The Lady Doc - Caroline Lockhart (ebook reader computer .txt) 📗

this was different. The sneering, cutting insolence came from no ordinary person. It stung her. She thought she detected a slight foreign accent in the carefully articulated words, though the phraseology was distinctly western. The voice was high pitched without effeminacy, soft yet penetrating, polished yet conveying all the meaning of an insult. No Anglo-Saxon could express such mocking contempt by the voice alone—that accomplishment is almost exclusively a gift of the Latins.

She was hot and uncomfortable, conscious that the blood was still in her face, when she heard him scramble to his feet and walk to the back of the wagon. Ever after Dr. Harpe remembered him as she saw him first framed in the white canvas opening of the prairie schooner.

His unusually high-crowned Stetson was pushed to the back of his head, one slender, aristocratic hand rested carelessly upon his hip, a fallen lock of straight, black hair hung nearly to his eyebrows—eyebrows which all but met above a pair of narrow, brilliant eyes. The aquiline nose, the creamy, colorless complexion, the long face with its thin, slightly drooping lips was unmistakably foreign in its type while a loose, silk neck scarf containing the bright colors of the Roman stripe added an alien touch. There was at once high breeding and reckless diablerie in his handsome face.

In the antagonistic moment in which they eyed each other, Dr. Harpe endeavored to recall the something or somebody which his appearance suggested. She groped for it in the dim gallery of youthful memories. What was it? It flashed upon her with the suddenness of a forgotten word. She remembered it plainly now—that treasured, highly colored lithograph of a brigand holding up a coach in a mountain pass! There was in this face the same mocking deviltry; his figure had the same lithe grace; he needed only the big hoop earrings to complete the resemblance.

He removed his hat with a long, sweeping gesture and bowed in exaggerated deference.

"At your service," he murmured.

"There was no need——" she began in a kind of apology.

"Fifty dollars is little enough to pay for the privilege of your skill, madam. Shall it be in advance? Of course; in advance."

She threw out her hand in a gesture of protest, which he ignored.

"Permit me at least to show you that we have it here. I feel sure that you can work with a freer mind if I count it out and lay it where you can see it." He took an odd, foreign purse from the belt of his "chaps" and she noted that it sagged with the weight of its contents.

"Gold," he explained; "nearly new from the Mint. You can have it tested at the bank before you begin—acids or something of the sort, I believe."

She crimsoned with anger, but he went on—

"Fifty dollars! What a very little sum to start the milk of human kindness flowing!"

"I told him he needn't mind—there was no rush—just when it was convenient. He misunderstood me." She found her tongue at last and lied glibly.

The child's foster-father stared at her as though he doubted his own ears. Her very audacity left him speechless.

"There you are, $50 in gold!" He flung the money into her lap. "Old hoss," he laid his hand upon the man's shoulder while his mocking laugh again made her cheeks tingle, "you oughtn't to lie to me like that."

When he had sauntered across the street with his careless, easy stride and disappeared inside the swinging doors of the bar-room of the Terriberry House, Dr. Harpe said brusquely:

"Here, you gotta help me yank this leg straight but, first, I want you to go over to the store and bust up a thin box—something for splints—strips off a fruit case would be best if you can get 'em."

"Haven't you splints?" the man asked in surprise.

"No; I've just come; I haven't got a stock yet and there's no drug store in this jay town. It's on the way but that doesn't help us now. We ought to have plaster of Paris but we haven't. Hurry up—get a move on before it swells any more."

The man did as he was bid, with a look of doubt and uncertainty upon his face.

He returned almost immediately with strips torn from a case of fruit.

"That's good." Dr. Harpe laid them on the bunk with the bandages. She added shortly: "She's going to howl."

"Can't you give her anything?"

"No; I can't give ether by myself. I'm not going to take a chance like that. If she'd die on my hands it'd queer me here on the jump. 'Twon't kill her. She'll probably faint and then it'll be easy. When the muscles relax, hold on to her leg above her knee while I pull."

The man's face turned a ghastly hue as the child screamed and fainted away, nor did the color return as he watched the woman's clumsy fingers, the bungling movements which, unlettered as he was, told him of her inexperience—bungling movements which had not even compensating feminine gentleness.

When the child had revived and Dr. Harpe had finished, the man went outside and leaned against the wheel.

"Are you sure it'll be straight?"

She saw her own misgivings reflected in his face, and it exasperated her.

"What a fool question. Do you think I don't know my business?"

He did not answer, and she turned away.

"Daddy?"

"Yes, Rosie." He was at her side at once.

She lifted her clear eyes to his face.

"I don't like that woman."

"Like her!" he answered slowly. "Like her! Her heart is as black as my hat."

To herself Dr. Harpe was saying:

"Moses! I had to start in on somebody."

It was with relief that she looked through her office window after supper and saw that the wagon was gone from the vacant lot.

"Good riddance!" she muttered. "I wouldn't have that black-eyed devil hanging around this town for money. He's onery enought to do me mischief. I wonder who he was? He might be anything or anybody; a dago duke or a hold-up—or both. Anyway, he's gone, and if I never see him again it'll be soon enough."

