West of Dodge/Chapter 16
Jim Justice looked in at the boxcar office as he was passing, he said, after the west-bound train had gone on its way to California. He found Dr. Hall comfortably seated in his surgical chair, the floor around him strewn with newspapers, the small doings of Damascus forgotten in the news of that other division of the nation east of Dodge.
Jim was dressed in his formal Sunday clothes, which appeared that morning to be largely a big-chested white shirt without a collar, the neckband of it clasped and locked as securely as the section boss' tool-house door by an onyx-ornamented arrangement with a spring top. He wore no coat, but a vest that was a considerable garment in its own right, being of green velvet, elaborately dressed with buttons of some metallic substance resembling zinc. Straps of strong suspenders were displayed with assurance below the vest, attesting that Jim's mournful, large-legged trousers were there to stay.
When Jim stepped, a movement of something stiff and tubular, like a joint of stovepipe, could be noted inside his trouser legs below the knees. Like a true, old-fashioned Missouri gentleman, Jim wore boots, hiding the tops of them away in this manner. He prided himself on his boots, and his way of concealing the tops of them under his pantaloons, feeling distinguished and superior in his peculiar habit in a country where men tucked the bottoms of their trousers out of sight within their boots as if shame attended the display.
There once was a politician in Missouri who wore his boots in this fashion, hiding their tops away like a scandal. He walked through office after office in that state on no other virtue than his boots. Wearing boots when and where other men wore shoes made him famous in his day. He died at last in Washington, whither his boots had carried him, his nose in the public crib as the seventeenth assistant secretary of something, his boots on his feet. Justice had unbounded admiration for that man, whom he resembled in a way and was aware of it. If boots had made one man famous, why shouldn't they do as much for two?
Jim's feet were small, his boots tight over the insteps and wrinkled elegantly around the ankles; his trousers were long, rolled up in several turns as if he kept a quantity of cloth by him for an emergency. Over all he wore a smoky-dun hat that once had been white, with a broad brim and high, round crown.
This hat was not the happiest touch that Jim could have given his ensemble. Under it his bulging jowls and drowned-looking, slovenly mustache were not at their best, nature having assembled his features for a headpiece of a different sort. A cap with ear-muffs, Dr. Hall thought, looking at his visitor's portly figure in the door.
"No," Jim declined, when Dr. Hall offered him the chair, "I'll set over here in the door. I don't see how you can set there and take your ease in that chair, Doc. I'll be busted if I could. I'd be thinkin' all the time somebody was goin' to make a grab for one of my teeth. Well, I reckon docterin' hardens a man. I've heard said it does."
"Yes, doctors and hotel men have a hard name," Hall agreed.
"Maybe a hotel man ain't as hard as his name sometimes," Jim said. "Take me: some of these people in this town think I'd drill the fillin's out of a man's teeth for a hotel bill, and here I've been down here this morning tryin' to give my blamed hotel away to a widder woman."
"You talk like she wouldn't take it."
"She wouldn't. That's the joke of it; she wouldn't."
"What's the occasion for all this liberality? Not going to quit us, are you?"
"If I could make that boardin'-train widder see money when it's spread out in her lap before her eyes, I would. I offered her the hotel as a gift, free gratis, if she'd buy the furnishin's. No; don't know nothing about a standin'-still boardin' house, she says."
"And that's a pretty good reason for letting it alone, too. If you can't make money out of it, how do you expect anybody else to?"
"Things is due to pick up in this town when the railroad makes this a division point and puts in a roundhouse and shops. Farley was tellin' me a few days ago it's all settled, provided we win the county seat in the election, and it's a cinch we will. It seems the company's made a deal to give it to Simrall if they beat us, but that was only to quiet 'em down, Farley says. They ain't got a chance in a thousand of beatin' us."
"Yes, Farley was telling me the same thing the other day. He says the company has been pestered and worried by county seat towns, and aspirants for county seat honors, all the way across Kansas. So they compromise the difficulty on promising what favors there are to be handed out to the winner where they have a contest on, like you have here. Queer situation, it seems to me."
"Not so danged funny as it might look to a one-eyed man. We've got our investments laid out in this town, and if we lose the county seat we'll bust. But we're not goin' to lose, and that's a cinch. This town'll be full of lay-over trainmen and shop mechanics when the company makes it a division point. That woman knows railroaders, she knows how to give 'em what they want. I thought I'd give her the first shot at it, but she wouldn't take a gift out of your hand if you wrapped it up in a silk hankachief."
"If you can see all that prosperity looming up, why not stay on and make your own fortune out of the hotel?"
