There was no organization, aggregation or collection by any name, in the country west of Dodge, as notable as Burnett's Cowboy Band. This band, numbering twenty-five or thirty, had been assembled by Burnett about a year before Dr. Hall's arrival in Damascus, as an expression of his importance which his own tongue and presence seemed insufficient to convey to the public appreciation. The most notable feature of the collection was the total absence of cowboys from the cast.
The leader of the band was the hardware merchant, a small Englishman with a brown-gray beard, whose name was Peters. He blew into a cornet with such spirit as to split the notes sometimes, making them high where they should have been low, but aside from that small fault of technique he was a most admirable musician, a sober man, with a family. He could go right ahead with his tune, afoot or ahorse, making the rest of them blow hard to keep up, and if he finished ahead of them, which he did frequently, it was nobody's business but his own.
That was one of the admirable things about the cowboy band: every fellow in it was so high-minded and independent that each of them pounded and puffed along according to his own gait. Off quite a distance, as one must stand to get the subject of a modern painting, one could identify a tune, or a fragment of a tune, now and then when the band was at practice of an evening in the Woodmen's Hall.
Dine Fergus was the tuba, Larrimore one of the trombones, others of equal consequence filling out the band. Burnett supplied the instruments and cowboy regalia, Peters giving his services as instructor and leader for the honor of the town. The first public appearance of the band away from home had been made at the livestock convention in Wichita the autumn past. Burnett had provided a special car for the trip, with large advertisements of its contents along the sides.
This Sunday afternoon the band was out, expanding its bellows in the public square. There was a stream of music coming down Custer Street that seemed as if the dam had burst as Dr. Hall waded against it on his way to Major Cottrell's sod house, to learn how his patient fared. Hall thought of the noise as a flood, the impetu' osity of it whirling and mixing things as it spread. It was as if orderly music had been turned out to go its way, losing its head in the exuberance of freedom.
The band had on its red neckerchiefs, sombreros, fringed pants, and all the other regulation adornments of romance cowboys, many of them being articles which the slow headed smallwits who rode at the tails of cattle never wore, either at work or at play. Peters, a short man, stood on a box at the head of his double line formation, the base drum at the bottom end. They were just finishing a tune when Hall arrived at the square. He stopped on the edge of the crowd to see how they went about the business of mauling a tune so mercilessly, that being his first sight of the assembly as a whole.
Peters emptied his instrument genteelly, his example followed by all who had metal contrivances which induced condensation. Probably something more than breath got into some of them. It was very likely, indeed. There was a great deal of unscrewing, jiggling of keys, upending, tapping. When all was clear, and everybody set, Peters put his cornet to his lips, parted his mustache with the mouthpiece, this way and that, delicately pursing his lips, showing the red of them under his beard.
Peters set the instrument to his mouth, took it away, looking around with questioning eye. There was a general bracing of feet, a spreading of legs, a settling down firmly for the struggle among the members of the band. Peters put the cornet to his mouth again, and took it away dry and unblown; pursed his lips once more with a tentative inflation, his eyes enlarging under the pressure.
"R-r-raidy!" said Peters, with a warning, portentous sound, the instrument approaching his lips. It was only two inches away from the place when he checked it, inflating his cheeks again in that tentative, testing way.
All was expectation; nobody breathed, the bandmen's chests big with the stored vigor waiting the word to go. Peters gave the bugle end of his cornet a little flip, like the tail of a fowl taking to the air.
"R-r-raidy!" he warned again. "Pla-a-ay!"
To an outsider it did not appear that they made a very good start. In fact, it sounded to Hall as if somebody had jumped the gun. It did not take those whose toe-holds had slipped at the signal long to overtake their competitors, even to forge ahead. Notable among these was the base-drummer, who gained speed as he advanced. He made an amazing recovery.
This drummer was a young man known about town as Frog Lewis, a tall, earnest chap with a long, thin face, and a gulping look about his mouth and throat from which his nickname had come. He finished the tune with a look of great satisfaction, plainly believing himself the winner, in which opinion Dr. Hall enthusiastically concurred. If he hadn't struck a fence or something, he would have been half a mile in the lead if the tune had continued three minutes longer.
The band was warming up to its work in fine style, although in the next piece Frog Lewis appeared to have lost step. He lagged, he labored, he laid on in the wrong place, out of all time or reason apparent to anybody but himself. Dr. Hall retreated, having got an earful that would last him a month. As he turned up the road toward Cottrell's, the piece came to an end, Frog Lewis giving a prodigious single and a quick double beat to close it, in his accustomed triumphant style. It seemed as if he had been lagging on purpose this time for his happy finale, which gave the impression that he had driven the tune into the barn and slammed the door.
