Don't Hang My Friend

by Raffensperger, John;

  I did like he said, but it felt like my head was coming apart.

  “Hurry up, there’s a lecture at the medical school.”

  My new clothes were still a mess. I had to sit down to pull on the pants and Doc did up the buttons on my shirt. It was plumb awful. It was worse, when I found out there wasn’t no money in my pockets and I wouldn’t have nothing to take home to Aunt Alice. The whole night came back, like one of those awful nightmares. “Doc, I’m awful sorry,” That’s what I tried to say, leastwise, but the words got stuck in the back of my throat.

  He didn’t say any more, but we walked all the way to the school. It was all I could do to stand up, what with artillery shells bursting inside my head.

  When we got inside the lecture hall, Doc went off to talk shop with a professor while I found a seat in the third row. I thought medical students would be solemn and pucker-faced like those young gentlemen studying to be preachers. Instead, these boys laughed, joked and shelled peanuts. All at once, they yelled and grabbed a boy down in front and hauled him to the back of the room.

  I nudged the boy next to me. “Do you always have this much fun?”

  He looked surprised. “Why shucks, this ain’t nothin’. You ought to see the fun we have in the anatomy lab. Just last week, some of the boys cut off an ear and put it in their landlady’s soup.”

  I was cheered somewhat by all the tomfoolery but got worried again. “Does the school charge a lot of money?”

  “Why of course, it ain’t cheap. It’s sixty dollars for each term and ten dollars a course. Then it costs five dollars to cut up a body for anatomy. ‘Course, anatomy ain’t so important if you learn the right doses for medicine.”

  I was digesting this news when the professor strode into the hall like a general of the army and gave those boys a look that would have curdled milk. They settled down and paid attention.

  Doctor Senn,a big man with a handlebar mustache and a foreign accent lectured about gunshot wounds of the abdomen and his experimental work on suturing holes in the bowel. The students paid attention when he said that death was caused by poison leaking out of the bowel into the peritoneal cavity. I knew enough anatomy to follow along and pretty well understood even though I was about to die with a pounding headache. He talked for an hour; two students brought in a fair sized hound that was already anesthetized with ether. Doctor Senn pulled a little pistol out of his pocket, took aim at the dog. “Bam”. When that pistol went off, everyone jumped half out of their seats. Doctor. Senn was some showman. I paid close attention when he cut the dog open and sutured holes in the bowel with little silk stitches. When that was over, he went back to lecturing and said that if surgeons would do the operation early, we could save more people with gunshot wounds.

  Doc raised his hand. “Would Lister’s carbolic acid treatment help?”

  Dr. Senn looked thoughtful. “It is important to clean out the poison. Yes Lister’s treatment might help.”

  At least, Doctor. Senn didn’t make fun of Doc. Maybe it was on account of he came from Europe and had up to date ideas.

  Once we got on the train for home, I figured Doc would let loose and give me hell. Instead, he gave me a look, like I was a rotten tomato, and read a book. I slept and felt like I might live when we got home. Aunt Alice said I looked terrible and that big cities were dangerous for boys. She didn’t know the half of it. She made me drink a cup of tea and then I crawled into bed and slept until the rooster crowed.

  When I got to the kitchen, Doc was about finished with his breakfast. He looked at me like I was a piece of dirt. “You made a damn fool of yourself.”

  I hung my head. “Yes sir.”

  “I thought you were old enough to know better than to behave like a drunkard. Did you fool around with that girl?”

  I didn’t know what he meant by fooling around, but I had kissed her tittie.

  “Not much,” I replied.

  “You better hope you don’t come down with a venereal disease.”

  “What kind of disease is that?”

  “Disease that you get from girls like that Dianna. It’s damn lucky you didn’t get killed on the street. After all that hell raising you still want to fight Comanches?”

  “No, sir.”

  I hadn’t thought about Indians or Rachel or much of anything else, except that girl Dianna and the operations at the medical school. Mostly, I was hungry, on account of not having anything stay in my stomach for two days.

  “Are you ready to apologize to Mr. Cromwell and go back to school?”

