Mrs. Charles shrank away from the door, white and unnerved as if she had trodden on a snake. Dr. Hall stepped in front of her with protective intention, expecting to see the notorious Dr. Ross, of whom everybody appeared to have such deep-seated fear, looming up before him as big as a white horse.
There was a spare small man, in remarkably disproportionate coat, standing about half way between the boxcar, of which Dr. Hall had taken possession that afternoon, and the railroad station, looking around as if undecided whether to turn off to one hand or the other, or keep going on straight ahead.
This man was arrayed in boots with bronzed-leather tops, such as cowboys of that period made the vogue on the range, with spurs to his heels, as if he had just dismounted from his horse. His black frock coat struck almost to the tops of the boots, showing a span of yellow trousers between. The fellow was topped off by a broad-brimmed hat with high round crown, which had been white or cream-colored once, but now was drab and dingy, as if the wearer had ridden many trips to market on top of cattle trains.
"Do you mean that little old horse-marine standing there?" Dr. Hall inquired, turning a surprised face towards Mrs. Charles.
"My Ga-hd!" said she, in that catchy, intaking way that railroad ladies of her station always have pronounced the name of deity when in tremor of great fear. "He's lookin' for you!"
"I guess he'll not have much trouble finding me," Dr. Hall replied.
He surveyed curiously the long-coated figure standing near the end of the station platform. Old Doc Ross looked like a man who had just got up from a heavy sleep, rising from the very spot where he stood. He moved hishead this way and that, slowly, like a man in a cloud of doubt, standing entirely still, the wind flapping the skirts of his coat around his legs. He was a man past the south gate of life, his dark beard streaked with gray.
"He'll kill you!" Mrs. Charles panted, palpitating in her terror like a trapped rabbit. "He killed men down in Dodge—I know he killed men down in Dodge—he swears he'll kill any doctor that tries to settle here!"
"Never mind," Hall soothed her, his hand on her shoulder, the spark of a smile in his calm, wise eyes. "I don't believe he's half as dangerous as he sounds. Til go and see what he wants."
"No, no! Don't you go!" she begged, making a quick clutch at his arm to hold him back.
"Sure I'm going," he replied, releasing her hand, holding it a moment as if to charge her with a little of his own steady confidence. "What would the railroad men think of me, hiding out from a little old rooster like that!"
"Wait a minute," she requested hurriedly, making a dash behind the little counter. "Here—take this gun—you've not got any on you—take this gun! When you hit the ground, you shoot! Don't wait for him to start it—you shoot!"
Hall took the pistol, looking at it curiously, as if she had offered some rare thing for his examination.
"No," he said, handing it back, "I think I'd be better off without it. Thank you, just the same."
He swung out of the car door, his long legs being sufficient without the ladder, and struck straight across to his office as if unconscious of both the presence and identity of Old Doc Ross. At the sound of Hall's feet on the cinders, Ross turned, fixing him with malignant, inflamed eyes. There was only the length of Hall's shadow between them, and it was not much longer at that hour of the day than the substance.
Ross did not challenge him; Hall went on to his door. There he stopped, looking at the end of the car as if figuring on the best place to cut a stovepipe hole, or tack up a bill of some kind, or even hang a doctor's sign. There was a movement of heels in the cinders behind him. Hall turned.
"Are you the splay-footed reptile from the slime of hades that calls himself a doctor?" Old Doc Ross inquired, his voice rough and uncertain as if he spoke out of the fog of a heavy sleep.
"I not only call myself a doctor, but I am a doctor," Hall replied calmly. "But my ticket didn't read from the place you mention, if that's what you want to know."
"Don't try to get smart with me, you half-boiled squab, or by the gods I'll cut the heart out of you, by the gods!"
Ross parted the skirts of his long coat to show the handle of a sheathed knife on one hand, the butt of a gun on the other.
"You don't know me, you never heard of Old Doc Ross. I'm brimstone, I'm croton oil, I'm hell-fire and oil of mustard! I'm red pepper, by the gods!"
"Kind of a hot prescription, ain't you?" said Hall, smiling in a tolerant way, as he might have smiled at the efforts of somebody honestly bent on amusing him, whose efforts were outlandish and uncouth.
Ross was not very steady on his legs. This fact, taken together with the little gang of spectators hanging off a hundred feet or so up the street, was sufficient proof for Hall that this seedy, vile old fellow had been roused out of his alcoholic stupor to put on an afternoon's entertainment for the town. The crowd of expectant onlookers was growing; the portly figure of Jim Justice was prominent on the front line.
Hall flared up against this public eagerness to see him humbled. Not satisfied with having unloaded a sneaking, cowardly murder on him only a few hours before, they had put him up now for a public spectacle. They had gone to work immediately with their ice water and coffee to rouse this hairy little old tarantula from his drunken sleep, knowing very well how to do it in the shortest way by the experimentations of the past. Jim Justice, who had seemed friendly enough last night, was now the moving spirit of this diversion, it appeared.
