by Max Brand
At this point it became difficult for him to continue his observations, for he was scooped up inside the arm of big Tom Keene and carried, all his five feet two of dignity wriggling and writhing, out to Major, where he presently found himself deposited in front of the saddle.
“You infernal rascal,” began the doctor. “I’ll have you tarred and feathered for this. I’ll have you hanged from the highest cottonwood tree in the county. I’ll have you … whoop!”
His voice ascended to a yell of terror as Major, hardly encumbered by the additional burden of the doctor’s spare body, hurtled into the air and cleared the fence, leaving the wrecked vegetable garden in much the same manner as he had entered it.
The doctor had scarcely finished commending Tom’s eternal soul to the care of the Creator when he found himself borne up the road at a terrific speed, and, looking up in terror at the blowing black beard of his captor, he was forcibly reminded of some of those genie who make the enchanting and terrible tales for children. He had not more than accommodated himself to the facts of the case and begun another exposition of the dire calamities that would happen to Tom for his outrage, when the horse was halted with jarring, scraping hoofs in the middle of a cloud of dust, and the doctor was jerked to the ground and his case of instruments and his black official bag thrust into his hands. Above him towered a grim-faced giant.
“Look here,” Tom Keene said. “There’s a little girl in this house that’s got a busted arm. Fix her, and I’ll see that you’re paid for the job. But, if you do a shabby piece of work, I’ll come and knock your house into a pile of shingles and set the place on fire and throw you on top. I mean that. Now get in there and start working.”
The doctor gazed apprehensively upon this thunderer, then turned and fled for the door of the house.
By the time Tom had entered the room where the child lay, he found that the doctor was an infinitely changed man. He had shed his irritation and his offended dignity like a worn-out coat. He was moving about the room with a precision and speed incredible to Tom. In a marvelously short space of time, he saw a narcotic administered to the plucky little sufferer, and then the making of the splints and the applying of the bandages went on apace.
Tom was made as comfortable as possible in a shirt and vest belonging to Mr. Carver. As for the wife, she could not speak to the rescuer without tears. Tom accordingly avoided her.
At length, from the sick room issued the doctor and stood again on the porch, rubbing his hands together and sunning himself in the last warmth of the day while he walked up and down and hummed a little tune under his breath. Mrs. Carver followed him with grateful and rather apprehensive eyes, as though she dreaded the mention of the bills, which was sure to be forthcoming. But the doctor was too self-contented at that particular moment to refer to disagreeable subjects.
“A very pretty fracture,” he announced, “but it’s going to heal … with proper care … as clean as a whistle, Missus Carver. Mind you, I say with proper care. Your husband can’t come storming around the house. Mary’ll have to have quiet for a time. Understand?”
“Yes, Doctor,” Mrs. John Carver murmured.
Kings do not elicit the humble submission that is paid to physicians. “And now,” said the doctor with a strange mixture of amusement and anger as he faced Tom Keene, “I’m going to leave you and walk home.”
Tom followed him a little distance down the road. “I guess,” he said, “that I acted like I was bulldogging a yearling more’n going for the doctor. But, you see, Missus Carver told me to start with that they owed you a bunch of money, and that they had no right to send for you.”
“They hadn’t,” the doctor snappily replied, “but, heigh-ho, I’ve come, and the job’s done. Not a bad job, either.” He was so delighted with the work he had just accomplished that he could not refrain from walking with the springing step of a youth and whistling a bar of an old air. “As for your own actions,” went on the doctor, “I am of a school in medicine that does not keep such a strict eye upon the manner in which a thing is done as upon the fact that it is accomplished. A broken bone is a broken bone, and, though one may put on his splints in one way and another in a different way, the important thing is that the bone be made to knit. Well, sir, you were sent for a doctor. You got him, and you brought him home.” He laughed again, while his good humor amazed Tom. “The way you got me doesn’t really matter.”
“I’ll pay for the …”
But Tom was interrupted by a great-voiced explosion from the doctor. “You’ll pay for nothing!” He paraphrased somewhat clumsily, “What are you to Hecuba or Hecuba to you? No, sir, I’m not the man who’ll be found wanting in charity. Matter of fact, I do three dollars of work for every one I’m paid for. And, if I do such work for others, why not for sweet little Mary Carver. Heaven bless her.”
The heart of the big man warmed to his companion. “You’re a good man,” Tom said, “a mighty good man.”
“Nonsense,” the little fellow said, and thrust out his chest with a great air. “I’m a doctor … that’s all.” He added: “What did I hear Missus Carver telling me about your climb up the well … up the well? Good Lord, sir, what do you mean by telling me that I’m a good man? Nonsense. Tut, tut, tut! You’d pay me for the work, eh? Never in a thousand lifetimes, sir. And who are you?”
“I’m a tramp, more or less,” Tom said frankly. “I go about enjoying life, you might say, in my own way. But I’m sure interested in that little Carver girl.”
“So’s everybody in the county,” said the doctor, “for a braver and a clearer-eyed and a more trusting and gay little body was never born, upon my honor.”