  I hung my head. “Yes, sir, if he will have me.”

  “I asked one of the professors at Rush if he had heard of treating cancer with periwinkle. He not only had heard of it, but had brought a jar of the paste back from the West Indies. I will send it with Miss Pendelton, when she goes to the Bontrager place.”

  I perked right up and lit into bacon, eggs, hominy and coffee.

  Soonest I finished eating, I went to the bookshelf and looked up venereal disease. I never read anything so scary. There was a disease called gonorrhea that burned something awful when you took a leak and syphilis that gave you the blind staggers and made men go crazy. There wasn’t no cure, you just suffered and suffered until you died. The book made it sound like as if only you touched the wrong girl, you could get a disease. I wasn’t going to ever have anything to do with women. For the next month, I inspected my private parts for signs of infection.

  Mr. Cromwell sent me to see Professor Wilson. I told him I was sorry, but the Professor got so mad his jowls jiggled and spit drooled out his mouth. “You insulted our fine school and upset the young gentlemen. Hold out your hand,” he said.

  He whacked my knuckles with a birch stick ten times so hard my hand bled and hurt something awful. I didn’t cry.

  “You can start back to school when you learn the Latin lessons,” he said.

  I set to work and learned stuff like, “homo solus animal implume bipus”. It didn’t make much sense because everyone knows that men have two feet and don’t have feathers. The way things were going, the professor was right when he said, “in hic valle lacrimarum”. Life was sure getting to be a valley of tears.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  I chopped a pile of wood, curried the horses, mucked out the barn, filled medicine bottles and cleaned the operating room. I even beat rugs for Aunt Alice. After a lot of study and hard work, Mr. Wilson let me back in school. The best news was that Bessie was helping out with Rachel’s mother. One day, about a week after the Chicago trip, she came flying over to our house in her two-wheeled cart with a trotting horse. She was all flushed and happy. “The periwinkle paste helps because the sore is getting smaller.”

  Doc rubbed his chin and looked doubtful. “Bessie, I hope you are right, but It isn’t likely to cure a cancer, it could have been a bad infection and I made a mistaken diagnosis.”

  It didn’t make no difference to me, if the medicine cured her mother it meant I had a chance with Rachel. The next day, a Saturday, I skedaddled out to the livery stable and borrowed a nice little mare. I rode all the way to the Bontrager place, hopin’ to see Rachel, no matter what old man Bontrager said. When I got up to the gate, he and his two oldest boys were coming down the lane. Rachel was in the yard scattering feed for chickens. I waved and called her name. I’m sure she saw me, but then the wagon pulled up by the gate. The old man’s face was twisted and black as sin. He unwound a long cowhide bullwhip and twitched the handle, so the end moved like the tail of a rattlesnake. “What do you want, boy?”

  “I come to see Rachel.”

  “You just turn right around and get on home. Rachel ain’t seeing the likes of you. It’s bad enough with that meddlin’ female,” he said.

  He snapped the whip so my mare did a little sidestepping dance.

  “I was just passing by and wanted to say hello.”

  “Boy, I’ll say it one more time afore I whip you good. Get on out of here. We ain’t got no use for you English.”
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  I turned the horse and went on back to town, feeling more mad than anything else. She would always be my true love.

  I didn’t exactly forget her, but the pain almost went away because Doc got real busy that summer. Hot weather always brought malaria, typhoid and terrible dysentery in babies. We dosed most everyone in the county with quinine and compound tincture of opium. I went along on most calls and gave ether when Doc set broken bones. Bessie helped out some with births, but there weren’t no sparks between them two. She was still helping out with Rachel’s mother.

  One night Mr. Birt and Doc were relaxing with drinks and playing checkers. “Farnum went to Washington for the inauguration,” Mr. Birt said.

  “Is that a fact? That damn banker doesn’t have many friends. He’s buying up land dirt cheap and farmers are moving on west. Folks are complaining again about losing cattle. Do you suppose he is behind that?” Doc asked.

