July was like a branding-iron fresh from the fire thrust down on the country west of Dodge. It was as Little Jack Ryan had said: what had gone before was only a salubrious tickling of the skin compared with this. Dr. Hall's boxcar office would have baked potatoes at any hour of the day between nine and seven, and steamed a pudding during its coolest and most refreshing interval.
Still the old-timers said it was a pleasant summer, and unusually abundant. Rain had come toward the close of June, perking up the withering corn in the long ribbons of sod out on the homesteaders' claims. There was going to be a crop, a sort of starvation crop, to be sure, but enough to rough the animals through the winter and make meal for the tillers of that unresponsive soil.
Things were looking brighter in Damascus as the result of this promised harvest. The lumberman was selling planks and shingles for additions to houses; other merchants were beginning to hear money tinkling in their tills as the settlers emerged from the shadow of their early fears and began to spend their guarded reserves.
For Dr. Hall, things had gone along in about the same rut. There seemed to be no further adventures in the town's program to involve him in its affairs. The citizens, having been unable to agree on either the walking-stick with a gold head, or a loving-cup with his name engraved, had let the matter drop without presenting him with either. Old Doc Ross came down to the boxcar office now and then of an evening, to sit in the long shadow and smoke a cigar, at which times he recounted many humorous, and frequently shady, experiences of his life. He hadn't been drunk for more than six weeks, and was an entertaining and companionable man.
Hall felt the pressure of heat and inactivity wearing on him. He was restless to be away. He was somewhat browner than when he came to Damascus; his hard cheek-bones seemed harder, more capable than ever of withstanding the blows of adversity. He had conformed to the exactions of railroad style, his hair cut short, neck duly shaved. His shirt was a soft gray one such as the jerries wore, a shade finer, to be sure, worn open at the throat without the entangling complications of a necktie, which the wind whipped around and made troublesome unless the ends were tucked into the bosom. He was thinner than when he had walked into the West Plains Hotel the evening of his arrival, quicker, if anything, on foot.
His eyes seemed older than the passing of a few weeks could account for, but they were as disquietingly judicial to Jim Justice as before. There were some, and their numbers were not few, who thought them kindly eyes, especially when Dr. Hall drew down his heavy black brows and narrowed them to bright, glittering points. He seemed then to look into a person's troubles, his sickness and pain, with the assurance that it was going to come out all right.
Hall was sitting in front of his office one afterneon in this mid-July, in that undress array of gray shirt, belted loose trousers and little else, thinking over his situation in that sun-pelted, leafless, unlovely little town. He reviewed how he had come there and stumbled into its affairs; how he had gone on, undesignedly, against any intention or will, knitting himself up with its life and ambitions, thrust forward by some grotesque chance as the chief figure through it all. Now the play was over, the adventures were done. Damascus had achieved its ambition. If there was any virtue in being a county seat, its fortunes were secure.
He had raised up many friends in that unlikely place. Where they had laughed at his way of assurance at the beginning, they came to him now with their sins. That was something; that was considerable, when everything was considered. It made a man swell up a little. Sitting there, his legs stretched wide, he gathered the muscles of his calves, pressed his toes to the ground, trying out the machinery for hoisting himself in his old-time, comfortable way.
Still, he could not see himself in Damascus a year hence, ten years hence, the new generation of prairieborn people growing up around him. A sturdy people they would be; a fast-striding, keen-faced people, with new visions which they would bring to realities, new desires which they would build into the form of utility and live. It would be a great life there among them, sweeping along in the crowding events their fuller lives would bring. Maybe there would be trees in Damascus then, and water works, and lights, and beautiful white houses with green lawns.
But he could not see it so. He could see nothing but an old sad gray sod house with narrow windows, when he looked far away with that dream-cast in his eyes. There it was standing, weathered and tattered and worn, jagged glass in its broken frames, open doors choked by brown tumble-weed, its footpath guttered to a rivulet by rain, as the old buffalo trails were guttered, the feet that traced it far away, as they were far away to-day.
Elizabeth would not come back.
Nance came out of his office into the blue-hot sun, in his oversleeves and green eyeshade, bareheaded, indecisive, looking up and down the track as if he had lost a train. Still looking around in his shadow-pursued way, he advanced toward Dr. Hall, as he commonly came when he had prize-fight news, or something equally important that he had caught from the wire.
"Say, Doc," said Nance, cautiously, like a man feeling ahead with his foot in the dark, "say, have you heard the news?"
"No, I haven't got my finger on the pulse of the world like you. What news is that?"
"Burnett," said Nance, spying around with his timid, distrustful look.
"Burnett?"
"Skipped," said Nance.
"The devil you say!"
"It's been goin' over the wire for an hour, shootin' it out to sheriffs and police all over the country to grab him."
"Is that so? What's he done?"