Major Cottrell was sitting by the open window, listening to the distant band, Mrs. Cottrell near at hand reading a Leavenworth paper which featured army news. Elizabeth had gone for a ride. The house was insufficient without her. It seemed an old place to-day, dreary in spite of the blue eagerness of the spring afternoon.
Major Cottrell said he was gaining every day. That was due to home-cured dried beef, he declared, which he placed second only to the skill of Dr. Hall. But that skill had been expended in the beginning; science had done all it could do in the first few days. Now it was the turn of dried beef, which the major kept by him at all times, cut in convenient strips for gentlemanly mastication.
They had heard in the sod house of Dr. Hall's adventure with Gus Sandiver the night before. He had taken the proper course, all through, Major Cottrell said.
"As a public official and the chief sponser of this town, I thank you," Major Cottrell said, offering his hand. "We don't want any lynchings in Damascus, nor any rioting of that kind to get us into the papers. On his own account Gus Sandiver wasn't worth the risk you took to save his neck—I'd shoot him as quick as I could pull my gun if I met him in the road—but you did more than save the life of a worthless man. You saved the honor of this town, and every good citizen in it thanks you. You've made friends by it that you'll never lose."
"I've been paid more than I earned then," Hall returned, uncomfortable under the old gentleman's high rating for his rash behavior in an affair that might have had a different ending only for that friendly shot out of the dark.
Did they know? he wondered. There was nothing apparent in their faces, nothing suggested in their unreserved manner. Elizabeth would not be the one to talk. But she would talk to him; he was resolved on that. Elizabeth would talk to him, compelled by his gratitude.
Major Cottrell was not a man to press acknowledgments to the cheapening point. He dropped the subject of Gus Sandiver and the honor of Damascus, turning to railroad news. From there it was a natural step for Hall to the affairs of Charley Burnett, upon whose new company he was curious to have the major's expression.
Hall told of Burnett's endeavor to draw Mrs. Charles into his scheme, of Little Jack Ryan's investment, and what he had heard of the town in general jumping to the new company like freezing people crowding around a fire.
"Yes, everybody's handing Charley their money," Cottrell said, laughing over Hall's comparison. "Maybe they'll be left out in the cold, instead of gettin' their fingers warm in Charley's financial blaze. He was up to see me last night. Oh well, I might as well own up I put a little in his game. Not enough to make me if he wins, nor break me if he loses. I never put all of my pile on any one card in my life, Charley's a puzzle; he's one of these financial sports that bursts out of nowhere and sets the world afire. He's sensational, but I believe he's sound. Did you think of throwin' in with him?"
"No," Hall replied, decisively.
Major Cottrell chuckled, growing grave and sober in a moment, nodding understandingly.
"I can see where Charley would look somewhat risky to a stranger. Easy enough, with his four-flusher front and handful of diamonds. But we know Charley pretty well here—that is, we know him as well as anybody, I guess. We've seen him grow from nothing to two million dollars' worth of cattle in the past four years. When a man does that, with you looking on all the time, it kind of makes you want to get in on it with him when the chance comes along."
"Naturally," Hall said. The man's personality is disagreeable to me. He appears to me just what you've called him—a four-flusher. I'm sorry Jack Ryan's wife didn't break her collar-bone yesterday."
"Yes, it would have been better if he'd kept out of it. I hope that railroad woman keeps clear. Nobody can afford to gamble, except on his surplus. This advice about puttin' all your eggs in one basket might do for a person that's only got one egg. I say if you've got two, put 'em in separate baskets, and see that the baskets are a good ways apart."
"Pretty sound finance, it seems to me," Hall agreed.
"Although I believe Charley's going to come out big," Cottrell said, somewhat hastily, as if to head off any impression to the contrary that might get abroad as having come from him. "He's got unlimited credit in the big Kansas City banks, they're fairly asking him to take their money. It's assurance enough for me when a business has the endorsement of a set of men as shrewd as those Kansas City bankers. I'd put some of them against the sharpest minds of Wall Street, any day."
"One of them told me once that the test of a banker's shrewdness was keeping clear of Wall Street," Hall recalled. "But I haven't seen him in a long time; I don't know whether they've got him yet."
"One mistake Burnett's making is that blame fool band," Cottrell declared with no compromising decisiveness. "It's a disgrace to this town to go haulin' that outfit around the country."
"They may improve," Hall said hopefully. "They appear to have a lot of individual confidence, if not any great amount of cohesion."
"They're as contrary as a crowd of old women when they begin to hammer on a tune. Well, I've got a reply from the state board in this matter of Old Doc Ross. The old rascal is a regular graduate of medicine, registered and solid as a rock. I'd have gambled the other way."
