaked down and closed the door.

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was in a bad condition, his right foot having been all but severed by a falling rail. Dr. Hall had hoped to pass the operation on to the hospital surgeons at Topeka, and the suffering man, a big-jointed, lanky young fellow, a very steam-shovel of a man, was firmly determined that the foot should not be taken off at all. This fatuous determination had grown so strong in him, encouraged by the foolish counsel of his fellows, that he repelled all the doctor's efforts to alleviate his pain.

These same friends who were leading him on to destruction by their advice, had supplied Gallaher with a quart of whisky, which he had under his pillow, or such of it as he had not swigged and poured on his distressing injury. The air fairly quivered with alcoholic distillations around Gallaher, who declared he felt a great deal easier, and that he would have no ministration nor medicine except that first and last remedy of the jerry for all the woes, physical and mental, that overtake a man.

Red-eyed in his pain, fierce in his ignorant defense of his injured member, Gallaher would hear nothing of an hypodermic injection of morphine to give him a few hours' sleep before the arrival of the fast train from the west, on which Dr. Hall designed to ship him away to Topeka. No, they were not going to throw any such trick as that

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 on him, Gallaher declared, put him to sleep and rob him of his foot for no other reason in the world but to practice and experiment. Let 'em try it on, just let 'em try it on!

The other crips, none of them very serious, had left their cots in the hospital to buzz out like flies at a carrion banquet around the kegs of beer. Gallaher had the dreary place to himself, a lantern swinging from an overhead beam casting a shadowed light as cheerless as his own misery. Dr. Hall sat by him, trying to pacify and assure the unfortunate jerry, whose suffering had kept him sober in spite of the reckless slugs of whisky he had swallowed.

There was no use taking the bottle away from him, for his comrades would give him more; it would be mercy misapplied to attempt the use of the needle. Gallaher's groans and lamentations which had sounded above the noise of the fiddles, had been due, the doctor came to believe after talking with him a while, more to concern over losing his foot than from the pain of his hurt. These men were not sensitive to physical suffering in the degree more kindly nurtured people felt it. The hard order of their lives, the blunting rigor of their toil, made them indifferent to torn flesh and crushed bone. A whimpering man was a subject of ridicule and contempt, a sensitive one, of the deepest scorn. But no man was above moaning, and having a sympathetic chorus to keep him company, at the prospect of losing a limb.

Dr. Hall left Gallaher asleep after more than an hour of friendly and soothing talk. He had won the young man's confidence, all but a little corner of reservation and distrust, by going back to Ireland with him in review of the past, and giving him assurance that his claim

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 against the company for proper compensation would be sustained.

The other patients were still profiting, as they considered it, by the liberal hand of Charley Burnett, when Dr. Hall left Gallaher. He must round the crippled tarriers up, Hall thought, and caution them to come in quietly. He must first leave an order with the night operator for the fast train to stop and pick up the hospital case. Bill Chambers must be found, and told to detail a man to go with the patient to Topeka.

There was a waltz on the boards, the heavy tread of the dancers making the lanterns swing. In the noise of fiddles and feet Dr. Hall crossed the track. He stepped to the platform, the length of the depot between him and the dancers, coming suddenly upon a couple as he rounded the corner on his way to the office door. They were Charley Burnett, host of the evening, and Mary Charles of the train.

They were not making any effort at concealment, standing where the light from the waiting-room lamp shone dimly through a window; there was nothing at all questionable in their close and interested conversation, but Mary started as Dr. Hall passed, drawing back from the conference guiltily, as if she had been caught listening to something she ought not hear. Burnett was imperturbable. He stood pouring his diamonds from hand to hand, probably having sought the light of the window to illuminate his opulent diversion. He nodded to Hall in unconcerned, rather patronizing recognition, and went on pouring his flashing trifles like a man in a field winnowing a handful of wheat.

Dr. Hall would not have given the encounter a second

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 thought if it had not been for Mary's guilty start and confusion. Burnett would be that kind of a man, he thought. He did not like the fellow's bow legs, nor his supercilious, sneering, crooked grin. Mary was a good girl. Her very innocence betrayed her. Burnett had a right to leave her alone.

They were gone when Hall came out; a quadrille was in swing with noise equal to a gang of jerries at work on the ballast with their tamping-bars. Hall walked along the track to avoid the pounding maze, thinking of Mary, and the queer little start and withdrawing, unwarranted alarm in the breast of innocence, yet the very weakness through which innocence always betrays itself when caught putting its foot into some forbidden pool.