"The tip's comin' from Kansas City—they say to hold him for fraud. That's what the tip to the sheriffs is. I got in on a press wire a little while ago and copped some of it. He's put over the biggest swindle that ever was worked, it said. Got away with a million or two, cleaned up and skipped, leavin' them Kansas City bankers holdin' the sack."
"Well, it's not so astonishing, after all," Hall said. "I always thought the man was a crook. How did he work it?"
"That's all I got, Doc. A man can't cut in on them press wires too long, you know. If I grab off anything else I'll let you know."
"Thanks, old feller. I guess it's going to jolt them here in Damascus."
"Won't it?" said Nance.
Mrs. Charles appeared in the kitchen door, wagging her head in friendly greeting. She waved her apron vigorously at the flies as she held the screen door open to talk across the track.
"Who won the fight?" she wanted to know, in a pitch unnecessarily loud, considering that her voice had to carry only about forty feet.
"What fight?" Nance countered, in voice equally strong.
"I don't know. Wasn't there no fight? You look like you had prize-fightin' news."
"Better than that," Nance assured her, at the same time piquing her curiosity.
"What's happened?"
"It's on the q.t.," Nance shouted. "I'll come over and put it in your ear, but on the strict q.t. between railroaders, you understand?"
Mrs. Charles nodded her full understanding, and Nance knew she was an old-timer, to be trusted with the state secrets of roadmasters and resident engineers. He went across the rails, glad of the chance to spread his amazing news.
No man ever planted a seed that bore such immediate and alarming fruit as Nance's news brought forth in the kitchen of the boarding-train. Mrs. Charles lifted her arms and yelled. It was not a scream, such as might, and perhaps should, issue from the feminine throat in time of overwhelming stress, but a full-chested, hair-raising, masculine yell. Nance was so amazed by the result of his disclosure that he backed off, hooking his heel on the rail, almost hitting the grit in a posture most undignified for a man of his consequence.
"Oh, m' Ga-hd!" said Mrs. Charles, bursting through the screen doors, standing half way down the steps in her wild perturbation. "I'll kill him! I'll cut his heart out! Oh, my money! Oh, m' Ga-hd!"
"Easy, easy," Nance counseled, standing off a safe distance in the middle of the track. "I didn't know you had any money on him, or dang if I'd 'a' told you."
"Oh, my money, my money!" Mrs. Charles groaned, descending from high pitch to low, a look of utmost misery in her white face and staring eyes.
Hall was surprised to hear this disclosure of her relations with Burnett. He had supposed her caution, together with his advice, had restrained her from putting her money into the fellow's scheme.
"Oh, my girls! Oh, my money!" Mrs. Charles moaned, her voice very low, repeating the words over and over, very disturbing and pathetic to hear.
Annie and Mary were taking the little spell of ease that fell to them in the middle of the afternoon, very likely stretched out on the floor of the commissary car, Hall knew, refreshing themselves with a nap. Mrs. Charles dashed up the steps, moved by a sudden onrush of despair, silent and grim, striding like a man, her hair flying in forty ways.
"Well, what do you think of that?" Nance said, crossing back to where Hall stood looking at the empty kitchen door.
"It looks like he roped her in after all,' Hall replied.
"I didn't know the old dame had anything up on him, or I wouldn't 'a' tipped it off to her. I told her it was on the q.t. too, and listen at her—just listen at her!"
It didn't require any great concentration to hear Mrs. Charles. She was raging around in the train, plainly in a wrathful mood now, railing and accusing and berating, the object of her reproach no matter of speculation for Hall. Mary was catching it, Annie standing between, as the girl's soothing, pacific voice attested, low and pleading, like the note of a violin in a boisterous storm of brass.
Nance heard his instrument sounding his call, insistently, imperiously, as a way-station call always sounds when a despatcher does not get an immediate response. He dashed up the platform to answer it, Mrs. Charles' clamor pursuing him, the first note of denunciation and bitter reproach the news of Burnett's rascality set sounding not only in Damascus, but through three states of the middle country east of Dodge.
Hall was not moved by any great depth of sympathy or pity for Mrs. Charles, for it is against human vanity to raise up either for one who has disregarded one's wise counsel and disinterested advice. Let her howl it out, he thought. Burnett had worked on Mary's dissatisfaction with his flattery, reaching the painfully accumulated savings in that ancient, but effective way. He reserved a humanitarian hope that some portion of the five thousand dollars had been withheld, yet doubted it, from the increasing volume of the widow's lamentations.
It was not his affair; he had done all he could to prevent the loss. Secretly Burnett had wormed into the hoardings, and with equal secrecy Mrs. Charles had yielded to Mary's importunities. Let her howl. Maybe it would do her good. He returned to his book, but was unable to fasten his mind on the theme, Mrs. Charles' sobs and wild outbursts shattering the tranquillity of the heat-burdened day.