She sat down in her office chair and rested her heels on the window sill while her cigarette burned to ashes between her listless fingers. For a time she watched the white light of the June moon grow on the line of dimpled foothills, the myriad odors of spring were in the air and the balmy west wind lifted the hair at her temples as it came through the open window. She felt lonely—inexpressibly lonely. She thought of Alice Freoff and restlessness grew. Downstairs she heard Essie Tisdale's merry laughter and it changed the current of her thoughts.

She had learned her story now and the mystery of her identity had given the little belle of Crowheart an added attraction. Everybody in Crowheart knew her story for that matter; it was one of the stock tales of the country to be repeated to interest strangers.

In the old days when Crowheart was a blacksmith shop and the stamping ground of "Snow-shoe" Brown, whose log cabin hung on the edge of the bench overlooking the stream like a crow's nest in a cottonwood tree, "Snow-shoe" Brown had yelled in vain, one spring day, at a man and woman on the seat of a covered wagon who were preparing to ford the stream at the usual crossing. But the sullen roar of the water drowned his warning that it was swimming depth, and, even while he ran for his horse and uncoiled his saddle rope, the current was sweeping the wagon and the struggling horses down stream. He followed along the bank until the horse's feet came up and the wagon went down, while there floated from the open end, among other things, something that looked to his astonished eyes like a wooden cradle. He threw his rope, and threw again, with the skill which long practice in roping mavericks had given him; and gently, gently, with a success which seemed miraculous even to "Snow-shoe" Brown, he had drawn the bobbing cradle gradually to shore. Inside, a baby smiled up at him with the bluest eyes he ever had seen. There was a picture primer tucked beneath the flannel coverlet and it contained the single clue to her identity. "Esther Tisdale" was written on the fly-leaf with a recent date.

"Snow-shoe" Brown said she was a maverick and unblushingly declared that he claimed all mavericks that he had had his rope on; therefore "Esther Tisdale" belonged to him. He left her in the care of the wife of a cattleman who hoped thereby to purchase immunity from "Snow-shoe's" activities, which he did, though that person rustled elsewhere with renewed energy, since he said he had a family to keep. So she learned to ride and shoot as straight as "Snow-shoe" himself and even as a child gave promise of a winsome, lovely girlhood. The unique relationship ended when her guardian died in his boots in the little cowtown over beyond the Limestone Rim. A hard winter and the inroads of sheep "broke" the cattleman who sold out and moved away, while Esther Tisdale shifted for herself that she might not be a burden. She was nearly twenty now, and, in the democratic community never had felt or been made to feel that her position was subservient or inferior. Therefore when her work was done and she bounded up the stairs to Dr. Harpe's door she felt sure of a welcome.

"It's only Essie Tisdale," she said in her merry voice as she rapped and peered into the room.

"Come in, Essie; I'm lonesome as the deuce!"

It was some time later that Mrs. Terriberry sailing through the corridor in her dressing-sacque and petticoat, with her feet scuffling in Mr. Terriberry's carpet-slippers, had the stone-china water-pitcher dashed from her hand as she turned a corner.

"Why, Essie!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Terriberry!"

"What's the matter?" She looked wonderingly at the girl's crimson face.

"Don't ask me! but don't expect me to be friends with that woman again!"

"Have you had words—have you quarrelled with Dr. Harpe?"

"Yes—yes; we quarrelled! But don't ask me any more! I won't—I can't tell you!" the girl replied fiercely as she rushed on and slammed the door of her room behind her.

In her office, Dr. Harpe was sitting by the window panic-stricken, sick with the fear of the one thing in the world of which she was most afraid, namely, Public Opinion.

She was deaf to the night sounds of the town; to the thick, argumentative voices beneath her window; to the scratched phonograph squeaking an ancient air in the office of the Terriberry House; to the banging of an erratic piano in the saloon two doors above; to the sleepy wails of the butcher's urchin in the tar-paper shack one door below, and to a heap of snarling dogs fighting in the deep, white dust of the street.

She glanced through the window and saw without seeing, the deputy-sheriff escorting an unsteady prisoner down the street followed by a boisterous crowd. In a way she was dimly conscious that there was something familiar in the prisoner's appearance, but the impression was not strong enough to rouse her from her preoccupation, and she turned to walk the floor without being cognizant of the fact that she was walking.

She suddenly threw both hands aloft.

"I've got it!" she cried exultingly. "The very thing to counteract her story. It'll work—it always does—and I know that I can do it!"

In her relief she laughed, a queer, cackling laugh which came strangely from the lips of a woman barely thirty. The laughter was still on her lips when a sound reached her ears which killed it as quickly as it came.

Addio mia bella Napoli, addio, addio!
La tua soave imagine chi mai, chi mai scordar potra!
Del ciel l'auzzurro fulgido, la placida marina,
Qual core non imebria, non bea non bea divolutta!
In tela terra el 'aura favellano d'amore;
Te sola al mio dolore conforto