Little Jack Ryan rose from the door as Dr. Hall approached his office. Jack excused himself hurriedly, on the plea of no telling what peril the company's property might be in with all that sowing of cigar and cigarette stubs. Dr. Hall was too considerate to watch which way Jack's anxiety directed him, but he grinned as he put his case away in the little closet that gave out a strong scent of germicidal drugs.

Hall put out the lamp after he had disposed of his instruments and arranged the interior of his office, closing up by that act, as it were, the business of the day. He filled his pipe and went outside, walking about on the fringe of the crowd of townsfolk and railroaders who were lending their moral, but not physical, support to the dance. Elizabeth had thought better of it and remained at home. Yes, he said, conclusively, it was better she had not come. It was a rough crowd, but hearty, and

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 Blewitt was making a row again over the restraint of his song. The hour for pick-handles was drawing near.

Satisfied that his social duties had been discharged, and quite easy on the point of his professional ones, Dr. Hall returned to his office, partly closed his front door to screen the light of his own lanterns as well as those illuminating the platform, and streched himself out in his surgical chair for a little relaxation and ease.

He tried to picture what that place and country sorrounding would be like a few years hence, after the railroaders had done their work of establishing the permanent track, tamping it as firmly as the Appian Way for the traffic between the seas to pass over in expedition and comfort; after those pioneers who flocked around the landoffice in flopping hats and patched overalls, gaunt, eager, zealous as crusaders in this fight for freedom and home—what it would be like after they had broken the sod and mellowed the soil until it would receive in kindness and nurture in friendliness the seed from their hopeful hands.

It would not marshal, that array of triumphant husbandmen; it would not take shape, that picture of comfort and prosperity in a land so bleak and unpromising. He had looked with amazement on the poor homes men were building on their sections and quarter-sections between Damascus and Simrall. Few had taken advantage of the one building material the land offered in abundance—the sod beneath their feet. This was due in some measure to their ignorance of the method of construction, but more to their prejudice against that kind of houses, which, to these corn-and-hogs farmers, as Cottrell had called them, were a designation of shiftlessness.

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 Their minds ran to planks, out of which they built little coops, sides and roofs often of the same material, so frail, so unstable, so temporary in appearance, as to give the impression that a horde of squatters had come to camp there a little while in some speculative design, and that autumn would see them vanish away again, taking their raw little houses with them, never to return.

There were some—and these were not few—too poor to spare the money for planks. These burrowed into hillsides, making holes which they roofed over with poles and sod, heaping earth over all until it seemed an effort to disguise their lodgment, either in craftiness or shame. Stovepipes were thrust out of the rounded roofs of these bank-side dwellings; sometimes there was a tiny window beside the door or, if not a window independent of that opening, a pane or two let into the panels. More often there was not a gleam of glass.

To such homes as these men had brought their wives and children; old wives and young, children puny and strong, adolescent, infantile, just crossing the line of puberty. There were widows with strong sons, wifeless men with long-backed daughters, broken home-forces which must unite in course to rear a new and strange race in this unsheltered land. What would the young be like, nurtured on the hardships of that bleak highland plain, housed in the caves and thin board huts which seemed so pitifully insufficient in the temporary quiescence of a land so cruel that no man remembered a kindness at its threshold?

It eluded him. The picture swirled unformed, as denying in its elusiveness as the blue smoky distances of that unfathomable land. Out of all this fervor of beginning,

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 this eagerness to grapple and overcome, to trample down and make smooth, what would come? What place was there for a man who did not have that dry-lipped, sharp-eyed hunger for the land in his soul? It was unanswerable. Yet it was compelling, a problem that stood with all the charm of mystery drawing one on to remain for its solution. And there was no power could solve it but time. Time alone; the one treasure that man cannot hypothecate, the one endowment to which all men are equal heirs.

This reverie was broken by a strange sense of quietude that had fallen suddenly over the revelers. The silence was as abrupt and complete as if the station agent had reached out of his upstairs window and turned a bowl over the dancers and fiddlers.

Dr. Hall sat up with a startled jerk, a premonitory coldness over him, a sinking feeling of foreboding, as if he had heard the step of a messenger bringing bad news. Before he reached the door he heard a shot, followed by a rush of feet; another shot, a yelp, and a husky voice ordering everybody to clear out of there.

"Scatter to hell out o' here!" the hoarse, flat-edged voice commanded, a shot underscoring the order.

When Dr. Hall looked out, the dancers had scurried from the platform like a flurry of snow before a wind. One man held the deserted boards, a booted, belted figure that towered tall and defiant, a pistol in his hand. Three of the five lanterns hanging along the edge of the platform had been extinguished. As Hall stood in his door looking at this person who had sprung so violently into the happy scene, the ruffian shot out another lantern, yelping in satisfaction as the glass tinkled to the boards.

