Jim Justice'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.
Gus Sandiver was safely stretched out in Dr. Hall's chair, with a shot of something under his hide to clear his 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.
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 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.
"Here—we'll sling your arm in that business you wore around your neck," Dr. Hall said to the patient, picking up the bright-figured silk article from the floor. "You'd better cut out the booze till this thing heals, or you're likely to lose your hand. There's no doctor in Simrall they tell me. I'd advise you to hop the first train to Dodge and have it attended to there."
Not a word out of the glum, ill-favored mouth, not a shake of the head, not a shading of good will or gratitude in the savage, slow-blinking eyes. But there was a new alertness about the man which Dr. Hall was not slow to see. He was listening intently to the noise of scraping feet on the hard cinder road before the door.
Hall thought there was a movement as of men collecting at that point. He concluded that they had recovered their guns and their courage, and were waiting for Sandiver to come out. The fellow's pistol lay on a chair over against the wall, hidden by his dusty sombrero, where Hall had thrown them when he followed the jerries in with their burden. Hall went and got them, giving the hat to its owner, retaining the gun, not quite decided what to do with it, instrument fit for only a coward's hand, he thought.
While Hall was deliberating over what to do with the gun, somebody knocked on the door, striking it in rude and insistent demand with something hard, very likely the butt of a gun, the doctor believed. Sandiver sat a little straighter in the chair, moving one foot in his stealthy, sneaking way from the rest, as if he calculated on making a spring, recovering his gun and fighting his way out.
Dr. Hall broke the pistol, throwing the shells with a clatter to the floor. The summons sounded on the door again. Sandiver—Hall was convinced he was nobody else—lifted his other foot with as much caution as if the slightest noise would be fatal to his hopes, and stood.
Hall threw back the spring-bolt and opened the door, which had been reënforced since Old Doc Ross' assault on it and made thick to withstand violence. But he opened it only a little way, not far enough to give them a look into the car, blocking that small opening with his body to guard against a rush.
"We want Sandiver," said a man in front of the crowd.
He was a stranger to Hall, a mild-looking, fatherly sort of man with a beard. He was holding a railroad spike in his hand, with which he evidently had made the alarming thump on the door.
"Are you the sheriff?" Hall inquired.
"No, I ain't," the man answered, as mildly as he appeared, yet with something portentous in the very control of his voice. He gave the instant impression of having been abroad in the night on such business as that before.
"I'll have to ask you to wait a few minutes yet, gentlemen. I'm not quite through with him."
Hall was peering into the crowd, trying to see whether Larrimore and the others were there. The one lantern still hung on the stake beside the platform, fifty or sixty feet away, making a confusion of shadows among them. There appeared to be thirty or forty in the crowd, but Hall was not able to identify many. There was a hat like Larrimore's off a little way, and a dicer that surely belonged to Fergus. Kraus' bear-like figure Hall could not pick out among them.
"He'll do the way he is, Doctor," the spokesman said.
"Just a minute, and I'll be with you," Hall said, politely but decisively, closing the door as he spoke.
Hall turned to his patient, who stood as he had left the chair, his head within a span of the car roof, his meanness intensified by the trap he found himself in, with men clamoring at the door for his life. He did not merit a defensive word, a moment's risk, Hall knew, for he was altogether unworthy, outcast and defiled. But if there was any way to help him get out of the mob's hands he was going to send him off with a whole neck. Not for Gus Sandiver's sake, but for his own.
The jerries could not be called into the case to help him. It was not their affair; it would be ungenerous to ask them to take a risk for this old prairie rattlesnake, who was guilty of no knowing how many atrocious crimes. But hold on a minute. How about Nance? Had that bullet got him at the window? Was this knocking, this subdued, mild-spoken request for Sandiver based on something more than a desire to strike a stunning blow in their petty squabble over the county seat?
They were knocking again, growing impatient, suspicious. Some had gone to the back door; others had ranged along the sides of the car as if to prevent any escape by the windows, which would have been a squeeze for even Sandiver, snaky as he was. Dr. Hall called a cheerful assurance that he would be with them in a minute.
Even if Nance had been killed, he argued, it would not do to pass Sandiver over to the crowd. There would be another inquest, the humorists of the town would swear Sandiver died of the injury he got when Hall heaved him into the track. If Sandiver had shot Nance, then he must go to jail, and he must go in no other company than Dr. Andrew Hall's. If Nance had escaped harm, then Sandiver must be put on his horse and turned loose to get out of town if he could do it.