  “Could be, there is rustling again. We thought the vigilantes drove them away, but those varmints are back,” Mr. Birt said. “Are they bothering Isaiah and his folks?” Doc asked. “Not lately,” Mr. Birt said.

  The ice house was the coolest place in town and one day, Billy and I were settin’ among big blocks of ice, chewing the fat about nothin’ in particular.

  “Have you heard the rustler’s are back,” he asked.

  “Yeah, there’s been some talk.”

  “Pa figures that forty or fifty head of cattle have gone missing this summer,” Billy said.

  Billy sucked on an ice chip and had that look in his eye like when he’s schemin’. Those rustlers can’t drive cattle overland without gettin’ caught and they sure ain’t gonna put ‘em on a railroad car. That leaves only one way to get rid of them.”

  “How’s that?”

  “They must barge those cows down the river. The Bixby’s been loggin’ off timber over in the hills and they are making up a log raft over at the head of Horseshoe Lake. They usually raft logs to Peoria. All they gotta do is put a fence around the barge, then load up the cattle and take them to Peoria or even St. Louis. They must do it on a dark night, so’s they get away without being caught.”

  “They are the same sumbitchs who killed Little Ike and busted the windows in Doc’s house. We ain’t ever got even with them,” I said.

  “It won’t hurt none to keep an eye on the river,” Billy said.

  One night it was so hot, I went to bed naked and lay in a pool of sweat, punching the pillow, trying to find a cool spot. The window was wide open, but there wasn’t no breeze, just lots of skeeters, buzzing to keep a feller awake. Sleep was nowhere near, when I heard a whispery sort of voice outside the window. “Tom, Tom, it’s me, Billy.”

  “What you doin’?

  “Let’s go swimming,” Billy said.

  I slipped on an old pair of pants, cut off below the knees, and climbed out the window. The night was dark and the katydids and crickets were loud as anything. An owl hooted and a Poor Will was singing “whip-poor WILL” like he was welcoming us into the night. The saloons had long since closed and the streets were quiet. We skipped along fast enough to make our own breeze and it felt cooler already. We went down the hill and through the willows and cottonwood trees and waded out with the mud squishing through our toes. The big, wide river was flowin’ along, goin’ all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The water was cool and fine, but we sat for a while, just feeling the current with our feet. There wasn’t any moon but the milky-way made a silvery glimmer on the water. You could see the river’s edge, where the trees were black and then the hills beyond until the line of black met the sky. It was so pretty, I wished that Rachel was with me. We would hold hands while lookin’ at all that water and the sky.

  “If someone was to barge cattle down the river without being seen, this would be a good night,” Billy said.

  “That’s a true fact, but what can we do?”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  Billy set off swimming hard and fast, upstream. I eased along, feeling the water cool my skin until the bites stopped itching. Fish jumped and eddies of water gurgled, but mostly it was so quiet you could almost hear the stars. Billy stopped when we were about even with the big swamp. We treaded water for a while and I took a big drink that tasted of the rich soil that washed off the prairies down the cricks. We rested a bit. After a while we swam further upstream without no plan or even anyplace in particular to go. It was enough that the water felt like velvet and we were out there, free as anything. After a while, we stopped swimming and floated on our backs downstream and watched shooting stars streak across the sky. I wondered where they came from and where they landed.

  “Tom, you ever been with a girl, kissin’ and all that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How was it? Didja know what to do?”

  I still didn’t count that time in bed with Mary and I wasn’t too proud of what I done with Dianna in that gentlemen’s club. I gave it some thought before answering.

  “I could have done it with a girl up there in Chicago, ‘cept she was one of those trollops. She knew how and must have done it plenty of times. It’s one of those things, that once you get started, it’s just the natural thing to do. I’d had a lot of that bubbly wine to drink and don’t remember too much of what happened.”

  “What about that blonde haired farm girl?

  “She ain’t that kind. I figured on marrying her, when I get out of school, but her pa had other ideas.”

  “I’d like a girl. Most of the fellows claim they taken one out in the woods. I ain’t had a chance,” Billy said.