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 "I'm a ant-eater, I'm a razor-back!" the long-legged, absurdly solemn-looking shooter announced, his voice hollow as a wind across a bung-hole. "Come and ride me! I've got horns on my backbone—come and ride me!"

Nobody ventured out to meet the challenge, although there was a crunching of many feet on the cinders over among the jerries who had been drinking beer, with a shouting for a rally, the sound of thumping as pick-handles were knocked from the eyes against the rails.

Fearing that his lanterns would draw the next shot, Hall turned them out quickly, dodging outside into the dark immediately, not caring to be made a blind target in that car a second time. The remaining lantern on its stake at the edge of the platform did not reveal anybody in sight but the shooter, who stood with his gun raised, apparently pausing to consider where to pitch his next shot.

At that moment Nance, the station agent, raised a window in his upstairs living quarters and stuck out his foolish head. He could be seen plainly, the light of the last lantern reaching to the broad eaves of the building. The despoiler of this pleasurable hour heard the sash slam as the outraged dignity of the agent put steam in his incautious arm. The visitor turned his gun on Nance, firing two quick shots, with a yelp between them like a hyphen connecting a fiery curse.

Nance disappeared from the window, leaving it open, the sound of glass trickling down to the platform. Whether Nance was hit, Hall did not know, any more than he knew what unmeditated resentment of such murderous villainy sent him in a leap from the shelter of the dark at the corner of his car, and carried him galloping

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 up the platform. At the sound of Hall's charge, the gunner wheeled around from the window to guard his rear.

The fellow came around with a quick spin on his heel, gun slung high, ready to throw it down for a shot. Hall was not more than twenty feet away, his white shirt making him a prominent target. He ducked to rush under the gun, aiming to tackle the fellow low and knock him off his feet.

Hall was not conscious of any danger of his own. His only thought was, as he bent low and shot ahead with all the speed a good toe-hold on the dry boards could give him, that the fool man would kill somebody if he wasn't stopped. Not him; not Andrew Hall, rushing up the platform where it came down to the cinders like a wedge; no thought that the pistol held on a level with the fellow's hat-brim was training down to stop him in his charge. Only that this fool man would kill somebody if he wasn't stopped.

That was the way of it that second when Hall came under the lantern: the gun coming around in a long, easy-going, confident swing, June-bugs bumping the lantern close by the wide hat of the gaunt, long-legged man. Then there was a shot, and the jolt of the collision. The gunman was scooped up in the rush as if a locomotive had hit him, thrown over Hall's shoulder clear of the platform, a humiliated wreck among the ballast between the rails.

In a moment the platform sounded to the rush of feet. Dine Fergus was the first to reach the spot, closely followed by Larrimore, others pressing forward into the light like closing water. Dr. Hall stood a moment where he had come up short after heaving the gunman over his

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 back, running the palm of his hand across his hair like a flat-iron, the outcome of the interference not quite clear to him yet. There was blood on his shirt, blood on the boards where he stood. But he was not conscious of any hurt.

Dine Fergus rushed up, stooped and made a sweeping grab for the intruder's gun, which lay almost at Dr. Hall's feet. Hall came out of his momentary daze, alert and aggressive, and gave Fergus a kick that rolled him a rod.

Jim Justice came puffing up, smashing his way to the inner circle. He stood on the edge of the platform, looking down at the man between the rails.

"Look at him bleed! It's spurtin' out of him like somebody'd knocked out the bung. He'd 'a' got you, Doc, if somebody hadn't took him that crack in the arm!"

"Who was it? Who done it?" eager voices inquired.

"Over there," said Justice, waving his arm vaguely toward the town. "I seen the flash."

Dr. Hall stuck the gun, which was long and heavy, between his body and the waistband of his pantaloons, a very unsatisfactory, insecure and uncomfortable way of carrying a gun, no matter for the piratical precedent which appears to be unquestionable. He had no other place to put the thing; he could as well have carried one of the jerries' picks in his hip pocket. The pistol made a harsh pressure against his ribs when he bent over the wounded man between the rails, lifting his bleeding arm to investigate the seriousness of his hurt.

It was bad enough. Somebody's bullet had smashed one bone and cut the artery. Hall did not stand to argue the man's worth to society, or his worthiness to live under

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text:
Page:Manual of the New Zealand Flora.djvu/519

Dichondra.] Sepals obovate, silky. Corolla much longer than the sepals, sometimes twice as long. Ripe capsules about equalling the calyx.—D. repens var. brevifolia, Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst. x. app. xxxvii.

