The Lady Doc by Caroline Lockhart (best english novels for beginners TXT) 📖

had not been conducive to an appreciation of scenery during the journey past.

As she drew a deep breath of the thin, stimulating air, the tension lessened on her strained nerves. She looked back at the interminable miles over which she had come, the miles which lay between her and the nightmare of disgrace and failure she had left, and then at the new, untried field before her. The light of new hope shone in her handsome hazel eyes, and there was fresh life in her step as she picked up her suitcase and started across the railroad track toward the town.

"Emma Harpe ... St. Louis," she wrote boldly upon the bethumbed register of the Terriberry House.

The loungers in the office studied her signature earnestly but it told them nothing of that which they most wished to know—her business. She might be selling books upon the instalment plan: she might be peddling skin-food warranted to restore their weather-beaten complexions to the texture of a baby's: she might be a new inmate for the dance hall. Anything was possible in Crowheart.

She was the object of interested glances as she ate her supper in the long dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past in conjecturing the future.

The clatter of dishes ceased after a time and with the darkness came the sound of many voices in the hall below. There was laughter and much scurrying to and fro. Then she heard the explanatory tuning of a violin and finally a loud and masterful voice urging the selection of partners for a quadrille. Whoops of exuberance, shrill feminine laughter, and jocose personalities shouted across the room followed. Then, simultaneous with a burst of music, the scuffling of sliding soles and stamping heels told her that the dance was on.

The jubilant shriek of the violin, the lively twang of a guitar, the "boom! boom" of a drum marking time, the stentorian voice of the master of ceremonies, reached her plainly as she lay staring at the stars through the single window of her room. She liked the sounds; they were cheerful; they helped to shut out the dying face of Alice Freoff and to dull the pitiless voice of the coroner. She found herself keeping time with her foot to the music below.

An hour passed with no diminution of the hilarity downstairs and having no desire to sleep she still lay with her lamp unlighted. While she listened her ear caught a sound which had no part in the gayety below. It came faintly at first, then louder as a smothered sob became a sharp intake of breath.

Dr. Harpe sat up and listened intently. The sound was close, apparently at the head of the stairs. She was not mistaken, a woman was crying—so she opened the door.

A crouching figure on the top step shrank farther into the shadow.

"Is that you crying?"

Another sob was the answer.

"What ails you? Come in here."

While she struck a match to light the lamp the girl obeyed mechanically.

Dr. Harpe shoved a chair toward her with her foot.

"Now what's the trouble?" she demanded half humorously. "Are you a wall-flower or is your beau dancing with another girl?"

There was a rush of tears which the girl covered her face with her hands to hide.

"Huh—I hit it, did I?"

While she wept softly, Dr. Harpe inspected her with deliberation. She was tall and awkward, with long, flat feet, and a wide face with high cheek bones that was Scandinavian in its type. Her straight hair was the drab shade which flaxen hair becomes before it darkens, and her large mouth had a solemn, unsmiling droop. Her best feature was her brown, melancholy, imaginative eyes. She looked like the American-born daughter of Swedish or Norwegian emigrants and her large-knuckled hands, too, bespoke the peasant strain.

"Quit it, Niobe, and tell me your name."

The girl raised her tearful eyes.

"Kunkel—Augusta Kunkel."

"Oh, German?"

The girl nodded.

"Well, Miss Kunkel"—she suppressed a smile—"tell me your troubles and perhaps you'll feel better."

More tears was the girl's reply.

"Look here"—there was impatience in her voice—"there's no man worth bawling over."

"But—but——" wept the girl, "he said he'd marry me!"

"Isn't he going to?"

"I don't know—he's going away in a few days and he won't talk any more about it. He's waltzed every waltz to-night with Essie Tisdale and has not danced once with me."

"So? And who's Essie Tisdale?"

"She's the waitress here."

"Downstairs? In this hotel?"

Augusta Kunkel nodded.

"I don't blame him," Dr. Harpe replied bluntly, "I saw her at supper. She's a peach!"

"She's the belle of Crowheart," admitted the girl reluctantly.

"And who is he? What's his name?"

The girl hesitated but as though yielding to a stronger will than her own, she whimpered:

"Symes—Andy P. Symes."

"Why don't you let Andy P. Symes go if he wants to? He isn't the only man in Crowheart, is he?"

"But he promised!" The girl wrung her hands convulsively. "He promised sure!"

A look of quick suspicion flashed across Dr. Harpe's face.

"He promised—oh, I see!"

She arose and closed the door.

The interview was interrupted by a bounding step upon the stairs and a little tap upon the door, and when it was opened the belle of Crowheart stood flushed and radiant on the threshold.

"We want you to come down," she said in her vivacious, friendly voice. "It must be lonely for you up here, and Mr. Symes—he's giving the dance, you know—he sent me up to ask you." She caught sight of the girl's tear-stained face and stepped quickly into the room. "Why, Gussie." She laid her arm about her shoulder. "What's the matter?"

Augusta Kunkel drew away with frank hostility in her brown eyes and answered:

"Nothing's the matter—I'm tired, that's all."

Though she flushed at the rebuff, she murmured gently: "I'm sorry, Gussie." Turning to Dr. Harpe, she urged persuasively:

"Please come down. We're having the best time ever!"

