CHAPTER TWELVE
Eight years mark vital changes in the individuals who make up the population of a community, but leave little effect upon the community itself. It was so with Rainbow. Arrivals, departures, graying hairs and maturities modified the entity which was Rainbow very little indeed. Eight years! Eight years had passed since the town, being what it was, had driven out Angus Burke, and, continuing to be what it was, Angus was all but forgotten save by the few whose lives were linked by chains of affection with his own.
Dave Wilkins was older, yet it was difficult for those who saw him daily to trace the imprint of the years upon his lean, often melancholy, ironic face. Craig Browning was older, more responsible, had, indeed, become the head of a family, and Mary Trueman, as was inevitable from the first, was his wife. Jethro Canfield was gone, and that severe, family-worshiping, splendid woman who had shared his years lay beside him in that acre of God which knows no distinctions nor castes…. And Lydia, perching in the glamorous doorway of womanhood, waited eagerly for what might befall. Alone she was, a member of Craig Browning’s household, his ward under the last will and testament of Jethro, her grandfather…. Least changed of all with whom this narrative has to deal were Bishwhang and Jake Schwartz….
Craig Browning was seated before his desk reading with concentration which befits a leading member of the bar, a lengthy legal document. Suddenly his ears were assailed by a clamor as of some creature, possessed of many times the usual allotment of arms and legs hurling itself up his stairs with slippings and stumblings and sprawlings. The door burst open and a young man with frightened eyes, with uncut, bristling hair, with inky face that worked with extraordinary emotion, plunged in, shouting:
“Mr. Browning!… Mr. Browning!… He’s took! He’s took!”
“Who’s took, Bishwhang? And what’s he took with?”
“Dave’s took…. He’s clean out of his head, and Jake’s a-holdin’ him…. He’s a-goin’ to die!”
Already, hatless, Craig was on his way to the door. “Come on,” he snapped. “Tell me as we go.”
Bishwhang came panting and sobbing, uttering incoherencies from which Browning gleaned, now and then, a sentence that was intelligible.
“He come into the shop and he says to me, ‘Where is it, Bishwhang?’ and I says, ‘Where’s what?’ and he says, ‘That bar of iron, that hot iron. I kin feel it a-proddin’ into my head, but I can’t find it,’ says he, and then flops over and goes on talkin’ and mutterin’ and thrashin’ around. ‘Who done it?’ says he. ‘’Tain’t right puttin’ a hot iron into a man’s head.’ Jake, he come a-runnin’ and grabs him and holds him and yells for me to git a doctor and you. Out into the street I could hear Dave a-hollerin’, ‘Angus never done it…. He wouldn’t ’a’ done it to me.’”
Bishwhang’s fright was pitiful; he fumbled his calloused hands and whimpered, “He’s goin’ to die. He’s goin’ to die, and what’ll become of all of us then?”
“He’s going to do nothing of the sort,” Craig snapped, sharp in his anxiety. “Brace up. We’re going to need you.”
They turned in at the printing office, and through the partition Craig could hear Wilkins’s voice droning querulously—now and again rising sharp and thin. “Take it off, can‘’t you? What you want to go sticking hot type in my head for? Right there. Lines and lines of it…. You did it—and Angus didn’t stop you. He wasn’t there. He….” Dave lay, propped against a stone, twisting and writhing and struggling in delirium, his head pillowed on the greasy overalls of Jake Schwartz. Doc Knipe knelt by his side striving to force a sedative between his lips—a fantastic figure of a physician in his customary warm weather costume of shirt-sleeves and a high silk hat. “Typhoid,” he snapped. “Should ’a’ been in bed a week ago, the dum fool…. Now he’s in for it…. Here, you, hang onto him while I fix something to quiet him.”
Doc Knipe prepared his hypodermic. “Jerk up his sleeve,” he rasped…. “There, guess that’ll keep him still a bit. Now what’re we goin’ to do with him? Can’t lay here on the floor a couple months.” The doctor’s tone was, as always, belligerent. He seemed to take illness as a personal affront. “He’s goin’ to need nussin’ and care, but where ’n tunket he’s goin’ to git it, I don’t know. A man that hain’t got gumption enough to git married ain’t got any business to git sick.” From choice, perhaps from policy, the doctor spoke the language of his people.