Hall looked up from this momentary cogitation, to see Ross coming nearer, holding his coat spread to show the weapons in his belt. The blustering old scoundrel could not have been more than two or three inches above five feet, Hall estimated. It was impossible for him to associate any thought of danger with this man, strutting before him like some battered old rooster with wings outspread.
Ross' hat was pulled down to the bridge of his nose, his red eyes glaring in vaporous hostility out of the shadow. His face was streaked where the restoring ice water had cut channels through the grime; his little snub nose was red as a haw among the tangle of his beard.
"I'm red pepper, I'm lye!" he declared, with a certain kind of burned-out, depraved pride. "When I light on a wolf's hide water won't wash me off—I burn him to the guts, I eat through him gristle and bone! What're you doin' in my town, tryin' to sneak in and eat my practice out from under me, you hell-branded hyena? You've got mud on your belly, you sneak so close to the ground! What're you doin' here in my town, I say!"
"Maybe I didn't know it was your town," Hall replied, feeling very cheap for passing words with the offensive old buzzard on any kind of terms.
"You know it now, you sore-eyed wolf!"
"I've not got any designs on your practice in this town, Doctor Ross. I'm the railroad physician, my territory doesn't extend past this boxcar."
"I'm the railroad doctor, I've never resigned my appointment," Ross declared. "You can't sneak in here and carry off your false pretenses on this town."
Hall felt the annoyance of his situation keenly. The gang up the street was increasing every moment; Mrs. Charles and her daughters were watching from their kitchen door; the station agent was looking and listening with his head out of his bay window, passing comment on the show with his wife, stationed at a window of their living-quarters upstairs. Hall wanted to spoil their entertainment. If he could get Ross inside, and talk it over with him quietly, he believed the old barbarian might be placated.
"This is no place for gentlemen to discuss their differences," Hall said, trying to appear frank and equal, although it was like lowering himself to the level of a hog. "Come inside, Dr. Ross; we'll talk it over in private."
"No, I'll not go in! I'll not breathe the same air with a spotted polecat like you! You'll stand right here before me and take your orders, by the gods!"
The gang came edging down the street, hesitatingly, with tentative feet put out like men trying doubtful ice, consumed by eagerness to hear both sides of it, yet held in restraint by the caution of experience. Fireworks might begin any moment, a bullet might come spinning in the wild course that bullets commonly take in a public fray, and crack the bone of some voter's leg.
Jim Justice, well to the front, was near enough now to see that Dr. Hall was not bulging anywhere with a hidden gun. He had not believed from the first that this man would descend to the common level by sticking a gun in his pocket in preparation for his inevitable reckoning with Old Doc Ross. Take a man with nickel-plated, judicial eyes like his and he'd trust to his bare-handed sufficiency through any kind of a scrape. The delight would be all the keener to see him stretch his long legs and gallop down the track toward Dodge, Old Doc Ross popping hot pills after him in his well-known, handy style.
Jim led on confidently after confirming his belief that Dr. Hall didn't have a gun stuck around on him somewhere. The others came after him like cattle trailing back some alarming scent, heads up, ready to stampede. They were ready to break for cover at the first shot from anybody's gun but Old Doc Ross's.
"I'm mean!" Old Doc Ross declared, his voice hoarse and strained like a camp-meeting preacher's. "I was raised on catamount livers, I drink ox gall by the pint! No man can come into my town and set up opposition to me. I've got a graveyard full of 'em that tried it."
Dr. Hall took a step toward him, Ross drawing back with a nimble leap.
"Don't approach me, or by the gods!" Ross threw his hand to his gun, looking every bit as mean as his self-proclaimed reputation.
"I wasn't going to touch you, Dr. Ross; I only wanted to talk to you, not for the entertainment of that bunch of loafers. I don't want to jerk your damn town from under you—I wouldn't have it as a gift. I'm the railroad doctor, and I'm here to stay as long as the company wants me. You keep on your side of the town and I'll stay on mine—unless I have business on yours. I'm not after your patients. I wouldn't touch 'em if you offered them to me on a hot shovel."
"There's just one way you can stay in this town," Ross declared loudly, in blustering contrast with Hall's low-modulated words, "and that's to buy my practice. I put it to every starved-out wildcat of your breed that strays into this town smellin' for something to grab away from me; I put it up on the block before 'em, fair and square. My practice in this town's worth fifteen hundred dollars. You can hand me over the cash money for it, or you can hit the grit. Them's your orders. Put 'em in your craw and grind 'em."
"I wouldn't give you fifteen cents for everything you own, past, present and future prospects," Dr. Hall replied, loud enough to be heard by the deafest one in the crowd. "If you don't like my company in this town, the road's open for you to leave. It's a cinch I'm not going."
"By the gods!" Ross fumed, so wrathful over this bold defiance he seemed to stand there and chew his words. "By the eternal gods! if you're hangin' around this town in the morning, I'll let daylight through you!"
