Golden-rod was blooming when Elizabeth came back. Its plumes along the roadside were dusty and its stature stunted, yet it stood there fringing the gray highway in friendly proximity to passing wheels, being a companionable herb, always crowding closely after man in his trodden ways.
Elizabeth had written frequently while away, postcards, with pictures of distant places on them, sent off in haste as she lighted now and then like a migrating bird. The last of these had come from Montreal, and there had been no answering it, as in the case with many of the rest. Dr. Hall had written a few letters, in leisurely, lightsome, gossipy stride, for which he had been thanked briefly, yet warmly enough for the public eye, in scrappy little scrawls.
In that way Elizabeth had kept up with home news pretty well, but it was an astonishing revelation to her when she and her mother came home that autumn morning when the golden-rod was blooming by the calm Arkansas. There was not much water in the river at that season, it is true, but it was bigger even at that low stage than the Bendemeer, and far more worthy a song.
The roundhouse was finished; it was stabling several road engines that day, grimy young men grooming them with large bunches of greasy waste. Close beside it the new shops were taking form, and up and down Custer Street steam rollers were at work smoothing the first asphalt pavement laid down in the country west of Dodge. Damascus was making the road straight and smooth for Prosperity. It did not want her to stumble on her way to the court house square.
But these were only minor wonders compared with the greater civic and moral improvement that had taken place. Owing to a disagreement on the ethics of bribery with the proprietor of the White Elephant, the county attorney had closed the joint. Its bar was out, its sign obliterated, its swinging doors removed. An active young Jew was putting what he called a racket store in the place. It was neither a music nor hardware store, as the name might imply, but a place where everything for household comfort and feminine adornment was offered at red-letter prices.
The single-barreled sports and ten-cents-ante gamblers were gone, for they belong to a genus that dries up like frogs in a drouth where there is no smell of sour beerkegs at the side-door entrance. Jim Justice had painted the West Plains Hotel and was building a wing to it, in a fair way to recoup the fortune the arch-joker of Damascus had pilfered from him through that incomparable jest.
Hall met the ladies at the train, flanked by Kraus, who had come over with a rig to take them home. Mrs. Charles, from her kitchen door, espied the group as the long passenger train cleared the station. She waved her hand in the high-sign of railroad free-masonry, supplementing it with a hearty hail. Elizabeth, remembering her sustaining kindness in her tragic hour, darted across the rails, up the kitchen steps, embraced and kissed her with a warmth that moved an envious pang in the railroad doctor's breast.
Mrs. Cottrell stood marveling at the change a few weeks had made in her bare and uninteresting town, glowing with the pleasure of justified faith.
"They're leaving to-day!" Elizabeth announced, dashing back again to the station. There was something near to consternation for a personal loss in her disappointed tone. "Isn't it a shame, just when the town's taking a start!"
"Who's leaving, Lizzie?" Mrs. Cottrell asked, mildly astonished at this display of feeling.
"Mrs. Charles and the jerries," Elizabeth replied, regretfully.
"Oh," said Mrs. Cottrell, a bit loftily.
She had not been able to overcome her original prejudice against railroaders, lady railroaders who lived on wheels in particular. In her eyes Mrs. Charles had broken caste in putting her arms around Elizabeth on the court house steps that day. It had been a well-meant, but unwelcome, intrusion across that military line of social superiority which an officer's wife holds as sacred as an altar in a holy place.
"I'm going to run down to say good-by to her and the girls," Elizabeth announced, "just as soon as I help you up with this stuff."
Kraus was standing by, ill-favored, slouch-shouldered, insolently impatient of the delay, the stuff mentioned lying around him knee-deep in the form of bags and bundles.
"Let's be getting on then," Mrs. Cottrell suggested. "Mr. Kraus is about out of patience with our dallying. Shall we see you again, Dr. Hall? or are you going on with these—are you moving, too?"
"Yes, I'm moving," Hall replied, not very warmly, as if confirming heavy news.