Craig thought of the little room upstairs, dark, uncomfortable, a poor place to be well in and a fatal place to be sick in. “Mary’d do it,” he said to himself, and it was in no effort to persuade himself of the fact that he spoke, but with real belief and confidence. “Doc, can he ride in a carriage as far as my house?”
“Kin if he has to.”
“Take him there, then. Mary would want me to send him.”
“Mary’s a fool,” snapped the doctor. “This ain’t mumps. It’s typhoid—typhoid—and there’s months ahead of him. Don’t go bitin’ off more’n you kin chaw.”
“Dave’s got to be saved.”
“Sure…. ’Tain’t customary, though, to balance a man’s life against ten weeks of discomfort for somebody else.”
“Get a carriage, Bishwhang,” directed Craig, and there the matter ended. Wilkins, burning with fever, twitching, tossing, muttering, was taken to Mary Browning, and Doc Knipe snorted when she said to Craig, “Of course you did right,” and went about her arrangements for the sick man calmly, practically, without the least pretense of fuss or flurry or of doing an unusual thing.
“I’ll nurse him,” cried Lydia Canfield. “I’ll nurse Uncle Dave.”
“You,” said Doc Knipe in his most intolerant manner, “will mind your business and do as you’re told.”
Lydia stood for a moment, her arms stiff and straight at her sides, her hands gripped so that the knuckles showed white, and glared at the doctor’s unconscious back. She had a temper, that young woman, and something of an estimate of her importance in the world. She looked like a furious fairy. Then, quivering with the fury of outraged dignity, she rushed out of the room and down the stairs. On a chair in the hall rested the doctor’s high silk hat—it personified him. To Lydia it was a part of him, to be hurt, humiliated, as he had humiliated her. The sight of it was a crooked finger on the trigger of her temper and she smote it with her palm so that it rolled and bounced across the floor. Vindictively she followed it and crushed it into shapelessness with her foot….
Still at white heat she passed out of the house and marched up the street, cheeks blazing, chin aloft, and passed at intervals without recognizing them, no less than three intimate acquaintances.
Bishwhang and Jake Schwartz had been left standing on the sidewalk in front of the printing office, watching the carriage disappear. They remained as they stood until the sound of its wheels could no longer be heard. It was as though they were manikins from which the springs had been removed, and this was, in a measure true, for Dave Wilkins was the mainspring of each of them.
“He’s a-goin’ to die,” Bishwhang said chokingly.
“Shet up…. Hain’t goin’ to nuther.”
Then, moved by a common impulse, they followed in the wake of the carriage.
“He never knowed me,” said Bishwhang. “He never even knowed who I was.”
“He was out of his head,” said Jake.
“Do folks die of it?”
“Folks die of anythin’ they set their minds to.”
They walked to the house where Dave lay, passed it, turned again like sentinels and continued to trudge to and fro, waiting, waiting.
“Mebby they’ll need us,” said Bishwhang, uttering their common thought, so they held themselves near and ready.
When Lydia emerged after her encounter with the doctor’s hat they followed her eagerly, but she went too swiftly for them, and they resumed their pacing for upwards of an hour when Doctor Knipe, holding ruefully in his hands the remains of his headgear, emerged. Bishwhang and Jake waylaid him at the step of his carriage.
“Look at that,” he snorted. “Smashed…. Good’s new, too. Hain’t owned it more’n ten-twelve year….” He seemed suddenly to realize that he was talking to someone, and, jerking back his head with an odd, intolerant gesture, he snapped out, “Well, what do you want?”
“How is he?” asked Bishwhang.
“Doggone sick…. Likely to be sicker.”
“He—he’s been poorly quite a spell.”
The doctor glared at Bishwhang. “I should say he had been poorly. Some folks never call a doctor till there hain’t work for anybody but an undertaker—and I ain’t such dammed bad company, neither.” With that he climbed into his buggy, snatched the reins from the crotch between whipsocket and dash and clucked to his horse.