“But from what you said,” Tom went on, “and from the looks of that big house and the buildings around it, her folks ain’t in as good shape as they might be so far as money goes.”
“Money?” exclaimed the doctor. “Why, once they were millionaires, I hear. John Carver’s father was a king in these parts of the world. There was only one strong law, and that was his word. That was John Carver the First. But John Carver the Second is a different story. He started wild as a boy, gambled most of his father’s money away, and then he got married and began to hate his wife because he couldn’t support her. You may have met that type of man here and there? The lowest of the low, in a way. They are cruel to those who are dependent on them, simply because they cannot provide for the dependents. Well, that’s the way with John Carver. You ask me if he is a scoundrel. I say no. You ask me if he is dishonest, I say not to my knowledge. But I’ll say this … that he leads a strange life, with his pocket full of money one month and not a penny the next. But, no matter how much money he gets, never a cent of it goes to the paying of his just debts, confound him!”
Tom took his leave of the physician and set his face toward the Carver house. There, he knew, was a job cut out for him.
Chapter Seven
With the unsavory picture of the Carver household in his mind’s eye, Tom Keene turned back toward the house. As he walked along, he eyed the big, rambling building with a growing interest. Some houses are just so many stones or boards put together, but others have a distinct personality that may be recalled or noted when the form is not in the observer’s eye at all. The house of the Carvers was such a one.
It was built in that period when the mid-Victorian romancers were most in love with the Gothic and the pseudo-Gothic, and everything that tended toward the mysterious and the exciting. Architects in this same period were prone to erect tall houses with as many gables as possible, and with lonely rooms set off in turrets at the corners. In this manner, the house of Carver had been raised. Half the panes of glass in the upper windows were gone, and the elaborate carving that edged the cornice, where the fancy of the workman had led him into the creation of odd monsters, had broken away in sections and fallen to the ground.
In fact, never had Tom Keene seen a house that so adequately ex
pressed a fallen estate. It was large enough to have housed forty. Instead, it did not house four. All the outhouses, as well—barns, sheds of all kinds, which had once been erected on the most princely scale to house horses, to stow away immense quantities of winter food for the cattle, and to cover the machinery needed in the operation of a great estate on which both farming and cattle raising were conducted—all of these buildings showed even greater disrepair than the dwelling. Their backs were broken by time and neglect. Their sides sagged in. Long boards had fallen here and there. Indeed, the farm buildings were in such condition that they were past help. At a glance, even the most ignorant person could tell that it would cost more money and time to repair than it would to rebuild.
A peculiar melancholy invaded the mind of Tom as he considered these details. Floating between him and the fact as he saw it, was an image, like a mirage, of the place as it had once been, when everyone who drove over either hill into view of the Carver house must have slackened the trot of his team to a walk to enjoy the prospect spread before him, and to envy the power and the vast wealth of those who lived behind the shelter of the trees in the great house.
What is so melancholy as the sight of fallen greatness? And what, Tom could not help asking himself, had been the root of the weakness? In what direction had the first Carver built upon sand? But at least this much was true: no matter how utterly the family had fallen, in the person of Mary Carver the line had put forth a lovely blossom before its death.
Such thoughts haunted the steps of Tom as he turned again from the road and walked up the path to the porch. He noticed on either side, what he had not paid heed to before—that this open ground was stubbed over with the stumps of trees. No doubt these were originally planted here to furnish shade, and the improvident present owner had chopped them down to furnish wood for the stove!
In the front hall Mrs. Carver met him, a little flushed, a little large of eye. “I guess you’ll be hungry about this time of day?” she asked him. And there was a timidity about her question that made him look at her again.
“Always carry a pretty good appetite around with me,” Tom answered.
“I …” began Mrs. Carver, and paused. She clasped her hands nervously before her, and her flush died out to a wretched pallor. “There ain’t much to offer you,” she finally managed to say. “I was expecting to have … John … out from town with a lot of things, but he ain’t come yet, and right now there’s hardly …”
“Don’t you go apologizing,” Tom said heartily. “You don’t have to start worrying and cooking to make me happy. Boiled potatoes and boiled pork is a feast for me. Don’t have to be breast of chicken … no ma’am!”
Still she paused. The gloomy thought obtruded itself in Tom’s mind that the woman might be actually begrudging him food.
She was making a great effort, and at length, with her head bowed and her eyes turned to the floor, she was able to say, “I can offer you flapjacks and … and tea.”
And all at once Tom saw things that had been present to his eyes before, but to which he had remained blind. He saw her thinness of face, which made her cheek bones so prominent; he saw the stoop of her hollow shoulders. Above all, he remembered the strange lightness of the body of the girl. But no sooner had the ugly thought presented itself to him than he shut it away. It could not be in this day and age. Men might commit strange and awful crimes, but he had never yet found one fallen so low that he actually allowed his family to suffer for the lack of food.
But the woman was cringing and shrinking before his horrified gaze. It had been worse than the laying on of whips for her to tell him this shameful truth about her husband.