"Well, Doc," Jim said confidentially, "I've closed out my cattle interests and sold my ranch. The hotel it's been a kind of a side-line with me, not enough in it to keep a man that's used to hittin' my gait busy. And that's the way it stands."
"I hope you did well," Hall said perfunctorily, in the way a man speaks when he has no interest in another's affairs.
"Yes, I think I made a purty good deal. I throwed in with Charley Burnett in his new company—he's makin' a company out of it now, you know."
"No, I didn't," said Hall, his interest growing lively.
"Yes, Charley's lettin' a few of his friends in with him. He's been makin' more money than any one man needs."
"I hope he'll keep it up—for the sake of his friends."
"Charley ain't got started on his way yet. He's goin' to be one of the biggest men in this country, he's goin' to wring the tails of some of them Kansas City sharpers that's been layin' down the law to us cattlemen out here in this country west of Dodge the past five or six years. Charley's the feller that's goin' to show 'em cattlemen can stand on their own legs, and make their own terms when it comes to loans and commissions, I'm here to say."
"I don't know," Hall said abstractedly; "I never knew their methods." He wondered how much of this confidence in Burnett was justified; whether it was founded on what he had accomplished, or the front he made with his handful of diamonds and his bluff. "So you took stock in the new company, instead of cash, for your ranch and cattle, did you?"
"It's better than dollar for dollar," Justice declared with such force one might have thought his security had been questioned. "I'll double on it between now and fall if I want to turn it loose."
"I wish you all kinds of luck," Hall said, but not with the honest warmth of unreserved faith.
"It ain't luck,'it's know-how," Jim said, full of confidence to the neck. "That's why I want to let loose of that blame hotel. Time for a feller that's worked all his life as hard as I have to pull in to the bank and take a rest. If I could git shut of my hotel I'd go back east and settle down."
"Back to Missouri, heh?"
"No, I wouldn't aim to go clear back east. I guess Dodge'd be fur enough for me. I used to be there in the old days. Guess the town'd be kind of quiet to me now, everything shut up. Made me think of it last night when that old raw-backed Gus tried to pull off some of the old-time religion. He might 'a' got you, too, if that dang little 'Lisabeth hadn't took a crack at him when he was swingin' down on you."
"Elizabeth? Why, it couldn't have been Elizabeth, Jim. She wasn't here."
Hall spoke with the calm certainty of one who had his data right. If there was any feeling evident in his manner it was one of mild amusement at Jim, who appeared to have replaced mystery with certainty since last night, in his determination to make Elizabeth fit the reputation he had given her.
"Who else?" Jim wanted to know, a large challenge in his tone. "Who else is there in this town, or anywhere around here, could stand off that fur and crack a man through the arm the first shot? And do it by lantern light, too!"
"I don't know about that," Hall admitted, still unmoved, "but I know she wasn't here. She promised me to ride down and look on a while, but I guess she changed her mind."
"She was right here, all right," Jim said, entirely sure of himself. "I seen her over on the edge of the crowd by them rails, settin' on her horse as plain as that pile of kegs. You was tinkerin' around with that Irishman in your hospital over there."
"Maybe she was here then, but she'd gone when I came back. I looked all around for her and couldn't find her."
"She loped back when she heard that shootin'," Jim said positively. The sound of shootin' 's the same to that girl as a brass band to a kid."
"Have you ever seen her in any shooting scrapes, or is this just hearsay?"
Hall was severe. He frowned like a cross-examining lawyer as he bored Justice with a challenging look.
"I wasn't right there, but I was in town. That was four or five years ago."
"Why, she wasn't anything but a kid four or five years ago."
"She was wild when she was young. She was brought up wild, and I guess she always will be wild."
"Was that the time she shot the cigar?"
"That was the time," Jim said, nodding soberly. "She come to the post office one day wearin' a pair of them straddle-leggid women's britches—you know the kind I mean, the kind that looks like they're all one piece till they straddle a horse, then they look like two women."
"Divided skirts, I think they call them, Jim. A very sensible arrangement for riding, I think."
"I wouldn't feel right if any relation of mine was to come out in public with 'em on, Doc. I guess that's what the feller thought when he made a remark as she went in the post office. She let that crack go by, but when the same feller got off something funny when she come out, she spun around on her heel and shot the see-gar out of his mouth as purty as you could 'a' knocked it out with your hand."
"He was lucky she didn't shoot his darned head off. I think he got about what was coming to him."
"I ain't sayin' he didn't, Doc. I don't approve passin' remarks about the women-folks when they go by, no matter if they do put on things that provoke men to say something. I won't stand for it, not a second. I'd boot a man clean to the middle of the street if he was to shoot his mouth off in the hearin' of any lady that passed my place, I don't care if she had pants up to her knees."
