Major Cottrell 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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?"
"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 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 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."
"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 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 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 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 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.