Gallaher was in a bad condition, his right foot having been all but severed by a falling rail. Dr. Hall had hoped to pass the operation on to the hospital surgeons at Topeka, and the suffering man, a big-jointed, lanky young fellow, a very steam-shovel of a man, was firmly determined that the foot should not be taken off at all. This fatuous determination had grown so strong in him, encouraged by the foolish counsel of his fellows, that he repelled all the doctor's efforts to alleviate his pain.
These same friends who were leading him on to destruction by their advice, had supplied Gallaher with a quart of whisky, which he had under his pillow, or such of it as he had not swigged and poured on his distressing injury. The air fairly quivered with alcoholic distillations around Gallaher, who declared he felt a great deal easier, and that he would have no ministration nor medicine except that first and last remedy of the jerry for all the woes, physical and mental, that overtake a man.
Red-eyed in his pain, fierce in his ignorant defense of his injured member, Gallaher would hear nothing of an hypodermic injection of morphine to give him a few hours' sleep before the arrival of the fast train from the west, on which Dr. Hall designed to ship him away to Topeka. No, they were not going to throw any such trick as that on him, Gallaher declared, put him to sleep and rob him of his foot for no other reason in the world but to practice and experiment. Let 'em try it on, just let 'em try it on!
The other crips, none of them very serious, had left their cots in the hospital to buzz out like flies at a carrion banquet around the kegs of beer. Gallaher had the dreary place to himself, a lantern swinging from an overhead beam casting a shadowed light as cheerless as his own misery. Dr. Hall sat by him, trying to pacify and assure the unfortunate jerry, whose suffering had kept him sober in spite of the reckless slugs of whisky he had swallowed.
There was no use taking the bottle away from him, for his comrades would give him more; it would be mercy misapplied to attempt the use of the needle. Gallaher's groans and lamentations which had sounded above the noise of the fiddles, had been due, the doctor came to believe after talking with him a while, more to concern over losing his foot than from the pain of his hurt. These men were not sensitive to physical suffering in the degree more kindly nurtured people felt it. The hard order of their lives, the blunting rigor of their toil, made them indifferent to torn flesh and crushed bone. A whimpering man was a subject of ridicule and contempt, a sensitive one, of the deepest scorn. But no man was above moaning, and having a sympathetic chorus to keep him company, at the prospect of losing a limb.
Dr. Hall left Gallaher asleep after more than an hour of friendly and soothing talk. He had won the young man's confidence, all but a little corner of reservation and distrust, by going back to Ireland with him in review of the past, and giving him assurance that his claim against the company for proper compensation would be sustained.
The other patients were still profiting, as they considered it, by the liberal hand of Charley Burnett, when Dr. Hall left Gallaher. He must round the crippled tarriers up, Hall thought, and caution them to come in quietly. He must first leave an order with the night operator for the fast train to stop and pick up the hospital case. Bill Chambers must be found, and told to detail a man to go with the patient to Topeka.
There was a waltz on the boards, the heavy tread of the dancers making the lanterns swing. In the noise of fiddles and feet Dr. Hall crossed the track. He stepped to the platform, the length of the depot between him and the dancers, coming suddenly upon a couple as he rounded the corner on his way to the office door. They were Charley Burnett, host of the evening, and Mary Charles of the train.
They were not making any effort at concealment, standing where the light from the waiting-room lamp shone dimly through a window; there was nothing at all questionable in their close and interested conversation, but Mary started as Dr. Hall passed, drawing back from the conference guiltily, as if she had been caught listening to something she ought not hear. Burnett was imperturbable. He stood pouring his diamonds from hand to hand, probably having sought the light of the window to illuminate his opulent diversion. He nodded to Hall in unconcerned, rather patronizing recognition, and went on pouring his flashing trifles like a man in a field winnowing a handful of wheat.
Dr. Hall would not have given the encounter a second thought if it had not been for Mary's guilty start and confusion. Burnett would be that kind of a man, he thought. He did not like the fellow's bow legs, nor his supercilious, sneering, crooked grin. Mary was a good girl. Her very innocence betrayed her. Burnett had a right to leave her alone.
They were gone when Hall came out; a quadrille was in swing with noise equal to a gang of jerries at work on the ballast with their tamping-bars. Hall walked along the track to avoid the pounding maze, thinking of Mary, and the queer little start and withdrawing, unwarranted alarm in the breast of innocence, yet the very weakness through which innocence always betrays itself when caught putting its foot into some forbidden pool.
Little Jack Ryan rose from the door as Dr. Hall approached his office. Jack excused himself hurriedly, on the plea of no telling what peril the company's property might be in with all that sowing of cigar and cigarette stubs. Dr. Hall was too considerate to watch which way Jack's anxiety directed him, but he grinned as he put his case away in the little closet that gave out a strong scent of germicidal drugs.
Hall put out the lamp after he had disposed of his instruments and arranged the interior of his office, closing up by that act, as it were, the business of the day. He filled his pipe and went outside, walking about on the fringe of the crowd of townsfolk and railroaders who were lending their moral, but not physical, support to the dance. Elizabeth had thought better of it and remained at home. Yes, he said, conclusively, it was better she had not come. It was a rough crowd, but hearty, and Blewitt was making a row again over the restraint of his song. The hour for pick-handles was drawing near.