"That's the spirit!" Hall applauded.
"But I ain't sayin' at the same time I approve of 'em puttin' on britches, wide or narrer. But all the women-folks in this country do it now," Jim sighed, shaking his head for the delicacy of the ladies west of Dodge. "I seen a woman—she was a young woman, too, and purty, purty as a peach—in here the other day wearin' overhauls, a pair of plain, blue-drillin' man's overhauls! She was drivin' a span of mules, handlin' 'em as good as I ever seen a man pull a gee-string over a jinny in my life."
"One of these newcomers, I suppose. I think she was a very sensible woman."
"Did you see her?" Jim inquired, in a tone at once depreciating and challenging, as if he questioned the right to approve her on a mere matter of report.
"No; I wish I had."
"I don't know how men as you take 'em feels when they see a woman steppin' around that way, but I know I felt like I wanted to sneak off. A woman with britches on always makes me think she's got something missin' behind, like a horse with a docked tail. I was so ashamed for that woman I felt ashamed of myself."
"You're altogether too modest," Hall laughed. "But how did that little shooting scrape of Elizabeth's come out? Did the old major go gunning for the smart guy?"
"No. No, the old man didn't take no more notice of it than if she'd shot a rabbit. He brought that girl up to take care of herself, and knew she could do it, I guess. He never would 'a' been able to overtake the feller, anyhow. He was a cow-puncher from up north of here somewhere, in with some cattle to load. He drawed his time and lit out inside of thirty minutes. I never heard of anybody else gittin' fresh with that girl since then. They seem to kind of pass the word along."
"Very good," Hall approved.
"Yes, that made a name and a fame for 'Lisabeth out here west of Dodge."
"Was that the only wild scrape you ever heard of her being mixed up in?"
"The only shootin' scrape I ever heard of her bein' in. But she's rairin' to mix up in 'em every time she hears a gun pop. I've seen that girl come a ridin' in here with a gang of cow-punchers off the range when the old man was in the cattle business, whoopin' and hollerin' as loud as any of 'em, racin' 'em down Custer Street to the depot and back to the square, kickin' up dust till you'd think a cyclone'd struck town. What do you call that if it ain't wild?"
"Youthful spirits, I'd say. So you think she pegged old Gus through the arm last night, do you, Jim?"
"I'd nearly bet a dime it was her," Jim replied, with something of his native insolence, so contemptuously shown in the first days of Hall's dealings with him, carefully suppressed under a sham of familiar friendliness lately, which Hall accepted for what it was worth.
"Maybe you're right," Hall acceded, thinking it best to let the question stand for answer from another source.
Jim was not inclined to let go of a thing that gave him so much pleasure. He went over the ground of last night's disturbance again, with a nod or a word now and then from Hall, which sufficed very well to keep him going. Jim was about as good a one-sided talker as ever came out of his loquacious state. One thing suggested another to him, which made his conversation as sprangling as a big raindrop on a rock.
"Whoever did the shooting under the impression that I was in danger might as well have saved the ammunition, Jim," Hall said at last, tired of hearing the endless fellow harp on the subject. "As I told Burnett a little while ago, Sandiver fired the last shot in his gun at Nance."
"He did?" said Jim, incredulity and disappointment comically mingled in his voice, in the astonishment of his belligerent features.
"Sure. I played safe. I stood in the dark and counted his shots, then rushed him. He didn't have any more chance to hurt me than a rabbit."
"You did?" said Jim, his countenance falling, the small look about him of a man who had been sold.
"There the shells are, right where they fell when I broke his gun to make sure it didn't have a load in it before I opened the door to speak to you fellows. I didn't want to have a loaded gun around me, I wasn't out to hurt anybody."
Jim was a little more curious, if not entirely so skeptical, than Burnett had been. He went in and picked up the shells, collecting them in his palm, where he stirred them with his stubby finger as if mixing some dose of destruction for an enemy.
"I reckon them's them," he said.
"Yes, I'm no kind of a hero, and I'm not in debt to anybody in Damascus for my life."
"Hum-m-m," said Jim, moving the shells around with his finger like a farmer looking over a sample of seed-corn, "Well, if these is them, how did old Gus come to slip one rim-fire in his gun?" Jim held up a shell, a look of stern accusation in his eyes.
"Why, I don't know," Hall replied, a feeling over him far different from the curiosity he attempted to feign. "Did he?"
"No, he never!" Jim declared. "Counted the shots! You never counted no shots. I saw Gus slippin' shells in his gun a minute before he took that crack at Nance—pity he didn't hit him, too!"