"Now I guess that's about all for you, old duck," Hall said.
"It ain't half, you lean-bellied whizzer! I'm red pepper, I'm concentrated lye! Whenever I touch a wolf's hide I take the hair off, I burn him to the holler, I scorch him to the melts! If you're sneakin' around here at nine o'clock to-morrow morning, by the eternal gods! I'll make a smoke behind you they can see from here to Dodge."
"You poor old soak!" Hall said, more in compassion than scorn, "You couldn't bluff a crow. When you're sober and sensible—if you ever get that way—come around and talk to me."
Hall had no feeling for this self-made rival but half-pitying contempt. That there was any danger in so much bluster, such loud declamation for the benefit of those who had groomed him for his act, was not even in his thought. He turned his back to Old Doc Ross, went into his boxcar office and closed the door after him, to let the old villain see how seriously his bombast was appraised.
Old Doc Ross was not in any mind to have it that way. He began to prance around in the cinders after trying the door and finding it locked. He raged along the side of the car to the other end, tried that door with no better success; came storming back to the more public end, where he stood commanding the interloper to come out and take his orders.
Dr. Hall sat in his untried surgical chair, greatly annoyed, not a little disturbed by a growing belief that Ross might be more dangerous in that clouded borderland between drunkenness and sobriety, than he appeared. He had nothing but a surgical knife to defend himself with in case the old scoundrel should break in, as he was threatening now in loud voice to do.
Hall was considering his situation with a cold feeling of apprehension, recalling Mrs. Charles' unfeigned concern. He regretted coming in. That was a bad move; it would look like dodging to the gang in the street, and it had worked on Old Doc Ross like a retreat before a hesitant dog. He was looking through the open door in the partition toward the exit in the farther end, thinking of going out that way, when Old Doc Ross began drilling bullets through the front door.
The surgical chair stood in the middle of the floor, in direct line of the bullets which were splintering through the thin planks of the door. Hall jumped over to the wall, where he stood trying to make himself flat, thinking that was a poor place for a man to be shut in, with a red-eyed old soak pegging away at his coop before an appreciative crowd.
"Come out and take your orders!" Ross yelled. Then a splintering crash, the roar of the gun, a little pause. "Come out and take your orders!" The bullets smacked the partition, going on through as if there was nothing in the way.
It was a trying situation for the new railroad doctor, pressing his shoulder-blades against the wall, hoping a bullet might not be deflected in passing through the door, twist over and bite him in that inglorious predicament. He had not been afraid when they were shooting at him in the square, but this was different. It was so different there was no comparison at all.
There was a break in the assault. Hall listened, sweating in suspense, hoping the old scoundrel would go away. But he was only loading his gun. When he opened up again it was without any shouting, two quick shots which sent the doorknob rattling to the floor. And there was Old Doc Ross, holding the door open with one hand, the other shoving his pistol in, leaning with a cautious, inquiring look, as if he did not know what to expect.
"Come out and take your orders!" he growled, hoarser than ever from his yelling. "I ain't goin' to kill you right now."
The gang had come down to the railroad, no doubt disappointed in its turning out a one-sided show. They had seen Old Doc Ross perform before. The proper curtain to this show would have been the long-legged young doctor fading out in the distance down the track. They edged up a little when they saw Dr. Hall come out, Old Doc Ross backing away from the door.
"You're to do the listenin' and me the talkin'," said Ross. "Stand there."
Before he got his mouth shut on the last word, Old Doc Ross was sidewinding under an open-handed swipe to the side of the head that fairly set his whiskers on fire. He slammed up against the end of the car, where Dr. Hall laid hold of him with rough hands, wrenched the gun away from him, doubled him ingloriously across his knee and stripped him of his holster and knife.
Then the assembled voters of Damascus saw the young doctor fold back the long coat-tails of his notorious competitor, and apply a spanking to his obscene old carcass such as a grown man never had laid on him before in the memory of those who watched. Old Doc Ross took the punishment with hoarse outbursts of blasphemous bellowing, with kickings of the heels, squirmings and twistings, all as ineffectual as the struggles of an infant across the maternal knee.
When Dr. Hall felt that the humiliating chastisement had gone far enough, he upended Old Doc Ross, planted him squarely before the crowd, held him steady by the back of the neck, and gave him a sound and solid kick. It sent the old ruffian off with such speed that his short legs were not equal to the pace. He fell, sliding his nose through the cinders, bringing up at the very feet of Jim Justice in a cloud of dust.
Dr. Hall turned around, as from some ordinary job, such as throwing a cat out of the door, picked up Old Doc Ross's formidable weapons, went into his boxcar office and kicked the bullet-splintered door shut in the faces of the gang that had come down to the railroad to see the thing played out to quite a different end. From the door of the kitchen across the track, Dr. Hall heard a loud burst of unrestrained, appreciative laughter.