Satisfied that his social duties had been discharged, and quite easy on the point of his professional ones, Dr. Hall returned to his office, partly closed his front door to screen the light of his own lanterns as well as those illuminating the platform, and streched himself out in his surgical chair for a little relaxation and ease.
He tried to picture what that place and country sorrounding would be like a few years hence, after the railroaders had done their work of establishing the permanent track, tamping it as firmly as the Appian Way for the traffic between the seas to pass over in expedition and comfort; after those pioneers who flocked around the landoffice in flopping hats and patched overalls, gaunt, eager, zealous as crusaders in this fight for freedom and home—what it would be like after they had broken the sod and mellowed the soil until it would receive in kindness and nurture in friendliness the seed from their hopeful hands.
It would not marshal, that array of triumphant husbandmen; it would not take shape, that picture of comfort and prosperity in a land so bleak and unpromising. He had looked with amazement on the poor homes men were building on their sections and quarter-sections between Damascus and Simrall. Few had taken advantage of the one building material the land offered in abundance—the sod beneath their feet. This was due in some measure to their ignorance of the method of construction, but more to their prejudice against that kind of houses, which, to these corn-and-hogs farmers, as Cottrell had called them, were a designation of shiftlessness.
Their minds ran to planks, out of which they built little coops, sides and roofs often of the same material, so frail, so unstable, so temporary in appearance, as to give the impression that a horde of squatters had come to camp there a little while in some speculative design, and that autumn would see them vanish away again, taking their raw little houses with them, never to return.
There were some—and these were not few—too poor to spare the money for planks. These burrowed into hillsides, making holes which they roofed over with poles and sod, heaping earth over all until it seemed an effort to disguise their lodgment, either in craftiness or shame. Stovepipes were thrust out of the rounded roofs of these bank-side dwellings; sometimes there was a tiny window beside the door or, if not a window independent of that opening, a pane or two let into the panels. More often there was not a gleam of glass.
To such homes as these men had brought their wives and children; old wives and young, children puny and strong, adolescent, infantile, just crossing the line of puberty. There were widows with strong sons, wifeless men with long-backed daughters, broken home-forces which must unite in course to rear a new and strange race in this unsheltered land. What would the young be like, nurtured on the hardships of that bleak highland plain, housed in the caves and thin board huts which seemed so pitifully insufficient in the temporary quiescence of a land so cruel that no man remembered a kindness at its threshold?
It eluded him. The picture swirled unformed, as denying in its elusiveness as the blue smoky distances of that unfathomable land. Out of all this fervor of beginning, this eagerness to grapple and overcome, to trample down and make smooth, what would come? What place was there for a man who did not have that dry-lipped, sharp-eyed hunger for the land in his soul? It was unanswerable. Yet it was compelling, a problem that stood with all the charm of mystery drawing one on to remain for its solution. And there was no power could solve it but time. Time alone; the one treasure that man cannot hypothecate, the one endowment to which all men are equal heirs.
This reverie was broken by a strange sense of quietude that had fallen suddenly over the revelers. The silence was as abrupt and complete as if the station agent had reached out of his upstairs window and turned a bowl over the dancers and fiddlers.
Dr. Hall sat up with a startled jerk, a premonitory coldness over him, a sinking feeling of foreboding, as if he had heard the step of a messenger bringing bad news. Before he reached the door he heard a shot, followed by a rush of feet; another shot, a yelp, and a husky voice ordering everybody to clear out of there.
"Scatter to hell out o' here!" the hoarse, flat-edged voice commanded, a shot underscoring the order.
When Dr. Hall looked out, the dancers had scurried from the platform like a flurry of snow before a wind. One man held the deserted boards, a booted, belted figure that towered tall and defiant, a pistol in his hand. Three of the five lanterns hanging along the edge of the platform had been extinguished. As Hall stood in his door looking at this person who had sprung so violently into the happy scene, the ruffian shot out another lantern, yelping in satisfaction as the glass tinkled to the boards.
"I'm a ant-eater, I'm a razor-back!" the long-legged, absurdly solemn-looking shooter announced, his voice hollow as a wind across a bung-hole. "Come and ride me! I've got horns on my backbone—come and ride me!"
Nobody ventured out to meet the challenge, although there was a crunching of many feet on the cinders over among the jerries who had been drinking beer, with a shouting for a rally, the sound of thumping as pick-handles were knocked from the eyes against the rails.
Fearing that his lanterns would draw the next shot, Hall turned them out quickly, dodging outside into the dark immediately, not caring to be made a blind target in that car a second time. The remaining lantern on its stake at the edge of the platform did not reveal anybody in sight but the shooter, who stood with his gun raised, apparently pausing to consider where to pitch his next shot.
At that moment Nance, the station agent, raised a window in his upstairs living quarters and stuck out his foolish head. He could be seen plainly, the light of the last lantern reaching to the broad eaves of the building. The despoiler of this pleasurable hour heard the sash slam as the outraged dignity of the agent put steam in his incautious arm. The visitor turned his gun on Nance, firing two quick shots, with a yelp between them like a hyphen connecting a fiery curse.