“Hain’t he got a chance, Doc?”
“Alive yit, hain’t he? Anybody’s got a chance till he’s dead…. Who’s goin’ to git out the paper while he’s laid up? You two?” Doctor Knipe emitted a crackling syllable of laughter so dry one would not have been surprised to see a cloud of dust arising from his throat. “G’dap!” He shook the reins over his horse’s back and jogged away, bare-headed, coatless, a spectacle of professional dignity which would have shocked many another community—but, withal, the best loved, most implicitly trusted individual in that county.
Bishwhang and Jake resumed their sentry-go.
“Who is goin’ to git out the dum sheet?” Jake asked testily.
“I dunno,” said Bishwhang.
“You’n me kin stick the type, but we can’t write no stuff. Now who ’n hell—”
“It’s got to be got out. There’ll be doctor’s bills and med’cine and sich—and Dave, he hain’t got nothin’ else.”
“Huh,” Jake snorted, “kin you imagine me settin’ down to write up the Methodist ice cream festival?…”
“Here’s that Canfield gal comin’ back,” said Bishwhang, and there was Lydia, the keen edge of her temper dulled by a long walk.
“Evenin’,” said Jake. “We was waitin’ for news about Dave.”
“Why don’t you go in and ask?”
“We—we didn’t want to make no bother,” Bishwhang stammered, “but—if you kin tell ’em—Jake and me—if we kin do anythin’, or anythin’—we’d admire to be told.”
“I’ll go find out about him for you. Wait.” She started through the gate.
“If you kin see him,” Dishwhang said. “If you git a chance to talk to him, jest ask him what in tunket we’re a-goin’ to do. Tell him we’re up a stump. Him bein’ sick, there hain’t nobody to git out the paper…. Kind of ask him what he’d do if he was in our place.”
“And,” said Jake, “if ’tain’t too much trouble, Miss, could you fix it so’s Dave ’ll know me— we was—doggone sorry.”
Presently she returned with her report. “He’s a little quieter, but oh, he’s terribly sick! Mr. Browning said to tell you he—he’d tell Uncle Dave what you said—as soon as he could.”
“Mr. Browning didn’t suggest nothin’ about the paper?”
Lydia shook her head.
“Did it happen he—Dave—was talkin’ about Angus? He was when he got took…. Angus must ’a’ changed, Jake, eh? In eight year he must ’a’ growed, eh, Jake?”
Jake nodded sullenly. Lydia stiffened to attention. “The very thing,” she said. “Write to Angus Burke and have him come home to run the paper. He ought to come. Don’t he owe everything to Uncle Dave?… From his letters—Uncle Dave’s read them to us—he’s capable of it. That’s what you ought to do.” Lydia was immediately enthusiastic.
Jake shook his head. “Dave wouldn’t like it. Angus hain’t through school, and Dave didn’t want him comin’ back here—not to Rainbow. Had his reasons, Dave did, and ’tain’t fer me’n Bishwhang to interfere.”
“But I’d like to see him jest the same,” muttered Bishwhang. It was a wish he had expressed thousands of times during the stretch of years, years during which neither he nor Jake had seen the stolid, unfortunate pariah who had grown to be of such importance in their dull lives. Often they talked of him; always there had been messages for them in Angus’s letters—showing that Angus remembered. But they could not imagine Angus to be almost a man—he was still the same to them—unaltered….
“No, Miss,” said Jake, “we can’t do that.”
It was not like Lydia to argue; not by argument did she carry her points, but rather by swift, surprising action. She turned on her heel and hurried up to her room. There she wrote a letter to Angus Burke, a letter which was the first he had ever received from a person of her sex.
“Angus Burke, Esq.,” she wrote formally, “Dear Sir: Mr. Wilkins is very sick. It is typhoid fever, which is very dangerous and he is very delirious all the time. There is not anybody to do his work on the paper and I think it is your duty,” she underscored “duty,” “to come home, even if you aren’t through school, and keep the paper going. Yours respectfully, Lydia Canfield.”
She waited to consult nobody. Convinced she was right, she went ahead careless of consequences. Such was her way….