"I'm rather glad to hear of it," Hall said, speaking quite honestly, more honestly than he could have spoken, perhaps, if there had been any element of competition involved.
"Yes, I believe I am, too, to tell the truth about it," Cottrell confessed, laughing over it. "When the heat of vexation with the old scoundrel passes I always feel kind of sorry for him, for it's as these people say here: there's a spark of something good in the old scamp, either a native shrewdness or a professional competency, that leads him right eight times out of ten."
"I saw him as I came up," Hall said, "sober as a lark, shaved and clipped and dressed up respectably. I had to look twice to convince my eyes."
"He lifts his heels like he's skatin' when he's sober and got on a clean white shirt," Major Cottrell said.
"He's a disgusting old villain!" Mrs. Cottrell fired from the flank. "It's a disgrace to the state that he's allowed to practice."
"Now you hear it," Major Cottrell said, nodding to Hall gravely, but with a laugh in his eyes.
"I'm surprised to hear you half-way condoning his disgusting vices," she fired again.
Major Cottrell winked at Hall, with sly understanding, as if to say most of his excusing of Old Doc Ross had been done to provoke her, just to show the visitor what kind of metal was in that family.
"I look for him to take fire one of these nights when he goes to blow out his lamp," he said cheerfully. "Then we'll get some nice portly old gentleman to take his place."
"Portly old gentlemen are out of fashion as physicians," she corrected him, this time the laugh on her side of the field. "We require brains in our doctors instead of—"
"Belly," said Major Cottrell, filling out the hesitant pause.
"Major Cottrell!" she reproved him, blushing to the tips of her ears.
"You don't have to observe those old-maidish niceties when you discuss anatomy before a doctor," Major Cottrell assured her with off-hand ease, pleased to the ribs to see the flash of virtuous delicacy in his wife's face. "Maybe we can induce Doctor Hall to take the old man's place when he blows up. He could do worse—he could do miles worse—than throw in with us here and grow up with the town."
"It would be a hard life, but a full one," she said, looking at Dr. Hall with appeal more pressing than any her tongue could speak. "A doctor in a pioneer place is a missionary."
"Pioneer place!" Major Cottrell discounted the designation for Damascus. "We did the pioneering here twenty years ago. There's nothing to do in this country now but pick up the profits of our hardships."
"There'll be hardship and suffering among these poor people who are crowding in here expecting to farm," she said in prophetic sadness. "I see them drive past going out to their claims, all they possess in one wagon, and not overloaded at that. They're unprepared, they don't realize what's ahead of them."
"There's not much profit for a doctor in them," Major Cottrell said, with the cattleman's hardness for those who had come to displace him of his ancient rights.
"There's the profit of merciful deeds," she returned, correctively.
"A doctor can't live on that in this country," Major Cottrell said gently. "What do you think of the prospect, Doctor?"
"I haven't got down to thinking much about it."
"There'll be telephones strung all over this country in time, like they're getting them in the cities, though I don't suppose a doctor could bring a child into the world by telephone."
"Major Cottrell!"
"Nor operate on a man for this new disease you doctors have invented, this new affix, or suffix—or what is it you call it?"
"Appendicitis, I expect you mean, Major."
"That's the word. It's got an ominous sound."
"Have you had any more calls to the country, Doctor?" Mrs. Cottrell inquired anxiously.
"No, I'm happy to say. They seem to be pretty healthy out there on the prairie."
"They doctor themselves till they're in the last extremity," Major Cottrell said. "I've been among that kind—Missourians, and those people. Every family's got a bottle of salts and calomel, take 'em like sugar. So, you haven't been considering staying with us, Doctor?"
"Not to say seriously."
"It's a great opportunity, a splendid chance."
"I have been told so, Major."
"You don't want to follow a railroad camp all your days, even if you could. You'll have to settle down one of these days and build up a permanent practice. Why not here in Damascus?"
"I don't believe there's any particular reason I could argue against it," Hall admitted.
"Then think it over, will you, Hall? You could buy Ross out for a little of nothing, and you don't need to let the money stop you if that would be in the way."
"Thank you, Major Cottrell, sincerely. I will think about it seriously."
Elizabeth was approaching; Hall could see her from his place near the window, sight more interesting in his eyes, perhaps, than it would have been to the others if they had been situated where they could have seen. He wanted to make it appear, to Elizabeth, like a casual meeting at the gap in the sagging wire fence, which they spoke of at the sod house as the gate.
Major Cottrell shook hands again as Hall rose to leave, with a word about dried beef and appendicitis, advancing the sudden conclusion that men would not be cursed by that ailment if they confined their diet in times of trouble to the strengthening provender of plainsmen-soldiers and pioneers.