Leafless usually annual herbs, germinating in the soil but not rooting in it, producing filiform branched stems which twine round herbs or shrubs and become parasitic by means of suckers which penetrate the bark, the lower portion of the stem then dying away. Flowers small, usually whitish, in dense or open cymose fascicles, sessile or shortly pedicelled. Sepals 5 or 4, distinct or connate at the base. Corolla campanulate or urceolate or ovoid; lobes 5–4, short, imbricate in the bud. Stamens 5–4, inserted on the throat of the corolla, above a ring of many scale-like lacerate appendages. Ovary globose, 2-celled, 4-ovuled; styles 1 or 2, persistent; stigmas capitate or filiform. Capsule 1–4-seeded, membranous, dry or succulent, circumscissile or bursting irregularly. Seeds glabrous, albuminous; embryo long and slender, spirally coiled; cotyledons wanting or obscure.

1. C. densiflora, Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 186.—Stems slender, densely matted and twisting together, as thick as stout thread. Flowers crowded in short densely congested 6–10-flowered racemes ¼–½ in. long. Calyx shortly 5-lobed; lobes oblong, obtuse. Corolla ⅛ in. long, subcampanulate, marked with transparent oil-glands; lobes 5, short, rounded, recurved. Scales broadly oblong, obtuse, fimbriated, united at their bases by a thin membrane. Filaments longer than the anthers. Styles 2, rather long; stigmas capitate.—''Handb. N.Z. Fl.'' 199.

Marlborough—Port Underwood, Lyall.

I have seen no specimens of this, and the above diagnosis has been drawn up from those given by Hooker in the Flora and the Handbook. According to Hooker, Dr. Engelmann, who examined the type at Kew, reported that it hardly differs from the South American C. racemosa, Martius, a species which was introduced into Europe many years ago, and caused much damage to crops of lucerne. It subsequently appeared in fields of lucerne in California. Mr. Kirk (Trans. N.Z. Inst. xx. 182) records the occurrence of the same plant (under the synonym of C. hassiaca, Pfeiff.) in lucerne-fields in Canterbury, but there are no specimens in his herbarium.


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 any condition whatever. The rascal's life was leaking out in jets from the wound. A piece of ballast twisted in the fellow's own neckerchief made a tourniquet that checked the flow. When he had made this swift repair, the pressing crowd looking on with interest, he looked up with sudden inquiry into Jim Justice's walrus face.

"Did somebody shoot him?" he asked.

"Did somebody shoot him!" Larrimore repeated in derision. "Hell!"

"It looks like somebody come purty near it," Justice chuckled. "Watch out for him! he's comin' to."

The gunman, who had been lying with his face in the ballast, lifted his head in the first surge of returning senses, shaking it weakly, with the bitter revulsion that shivers the old soak after slinging down a big slug of raw whisky.

"Tastes bad to him," Justice laughed.

"It'll taste worse!" Larrimore threatened. "Comin' here shootin' up this dance!"

"Must 'a' knowed our guns was locked up in that damn baggage-room," somebody growled.

Dr. Hall was helping the object of this public displeasure to come to a sitting posture between the rails, where he weaved weakly, his long legs spread wide. He had dislodged the bandage on his wrist in his efforts to get up. Dr. Hall was clamping the spurting artery with his thumb.

"Give me a hand with him, some of you men," he appealed. "He'll bleed to death unless I get him to my office and fix this arm."

"Jail's the place for that feller," somebody said.

"And that's where he's going," Larrimore declared. "Come on here, men!"

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 "No, you don't!" Hall said. "You're not going to throw a trick like that twice on me in this town."

He shifted the bleeding arm to his left hand, as if making ready to square off with the old razor-back's gun and defend the remnant of his unworthy life. Jim Justice pushed forward a little, leaning eagerly.

"Look a here, Doc; don't you know who that feller is?" Jim asked, a chuckle of appreciation in his thick voice. "He's old Gus Sandiver, about the last man you'd want to pull a gun for, I guess."

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's revelation was not so astonishing to Dr. Hall's ears as Jim had looked for it to be. It was greatly to the disappointment and disgust of everybody that the doctor did not display any personal interest in the case at all. His one thought appeared to be professional, his one desire to get Gus Sandiver, or whoever the fellow was, into his office and attend that shattered arm.

The jerries were pushing in through the crowd with their pick-handles; Mickey Sweat at the front of them, his arm in splints across his chest.