"What's the difference?" Hall inquired, taking the shell in question from Jim, looking at it with interest wholly genuine, no pretense in that phase of it at all.
Jim ignored the foolish question, the answer to it being plain to anybody who had the sense of touch.
"It might 'a' went off, I guess it could 'a' went off," speculatively, "but I wouldn't like to risk a rim-fire goin' off in a center-fire gun if I was out a gunnin' for somebody, and I'll nearly bet four bits Gus Sandiver wouldn't, either."
"But what's the difference?" Hall insisted, plainly honest in his perplexity over this technical nicety in ammunition.
Jim looked at him with his big eyebrows drawn threateningly, his face a fighting red above the snowfield of his big white shirt.
"Are you ignorant, or just a darn fool?" he asked. "Center-fire ca'tridges's got a cap in the end—look a-here."
"Is that so?" said Hall, reaching for the rest of the shells.
"Yes, that's so," tartly, with a scornful look for such a hollow piece of trickery. "You wasn't in no danger, you ain't under no favor to nobody for savin' you from gittin' a forty-four between the eyes! Where's that loaded shell?"
"You can search me," said Hall, making it as a disclaimer, rather than an offer which might have embarrassed him a little if Jim had accepted.
Jim's manner began to soften, the combative stiffness to relax, as he unkinked his eyebrows and pulled in his chin. He snorted as if he had dust in his nose, turning it off into a chuckle, a gleam of humor in his small, hog eyes.
"Well, Doc, I ain't a blamin' you for tryin' to make yourself look little where most men'd bust a hamestring to look big. Most men'd 'a' throwed in a few loaded shells in place of an empty one, to make a full house, but any man that knows a gun from a turnip'd 'a' throwed in the same kind of shells."
"That's funny," said Hall, red to the core, it seemed to him, he was so furiously confused.
Jim had some kind of a remote, dim feeling of sympathy for this painful mortification, but he wasn't quite ready to let the young man off.
"It wouldn't 'a' been a bad joke, neither, if you could 'a' got away with it, Doc. But I don't see why you want to pretend you wasn't in no danger when you was."
"Suppose we let it pass," Hall suggested, making it almost an appeal, looking up suddenly from his confusion over the shells.
"Sure," Jim agreed heartily. "I admired your grit when you butted into that feller and h'isted like a ingin hittin' a bull. But I'll be derned if I know yit whuther you're simple, or a plain derned fool."
"You'd just as well stop trying to figure out, Jim. Nobody ever could do it."
"Well, you got 'em, you got 'em when you opened that door and come out with nothin' but a sponge full of something to stand off forty or fifty men. I tell you, Doc, that got 'em! Some of them fellers's sayin' this morning it wasn't nothing but a bluff, but if it was a bluff it was a dang good one."
"Thanks," said Hall, not insensible to the praise. It came in such relief of his late embarrassment that he felt himself soaring a little. He tiptoed and strutted, as if about to take off for a flight over Damascus and view it from the heights of a perfectly complacent egotism.
"But say, Doc, honest now: what was that stuff you had on that sponge?"
"That? That was psychology." Gravely, all his confusion gone, meeting Jim eye to eye.
"Si—whichery?"
"Psychology."
"That must be something new, I never heard of it in my time. Strong, heh?"
"One of the most dangerous things ever discovered."
"What does it do to a feller, Doc?"
"A little of it in either the ear or the eye has been known to make a man as crazy as a bat."
"Well, I'll be jiggered!" said Jim.
Jim was so eager to get back to the hotel and report success on his previously declared intention of getting out of Dr. Hall what he had poured on the sponge, that he appeared abrupt almost to displeasure. He hurried off with an excuse about dinner, repeating over and over the name of the potent thing that went into a man's eye or ear and drove him mad.
Dr. Hall stood a little while, contemplating the empty cartridges in his hand. Presently he opened the closet door and took out Old Doc Ross's gun, slipped the rim-fire cartridge that had brought confusion on him into an empty chamber, tossed the weapon back again, wise in the humiliating discovery that something more than length and diameter is wanting to make pistol cartridges alike.
Foolish of him, he thought. In his great concern to hold himself free of obligation to anybody in Damascus, in case last night's unkown champion should prove to be one of the boys, as Burnett had said, he had only succeeded in giving them another laugh at his expense. For Elizabeth's eyes he had another cartridge, one that matched in every way the others from Gus Sandiver's gun, except for a plug of gray lead in the end. It was the one that had been under Gus Sandiver's hammer when the unknown shooter's bullet stung the old horse-thief in the wrist.