Annie came running over presently, woe in her face, imploring the doctor to do something for her mother, who was going crazy over her loss, she said. While Hall knew time was the only doctor that could do Mrs. Charles any good, he took his case and went with Annie.
Mrs. Charles had reached a resolution to start out after Burnett, deaf to the pleas of Mary and the more sensible argument of Annie that she did not know where he was, that nobody knew. When Hall entered the kitchen Mrs. Charles was standing in the middle of the floor, weaving from side to side, restrained by Mary in her preparations for pursuit. She had put her—aac on over her disordered hair, and was holding ber shoes in one hand, her corsets in the other. She was reduced by that time to a sort of dumb determination to go and find Burnett and cut his heart in strings. She had laid out the biggest butcher knife in her kitchen, ready to snatch it up and rush away on her terrible mission of vengeance, which would not have been all sound and fury, indeed, if Burnett had been available to her hand.
Dr. Hall gave her something in a glass that was black and bitter, bad-tasting enough to make her think it had a rectifying effect upon disordered senses whether it possessed that virtue in any degree at all. He influenced her to lie down, but that was such an unusual posture for her by daylight she could not endure it. She was up within an hour, pushing preparations for the evening meal, knowing very well that railroaders must be fed, let fortunes rise and fall as they may.
When the jerries came in for supper Mrs. Charles was calmer. She was going about her business with a wet towel around her head, her eyes red, her face swollen from much weeping. That was a very assuring state, Dr. Hall believed. The tear ducts are the safety valves of the burdened soul. The copious weeper is the one who easiest forgets.
Before that hour the news of Burnett's blow-up had gone over town. The county attorney had been asked to issue a warrant for him by representatives of Kansas City banks. Burnett had not been seen in Damascus for a week or more, nothing unusual in his active life. By the time the warrant was put in the sheriff's hands the spectacular cattleman had a start that was hopeless to overcome.
Gloom was heavy over the boarding-train that evening. Jerries sat along the shady side smoking after-supper pipes, talking in low tones, rolling sympathetic eyes toward the kitchen, nodding grave heads. Herself was in the deep waters of trouble; the jerries' hearts went out to her like life-buoys thrown from a wave-washed deck. But it was also as if these friendly-cast buoys were anchored by lines too short to reach their object, Herself being overboard in a sea so troubled that silent sympathy and spoken cheer alike were ineffectual to lift her head above the waves.
Herself had been robbed, duped, stripped of her hard years' earnings by the most despicable scoundrel that ever operated on earth since the days of the serpent in the garden who wheedled the first frail lady of them all out of man's birthright of ease. Herself had traded off her good gould money for less than the trivial fruit the first woman to attempt barter received. Herself had not come out of the transaction with as much as a prune.
It was nothing to the jerries that Burnett had gone off with a million and a half of dollars borrowed through fraud from Kansas City bankers; with Jim Justice's hard scrapings through a long, close-dealing life; with a bit here, a little there, out of many a poor man's pocket in Damascus; with Little Jack Ryan's savings, and all he could gather by a bold front and alluring representations from everybody that ever called him friend.
All that larger and equally heartless robbery did not move the jerries. They would have passed it lightly, with maybe a laugh at Little Jack Ryan, who was not considered a regular railroad man, but rather a hanger-on at the heels of trainmen and station agent, and other weaklings who never had felt the feel of a shovel in their fists.
They would have admired Burnett a little for his shrewdness, perhaps, if his sly planning and gathering for this big day of defalcation had not involved Herself, bringing her to such misery, such weeping and wailing, and rushing about with hands in her hair as if she would leap out of her door in a frenzy of despair and fling her life away under a train.
Burnett's plan had been so simply dishonest in its intention as to make its success all the more astonishing. He had made a big front, with his cowboy band and handful of diamonds, before the bankers, who are about as gullible as anybody else, it often appears, if played with the right sort of bait. These sharp fellows, who would have given a cold eye to an honest grocer unless he could have piled up convertible securities to twice the amount of the loan desired, had Ient money freely on Burnett's herds.
These herds it was now revealed, were neither as numerous nor as large as had been represented. By quick shifts of cattle from range to range, Burnett had placed as many as three mortgages on a single herd.
All this came out when the young men sent to the range by the bankers, whose suspicions had been roused at last, no man knew how, got together and compared paper and looked at the security. It was the biggest fraud ever put through in the history of the livestock business on the western range. It had been so simply crooked from the very start that the duped bankers connived in the fraud as accomplices after the fact to the extent of trying to smother the news and choke off further revelations, fearing public confidence might weaken and bring them down to ruin.
It was said the bankers knew where Burnett had gone, but were the last people on earth to want him back. They would rather absorb their loss than have their simplicity revealed in the story Burnett could tell.