"Lay hold," Mickey gave the order in his official, tracklining voice, "heave that man up and take him to the dochter's kyar. Let yees spread out now, min—let yees spread out!"

The citizens and cowboys had not succeeded in bluffing the night operator into giving them the key to the baggage-room, although there was much pressure being laid on by Charley Burnett and other influential citizens who believed the peace and security of all depended on instant arming and rushing out in defense. Gus Sandiver had not come to Damascus alone, it was said; there was a gang at the saloon.

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 head. He had taken on a little too much before starting out to clean up the dance, which the jolt against the main-line rail had not altogether offset. Mickey Sweat and the jerries had gone back to the kegs, there being a full one yet to account for before they could rightly turn in and call it a night, assured by Dr. Hall that he would not need their highly appreciated services again.

The jerries were not deeply concerned over the affair. They had little sympathy, and less admiration, for any man who went out with a gun in his fist to do his fighting, and precious small interest in him when he came down to merited grief at the end. The jerries did not hold the men whose guns Nance had locked in the depot a bit more worthy than the one who had dispersed them with his weapon. Give them a little time to knock the pick-handles out and they would have pounded to the charge, scornful of any weapons but their own, and landed without discrimination or favor on the head of every man with a gun, let him be friend or foe to the town.

Dr. Hall closed his door while he worked over the victim of the unexplained shot which probably had saved his own life. Gus Sandiver was ill-favored and morose of visage, forty-five or fifty years of age, narrow-shouldered, extremely thin and tall. His legs were so long that his high-heeled boots with fancy tops—there was a white star stitched into each of them—struck him about midway of his bony shank. There was not bulk enough, together with leg and pantaloon, to fill the boot-tops out and hold them snugly up where they belonged. In consequence of this the leather had sagged down and wrinkled, giving the man a skinny appearance in that region, altogether depraved and mean.

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 In keeping with the frontier fashion of that day, and a day long before, this man wore a huge mustache. It was red, coarse as a horse's mane, in harmony with his tufted eyebrows which gave him a fierce, inexorable, scowling look. The mustache had no spirit to it, but drooped over his mouth, well suited to his generally sulky ensemble. His face was sharp and narrow, his head reptilian, small. He had little more chin than a chicken. It was easy to believe that all the frontier viciousness was compressed into the fellow and reduced to its most virulent tincture by the slow dehydration that had made him stringy muscle and bone.

He lay blinking his red eyes, sullen and full of resentment, not understanding his situation any more than a caged wild eagle comprehends its case. After a little he began to clear out of his daze to the realization that something had happened to him and he had fallen into friendly hands. Outside there was comparative quiet, the dance being dispersed by the interruption. The jerries were not hilarious, for beer was not their liquor. It drowned the soul of a man, they said, before it warmed his heart.

Dr. Hall had not passed a word with the patient, nor attempted to. He had plenty to think of in connection with the ungracious ruffian as he worked rapidly to patch him up securely enough to send him on his way, vicious and unlawful as that way might be.

How to get rid of him, and keep him from falling into the hands of those notable town humorists at the same time, was a question. Hall was determined not to give Larrimore, Kraus, Fergus and the rest of them a chance to play another of their rare jokes at his expense. If that old wind-chafed, whisky-scorched scoundrel in the

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 chair was Gus Sandiver, he would make them a notable prize. Hall paused in the work of making a big white wad out of the stranger's wrist and hand, the strip of gauze drawn tight.

"Look here?" he asked sharply, "are you Gus Sandiver?"

The crippled old villain did not reply. He lay back passively enough for surgical purposes, although the look of ingrained meanness seemed to deepen, his morose, fiery features to take on a more hateful and vindictive droop. He looked mean enough to be a horse-thief, with all the depravity of character Jim Justice had attributed to Gus. The question into his identity appeared to have roused the fellow like a hot poker to his foot. He evidently began to doubt his security, reaching stealthily across his lank body to fumble the empty holster at his side.

Dr. Hall watched the movement out of the corner of his eye as he went on winding gauze, thinking the ungracious old brute would not hesitate, if the weapon were there, to snake it out and shoot him in the back as he worked.

"This is only a temporary dressing," Hall explained as he tore the gauze, making a fork to tie around the bony arm. "If you take it off you'll bleed to death before you go ten miles. You can have somebody else fix it up when you get home."

No acknowledgment by the patient that he understood, no gleam of thankfulness in the hateful red eyes.

The people appeared to be going home, the dance evidently having suffered a setback from which it could not revive. There was a sound of many feet on the platform, and the cinder road between the end of it and the doctor's office.

title: Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/172