Sweat poured out on the forehead and from the very armpits of Tom Keene. He fell into a hot agony of shame for the whole race of men that had produced the wretch named John Carver.
“I was only joking,” he managed to say. “I couldn’t … I couldn’t stay and … and have supper with you-all, anyways. You see, I got to go on. I’m due right now in town. I got to …”
But she bowed her head and rested her face in her hands. She wept.
It was agony to Tom to watch her. It sent queer pangs of sorrow through him. He was ashamed. He felt as though he had been abashed before a multitude. He stepped to her and laid his quivering hand on her shoulder. Heaven above! How sharply the shoulder bone struck through to the heavy palm of his hand.
“Don’t do that,” Tom said huskily. “Please don’t do that, lady. Look here. I’m coming back … quick.”
“No, no!” she cried. “You don’t mean you’re coming back to … to bring us something? Oh, if I took charity, my husband would be furious with me. He has a terrible temper, and he would lose it if he dreamed that I … You see, he can’t help it because we’re this way. He really doesn’t know …”
Tom Keene ground his teeth. “If I should do anything for you, lady,” he said gently, “nobody in the wide world would ever know about it unless you wanted to tell ’em yourself.”
“You …”
“You just raise up your head and stand on your two feet and forget that you’re afraid, Missus Carver,” he insisted, and he drew her hands away from her face.
“But I never can look you in the eye,” she said miserably. “I never can. After what you’ve done for me … for Mary … for poor John himself … and then to think.” Tears ran down her thin cheeks again, and she wavered a little.
By thunder, thought Tom Keene to himself, she’s plumb weak. She’s pretty near starved. He said aloud, “I’m going to be back not so very much after it’s dark. Will you keep a-smiling till I come? And will you start a-smiling now, lady?”
She managed a miserable smile, obediently, and, with his heart smiting him, Tom turned away and went hurriedly out of the house.
He looked on the world in the glory of the sunset time with a joyless eye. It was a bad world. There was a vast predominance of evil in it, or else this poor woman and her child could never have fallen into this condition.
Throwing himself into the saddle of Major, he sent that glorious animal plunging down the road. And there was revolt in the heart of Tom—there was war in his heart. But, whether he wanted most to help the woman and her child or wring the neck of John Carver, he could not tell.
Chapter Eight
Tom Keene stood in the middle of the village street. The silken black of Major was his background; the big horse towering with head thrown high. On the one hand was the lit entrance to the gambling hall; on the other hand was the bustle of Porterville’s leading saloon, and in the distance, along that crooked street that had first been laid out in all its winding by leisurely cattle who wore the trail to the water hole, the smoke from a score of smokestacks and chimneys wound up into the sunset sky. The windows began to be blocked out in yellow squares as lamps were lit. Porterville was entering upon a peaceful night.
Men were either in their homes or in the hotel a little farther down the street, thinking of supper. Only a scattered few took this odd time of the day to patronize the saloon or Will Jackson’s gambling house, where the cards talk “plain talk that any honest gent can understand.” There was nothing moving in the street other than a thin, blue-white cloud of dust that the wind had lifted up and was rolling along between the houses, puffing it leisurely into varying forms.
How could the village be pleasantly roused to answer the will of Tom and come out here from dining table and saloon bar and gambling machine to listen to his words? The means he adopted were means that he had used before and always with the greatest success. He patted the neck of Major and pointed to the nearest door, the door of Jackson’s.
Major snorted, then walked obediently to the designated house, tapped on the door with his forehoof, and, when it was opened, advanced a half step into the interior. There he maintained his ground, in spite of curses, until he had emitted a long and ringing neigh, after which he withdrew, rearing
back with the agility and balance of a cat. Naturally half of the men in the room came to learn the cause of this strange performance, and they crowded out of the door to see Major step across the street to the big, bearded man who waited there, and who straightway pointed out the saloon.
Whatever game was on, it was well worthwhile stopping to watch such a trained performer at his tricks. They saw Major go to the saloon, thrust the swinging doors open with his nose, and stride half his length into the saloon. Again he neighed, and again, in his retreat, he was followed to the doors by a mass of curious men. Still he was sent on by Tom until he had climbed the front steps of half a dozen houses and neighed inside their doors, and by this time his purpose was accomplished.
Rumors, that will pierce walls of stone, traveled easily among the flimsy shacks of the town and brought man, woman, and child into the dust of the street. Here they saw Major take up his position and saw big Tom Keene swing up into one stirrup, sitting crosswise in the saddle so that he could speak more easily to the gathering crowd. The shaft of light from the open door of Jackson’s fell full upon him. And because they had gathered to see tricks, they stayed even when he began to talk about good will and trust in one another, and charity.
Here, however, they wavered. All the eloquence of Tom could not really avail when there was hanging in the balance against him the fragrance of suppers cooking on a score of stoves. The rear edges of the little crowd began to give back and thin out, and a man who had spent somewhat too much time and money in the saloon cried, “If you got that sort of a lingo, why don’t you wait for Sundays? Expect to waste our time in the middle of the week?”