Dr. Harpe hesitated, for she thought of Alice Freoff, but the violin was shrieking enticingly and the voice of the master of ceremonies in alluring command floated up the stairway:

"Choose your partners for a waltz, gents!"

She jerked her head at Augusta Kunkel.

"Come along—don't sit up here and mope."

Andy P. Symes, waiting in the hall below, was a little puzzled by the intentness of the newcomer's gaze as she descended the stairs, but at the bottom he extended a huge hand:

"I'm glad you decided to join us, Miss——"

"Harpe—Doctor Emma Harpe."

"Oh," surprised amusement was in his tone, "you've come to settle among us, perhaps? Permit me to welcome you, Dr. Harpe. We are to be congratulated. Our nearest physician is sixty miles away, so you will have the field to yourself. You should prosper. Do you come from the East?"

She looked him in the eyes.

"St. Louis."

"Take your pardners for the waltz, gents!"

Andy P. Symes held out his arms in smiling invitation while the news flashed round the room that the newcomer with the cold, immobile face, the peculiar pallor of which contrasted strongly with their own sun-blistered skins, was a "lady-doctor" who had come to live in Crowheart.

The abandon, the freedom of it all, appealed strongly to Dr. Harpe. The atmosphere was congenial, and when the waltz was done she asked that she might be allowed to sit quietly for a time since she found herself more fatigued by her long journey than she had realized; but, in truth, she desired to familiarize herself with the character of the people among whom her future work lay.

A noisy, heterogeneous gathering it was, boisterous without vulgarity, free without familiarity. There were no covert glances of dislike or envy, no shrugs of disdain, no whispered innuendoes. The social lines which breed these things did not exist. Every man considered his neighbor and his neighbor's wife as good as himself and his genuine liking was in his frank glance, his hearty tones, his beaming, friendly smile. Men and women looked at each other clear-eyed and straight.

The piercing "yips" of cowboys meant nothing but an excess of spirits. The stamping of feet, the shouts and laughter were indicative only of effervescent youth seeking an outlet. Most were young, all were full of life and hope, and the world was far away, that world where clothes and money matter.

The scene was typical of a new town in the frontier West. The old settlers and the new mingled gaily. The old timers with their indifferent dress, their vernacular and free manners of the mountains and ranges brushed elbows with the more modern folk of the poor and the middle class of the Middle West. They were uninteresting and mediocre, these newcomers, yet the sort who thrive astonishingly upon new soil, who become prosperous and self-important in an atmosphere of equality. There were, too, educated failures from the East and—people who had blundered. But all alike to-night, irrespective of pasts or presents or futures, were bent upon enjoying themselves to their capacities.

Callous-handed ranchers and their faded wives promenaded arm in arm. Sheep-herders and cow-punchers passed in the figures of the dance eyeing each other in mutual antipathy. The neat "hand-me-downs" of grocery clerks contrasted with the copper-riveted overalls of shy and silent prospectors from the hills who stood against the walls envying their dapper ease. A remittance man from Devonshire whose ancestral halls had sheltered an hundred knights danced with Faro Nell, who gambled for a living, while the station agent's attenuated daughter palpitated in the arms of a husky stage-driver. Mr. Percy Parrott, the sprightly cashier of the new bank, swung the new milliner from South Dakota. Sylvanus Starr, the gifted editor of the Crowheart Courier, schottisched with Mrs. "Hank" Terriberry, while his no less gifted wife swayed in the arms of the local barber, and his two lovely daughters, "Pearline" and "Planchette," tripped it respectively with the "barkeep" of the White Elephant Saloon and a Minneapolis shoe-drummer. In the centre of the floor the new plasterer and his wife moved through the figures of the French minuet with the stiff-kneed grace of two self-conscious giraffes, while Mrs. Percy Parrott, a long-limbed lady with a big, white, Hereford-like face, capered with "Tinhorn Frank," the oily, dark, craftily observant proprietor of the "Walla Walla Restaurant and Saloon." Mr. Abe Tutts, of the Flour and Feed Store, skimmed the floor with the darting ease of a water-spider dragging beside him his far less active wife, a belligerent-appearing and somewhat hard-featured lady several years his senior.

But the long, crowded dining-room held two central figures, one of which was Andy P. Symes, and the other was Essie Tisdale, the little waitress of the Terriberry House and the belle of Crowheart.

Symes moved among his guests with the air of a man who found amusement in mingling with those he deemed his inferiors even while patently bidding for their admiration and regard. His height and breadth of shoulder made him conspicuous even in this gathering of tall men. His finely shaped head was well set but in contrast his utterly inconsequential nose came as something of a shock. His face was florid and genial and he had a word for the most obscure.

Yet the trained and sensitive observer would have felt capabilities for boorishness beneath his amiability, a lack of sincerity in his impartial and too fulsome compliments. His manner denoted a degree of social training and a knowledge of social forms acquired in another than his present environment, but he was too fond of the limelight—it cheapened him; too broad in his attentions to women—it coarsened him; his waistcoat was the dingy waistcoat of a man of careless habits; his linen was not too immaculate and the nails of his blunt fingers showed lack of attention.