"Going to quit us, now we've got a start?" Elizabeth challenged him sharply, as if she questioned his courage, after all. "Why, it's your town, you saved it, you made it what it is. It never would have amounted to a whoop if they'd got hold of the records that day."
"You give me entirely too much credit, Elizabeth," he replied, flushing under her praise. "I'm moving, but I'm not going on with the train. I have other plans."
"We'll always have a deep interest in you, Dr. Hall, for your great loyalty and help to us in our most trying hours," Mrs. Cottrell said. "I wish you to remember that, wherever you go. If it were possible we'd have you up to dinner this evening, and hear your plans for the future. But"—a gesture of disparagement—"there'll be dust a foot deep all over the house!"
"I couldn't think of straining your hospitality to that point," Hall returned. "You'll have enough to do without being burdened by a voracious guest. I'll be pretty busy myself to-day—just grab a bite on the run."
Kraus had put the luggage in the dusty phaëton. He was climbing to his seat now as if he intended driving off without his passengers, apparently groveling in his soul with the humiliation he felt in serving them at all. There are people such as Kraus to be found everywhere in this land of the free and home of the knave, who have no other means of showing their equality save by insolence.
"But where are you going?" Elizabeth inquired, helpless emptiness in her voice. It was as if she had put out her foot to step on a familiar stone and found it gone.
"Maybe I'll see you when you come down to say good-by to Mrs. Charles?" he suggested. "They'll be pulling out in an hour or so. She's going to serve dinner on the new switch."
"I'll lope right back, then," she promised.
"Do," he urged her. "But you'd better hop in, or Kraus will drive off and leave you."
"You'll tell me what your plans are then?" she pressed, lingering a moment on the edge of the platform.
"I'll tell you everything I know," he assured her, with the easy extravagance of one whose treasures did not amount to much.
Elizabeth came hurrying down Custer Street as the work-train engine was coupling to the boarding-cars to pull them out to the switch Bill Chambers had laid to receive them several miles beyond Simrall. Hall was over at the kitchen door, having his parting words with the ladies on wheels. Elizabeth made a spurt of it for the finish, running like a schoolgirl, her knees knocking her skirts, her light feet flung high.
She arrived red and panting from her run, broad-brimmed sombrero in her hand, her hair flying, but triumphant as a winner in a race. She had changed her dress, Hall noticed, for one better designed for walking—a short serge skirt with white waist, which made her look very airy and independent. She had time for only a word with Mrs. Charles and the girls, and a handshake reached up and down from the kitchen door.
Elizabeth and Dr. Hall stood looking after the boarding-train as it pulled away from the town whose prosperity it had nurtured in the days when business was young and uncertain there. Mrs. Charles and her daughters waved from the kitchen door until the train whipped out upon the main line, shutting them from sight.
"Well, they're gone," she said.
"Yes, they're gone."
They started back across the track to the boxcar office, going slowly.
"You'll have nothing to stay for now, of course," she said, not conclusively, but with a tinge of upbraiding to her words.
"Oh, I don't know," he returned flippantly, looking at her with a side-long grin. "What are your designs on the future, if you'll let me ask? Judge Waters tells me the county wants to buy the site where your house stands, to build a union high school."
"Yes. Mother thinks it's the best monument father could have—they'll call it the Cottrell High School—and I agree to it. Is Old Doc Ross gone? I noticed they've moved his office a hundred feet or so from where it used to stand, and are digging a foundation for a building or something there."
"Yes, Ross has gone to Oklahoma. He had his eye on it for some time, he told me. We got to be pretty close friends, after all our bad start."
"You did?"
"Nice old chap when you got to know him—that is, kind of nice in some ways. He hitched up to his fits wagon one evening and drove away. I was rather sorry to see him go."
"Has another doctor taken his place? I didn't see any name on his office."
"Yes, another doctor bought him out."
"Who?"
"I don't think he amounts to much," he replied evasively.
"But who is he? What's his name?"
"I wish I had a chair to offer you," he said, as they drew up under the canvas awning that Little Jack Ryan had stretched, "but I haven't. The one I had was borrowed from Mrs. Charles."