"Sandiver, you've got yourself in a hell of a fix by coming over here to shoot up this dance," Hall said. "If you've killed the station agent, I can't save you; if you haven't, I'll do the best I can."
Sandiver did not answer. He stood glum and scowling, arm slung across his chest in the gaudy neckerchief, looking around the room for something to lay his hand to, his scalded eyes coming back to the pistol Dr. Hall held in his hand. Long since Old Doc Ross's gun had been taken down from its conspicuous place on the wall, where it had hung waiting for its owner to come and ask for it. It was lying at the bottom of the little closet, and Hall was thankful it was out of sight.
They were growling at the door, threatening to break it down. Hall believed they would hesitate some time before attempting that, knowing he was armed with Sandiver's gun. He tried to make his voice sound cheerful and friendly when he sung out that he was through, and coming.
Still he did not know just what to do, just how to bluff it through. One thing about it: they were not going to hang Sandiver, and then swear he was dead before they strung him up, or that he died on the way to jail.
There was a big sponge in a basin, standing on a box beside the chair, lately used in cleansing Sandiver's wound. Dr. Hall snatched a large bottle from his cupboard, swung around and opened the door. He threw it wide open, the light of his lamp striking the foremost of the crowd so strongly they drew aside out of it, making a little channel the width of the door. Dr. Hall stood before them, the pistol in one hand, the big dark bottle in the other.
Nance, the station agent, was down at the farther end of this little lane. He hopped nimbly aside into the dark. Part of Hall's perplexities cleared away. He stood in the door, Sandiver remaining where he had planted himself after leaving the chair.
"Gentlemen, I'm not going to trust any more committees in this town to take my prisoners to jail," Dr. Hall announced in friendly, calm voice. He stuck the pistol in his waistband as he spoke, nobody but Sandiver knowing it was as harmless as the whiskered citizen's spike.
"We'll see he gets there, all right, Doc," somebody said, lightly assuring, the way one speaks to a child when playing to deceive it. The irrepressible humor of Damascus was beginning to spout.
"Pass him out here, and don't do so damn much stallin' around!" another demanded.
Dr. Hall turned to the basin, poured generously from the big bottle upon the sponge; picked it up, and turned to the door again. They fell away with a scramble before him, his movement was at once so determined, confident and threatening. He faced them, the dripping sponge in his hand.
"Gentlemen, I turned a man over to a crowd of you not so very long ago," he said, "a man by the name of Bud Sandiver. When that man left my hands he wasn't half as badly hurt as this one is, but five or six men swore he dropped dead on the way to the jail door, and he didn't have over fifty feet to go. You thought it was a pretty good joke to swear the killing of that man off on my hands. I tell you, gentlemen, you're not going to put another joke like that over on me to-night. I'll take this man to jail myself. When we step out of this door, you spread out and stay spread."
Dr. Hall made a motion of menace: with the dripping sponge; it was followed by a rasping and scurrying of feet. No mob is valiant; no man is courageous before a mystery. Hall took Gus Sandiver by the arm and marched him out, slamming the office door shut after him, the spring lock shutting up the secret of the big black bottle.
"Go to your horse," Hall whispered.
Fortunately, the way to the horse was the way to jail. The old horse-thief had tied his animal to a telegraph pole behind a screening pile of ties, close by the side of Custer Street. Hall had him in the saddle, the reins thrown around his neck, the unloaded pistol thrust into his undamaged hand, before the bluffed crowd, slowly reassembling a cautious distance behind, gathered what was going on.
A kick of the spurs and Sandiver had a big stack of steel rails between him and the baffled humorists of Damascus. The few shots they chucked in his direction did him no more harm than if they had been fired into the ground. Alone Gus Sandiver had ridden into Damascus, alone he rode out of it. He had not spared his rescuer a word, either a blessing or a curse.
Dr. Hall returned to his office deliberately, the scuffing of feet in the gloom around him like the noise of stalking beasts which lack the courage to spring; opened his door and threw the sponge in the basin, corked the dark bottle and stood it in its place on the shelf. He stood before the open cupboard a moment, his legs spread in his ungainly way, lifting himself to his toes in that silent, self-satisfied flexing of the muscles which seemed so much like the exercise of a caged tiger eager for some contest worthy its untried strength.