Nance disappeared from the window, leaving it open, the sound of glass trickling down to the platform. Whether Nance was hit, Hall did not know, any more than he knew what unmeditated resentment of such murderous villainy sent him in a leap from the shelter of the dark at the corner of his car, and carried him galloping up the platform. At the sound of Hall's charge, the gunner wheeled around from the window to guard his rear.
The fellow came around with a quick spin on his heel, gun slung high, ready to throw it down for a shot. Hall was not more than twenty feet away, his white shirt making him a prominent target. He ducked to rush under the gun, aiming to tackle the fellow low and knock him off his feet.
Hall was not conscious of any danger of his own. His only thought was, as he bent low and shot ahead with all the speed a good toe-hold on the dry boards could give him, that the fool man would kill somebody if he wasn't stopped. Not him; not Andrew Hall, rushing up the platform where it came down to the cinders like a wedge; no thought that the pistol held on a level with the fellow's hat-brim was training down to stop him in his charge. Only that this fool man would kill somebody if he wasn't stopped.
That was the way of it that second when Hall came under the lantern: the gun coming around in a long, easy-going, confident swing, June-bugs bumping the lantern close by the wide hat of the gaunt, long-legged man. Then there was a shot, and the jolt of the collision. The gunman was scooped up in the rush as if a locomotive had hit him, thrown over Hall's shoulder clear of the platform, a humiliated wreck among the ballast between the rails.
In a moment the platform sounded to the rush of feet. Dine Fergus was the first to reach the spot, closely followed by Larrimore, others pressing forward into the light like closing water. Dr. Hall stood a moment where he had come up short after heaving the gunman over his back, running the palm of his hand across his hair like a flat-iron, the outcome of the interference not quite clear to him yet. There was blood on his shirt, blood on the boards where he stood. But he was not conscious of any hurt.
Dine Fergus rushed up, stooped and made a sweeping grab for the intruder's gun, which lay almost at Dr. Hall's feet. Hall came out of his momentary daze, alert and aggressive, and gave Fergus a kick that rolled him a rod.
Jim Justice came puffing up, smashing his way to the inner circle. He stood on the edge of the platform, looking down at the man between the rails.
"Look at him bleed! It's spurtin' out of him like somebody'd knocked out the bung. He'd 'a' got you, Doc, if somebody hadn't took him that crack in the arm!"
"Who was it? Who done it?" eager voices inquired.
"Over there," said Justice, waving his arm vaguely toward the town. "I seen the flash."
Dr. Hall stuck the gun, which was long and heavy, between his body and the waistband of his pantaloons, a very unsatisfactory, insecure and uncomfortable way of carrying a gun, no matter for the piratical precedent which appears to be unquestionable. He had no other place to put the thing; he could as well have carried one of the jerries' picks in his hip pocket. The pistol made a harsh pressure against his ribs when he bent over the wounded man between the rails, lifting his bleeding arm to investigate the seriousness of his hurt.
It was bad enough. Somebody's bullet had smashed one bone and cut the artery. Hall did not stand to argue the man's worth to society, or his worthiness to live under any condition whatever. The rascal's life was leaking out in jets from the wound. A piece of ballast twisted in the fellow's own neckerchief made a tourniquet that checked the flow. When he had made this swift repair, the pressing crowd looking on with interest, he looked up with sudden inquiry into Jim Justice's walrus face.
"Did somebody shoot him?" he asked.
"Did somebody shoot him!" Larrimore repeated in derision. "Hell!"
"It looks like somebody come purty near it," Justice chuckled. "Watch out for him! he's comin' to."
The gunman, who had been lying with his face in the ballast, lifted his head in the first surge of returning senses, shaking it weakly, with the bitter revulsion that shivers the old soak after slinging down a big slug of raw whisky.
"Tastes bad to him," Justice laughed.
"It'll taste worse!" Larrimore threatened. "Comin' here shootin' up this dance!"
"Must 'a' knowed our guns was locked up in that damn baggage-room," somebody growled.
Dr. Hall was helping the object of this public displeasure to come to a sitting posture between the rails, where he weaved weakly, his long legs spread wide. He had dislodged the bandage on his wrist in his efforts to get up. Dr. Hall was clamping the spurting artery with his thumb.
"Give me a hand with him, some of you men," he appealed. "He'll bleed to death unless I get him to my office and fix this arm."
"Jail's the place for that feller," somebody said.
"And that's where he's going," Larrimore declared. "Come on here, men!"
"No, you don't!" Hall said. "You're not going to throw a trick like that twice on me in this town."
He shifted the bleeding arm to his left hand, as if making ready to square off with the old razor-back's gun and defend the remnant of his unworthy life. Jim Justice pushed forward a little, leaning eagerly.
"Look a here, Doc; don't you know who that feller is?" Jim asked, a chuckle of appreciation in his thick voice. "He's old Gus Sandiver, about the last man you'd want to pull a gun for, I guess."