"I'm only going to stay a minute—it doesn't matter. So somebody bought Old Doc Ross out? I've always hoped it would be you. Have you met him?"
"Why, no; no, I can't say that I ever have met him."
"I always hoped you'd see your chance here—it was coming all the time. I saw it a long way off. Didn't I tell you?"
"Yes, Elizabeth, you told me. You said I'd have to go out after it with a gun, and I told you that wasn't my style."
"You'd better have done that than let it get away," she reproved him. "Who grabbed it? What's the new doctor's name?"
"Fellow by the name of Hall," he replied, looking slyly at her across his nose.
"Good boy! good boy!" Elizabeth applauded, swung off her feet by the unexpected news.
She held out her hand to congratulate him on his bare-handed capture of a man's chance, fleet game that galloped so swiftly across that changing country west of Dodge.
Dr. Hall held her eager warm hand a moment, smiling down on her in paternal, indulgent kindness. He was pretty well satisfied with himself just then, as he had not counted on the pleasure of making a revelation to Elizabeth. Kraus would have told them on the way out, he had thought, putting some tag of disparagement to the news in his cross-grained, intolerant way.
But it was news to Elizabeth; pure, first-hand news. He swelled in his satisfaction of that fact, rather than his accomplishment that made it possible, bending his flexible, silent soles, wrinkling his nicely polished shoes as he hoisted himself like one of those monstrous freaks who go up in jerks and lower their stature in jolts, sometimes seen in a circus side-show.
"And you're just moving up-town, you're not going away, you're not the railroad doctor any more?"
"Yes, I'm still the railroad doctor, but that's only incidental to being the Damascus doctor. That hole you saw them scraping out in the square is for the foundation of my hospital. It's going to have thirty beds."
"Fine business!" said Elizabeth, glowing like a sunflower.
"I'm to take care of all the railroad business on the division west of Dodge. I'm going to make a little green park around the building, and plant some cottonwood trees.
"I couldn't see you leaving," she said gently.
"And I tried to make myself believe, perversely, you'd never come back. You'll be building when you sell your house?"
"We've been planning quite a while on a site near Judge Waters' place."
"I remembered your earnestness when you said this was home, but there seemed so little, at times, for anybody to come back to here. I said you never would come; but I planned in the expectation that you would."
"You know what it is now that takes hold of you and twists around you and ties your heart here, like that little yellow weed the children call love-vine. It was born in me, but it gets everybody worth having that stays around in this country a while."
"There may be some subtle, romantic thing like that, Elizabeth, but I think what got me in the end was nothing but a laugh."
"Don't be foolish," said Elizabeth, lifting her eyes in mild correction of what she thought untimely levity.
"Not at all," he denied. "They laughed at me when I first came here, and kept it up the deeper this love-vine business of yours wound round me and tied me up in the town's troubles. Town's troubles! They weren't the town's troubles after I mixed in them. They stuck to me like tar and feathers, they became solely and peculiarly mine. I didn't like that side-stepping of responsibility in the first case. It struck me like a fish thrown in my face, but when they turned around in the end and laughed longer and louder at themselves than they'd ever laughed at me, I began to thaw out and grin with them. That was a spirit I hadn't given them credit for; it was a nerve I could admire.
"You mean the Burnett joke that started with Little Jack Ryan? Well, you can search me! I couldn't see anything funny in that."
"Of course not, being away. I couldn't convey the subtle humor of the situation in a letter. You had to be on the spot to get the flavor of that joke."
"And a grin's got to be greater than a gun in this country west of Dodge," Elizabeth said. "Well, I don't care how you won out or were won, I'm glad you're going to stay. I wish I were a doctor, or a nurse, so I could help you with the hospital."
"There's a place for you, Elizabeth," he said, his stature growing two full inches, his chest distended by a long inspiration as he balanced on his toes a moment, straining as if to see over the white-blotched hills across the Arkansas, where his wise, kindly eyes were fixed. "There is a perfect place for you, Elizabeth. That was included in the plan before I began to build; that was the very foundation of it all."
The end