  He didn’t say anything more. Maybe he was just as embarrassed as I was. We floated along for a spell until I heard low voices just ahead, over near the channel that led to Horseshoe Lake. I grabbed Billy’s arm and dog-paddled toward the sounds. Next, I heard a bawling, like a calf lookin’ for his mother, and a man’s voice. “Make that damn calf shut up.”

  A big black shadow eased along the shore, coming out from the channel. It looked like a raft or a barge that didn’t have no business being on the river at night. Then another voice came, closer. “Push ‘er out in the current.”

  A half dozen men with poles pushed a big raft with long poles.

  “It’s the rustlers,” Billy said.

  “Let’s beat it,” I whispered.

  “No.”

  We got so close, we hung on to the side of the raft, right next to where the cattle were shuffling and chomping on hay. Billy pinched my arm and pointed with his hand.

  I didn’t see anything special until Billy hauled himself to the back end of the raft where a little steam launch was lashed to the side. It looked like they planned to pole on past the town, then start the engine and make tracks downriver, maybe all the way to Missouri. Billy didn’t have no fear and would get us killed for sure, but he hauled himself up on that steam launch. It was darker’n the inside of a grave, but Billy found the lashings that held the launch on to the raft. “Let’s cut her loose and take the launch over to town. They won’t have no way to git downriver.”

  I hung on, just keeping my head above water, while Billy sawed at the ropes with his Barlow knife.

  The cattle were shifting around, chewin’ hay and out of the dark, a voice said, “Git that engine fired up, we gotta be downriver before daylight.”

  A shadow was coming my way, carrying a push-pole. I figured he’d see Billy for sure. When he came close, I raised up and grabbed the pole and levered him over the side. He went in with a splash and came up yelling that he couldn’t swim. Others came running and while they were getting the fellow out of the river, Billy cut through the last rope. I hung on to the steam launch and used the pole to push away from the raft. Right away a fellow jumped from the raft to the launch. Billy tackled him. They were all tangled together, wrestling and fighting. I come up out of the water in time to see Billy down on his back and the other fellow sittin’ on him with a raised Bowie knife. I kicked the feller’s head and Billy got ahold of
his arm and rolled off the launch, carrying the rustler along. I guess the other fellow couldn’t swim but he got a death grip on Billy’s neck. They went underwater and after a while the big fellow bobbed up. I whacked him on the head. All the fight went out of him and Billy came to the surface, spittin’ water and gaspin’ for air.

  We didn’t have no way to start the engine, but with both of us kicking and paddling we got the launch out in the current. She went along a lot faster than the raft.

  Those men would easy have caught up with us, but none of them knew how to swim. After a while, we hung on and let the current do the work until we were just above the town and then we kicked and paddled until she touched shore just below the ferry landing.

  “Now what?” I asked.

  “I’ll git Pa while you rouse the constable.”

  Tim, the constable, kept watch over the launch with his double barreled shotgun until daylight. Mr. Malone and the vigilantes found the raft and the cattle on a sandbar a couple miles downriver. The gang got clean away except for Mordecai Bixby, who had a broken thigh bone. He had been in the Murphy gang that day, almost two years ago, when Doc shot the dog.

  Old Bixby claimed he was huntin’ coon and didn’t have nothing to do with the raft or the cattle. The vigilantes were mad about getting roused out of bed and were fixin’ to string him up for cattle rustling to set an example.

  “Don’t do it. Wait, he will squeal on the gang,” Mr. Birt said.

  Bixby cried that his leg hurt something fierce, but he started talking when he saw the rope. “Them boys is half ways to Missouri. It won’t do no good to go after them, but they be comin’ back. Ain’t nobody going to fix this broke leg?”

  He sobbed out the words in a whiny tone of voice until they voted to throw him in the clink instead of hanging him. Doc gave him a shot of morphine and then we rigged up splints to straighten out his leg. I was with him when the morphine wore off and he sort of spit out his words. “They got your name, boy, old Murphy ain’t forgot all the trouble you caused. Your life ain’t worth a plugged nickel.”