Over the Pass Part 28

There entered a man of middle age, with close-cropped gray beard, clad in soft flannels, the trousers bottoms turned up in New York fas.h.i.+on for negligee business suits for that spring. To the simple interior of a western ranch house he brought the atmosphere of complex civilization as a thing ineradicably bred into his being. It was evident, too, that he had been used to having his arrival in any room a moment of importance which summoned the rapt attention of everybody, whether nurses, fellow physicians, or the members of the patient's family. But this time that was lacking. The young man leaning against the table was not visibly impressed.

"h.e.l.lo, doctor!" said Jack, as unconcernedly as he would have pa.s.sed the time of day with Jim Galway in the street.

"h.e.l.lo, Jack!" said the doctor.

Jack went just half-way across the room to shake hands. Then he dropped back to his easy position, with the table as a rest, after he had set a chair for the visitor.

"How do you like Little Rivers?" Jack asked.

"I have been here only thirty-six hours," answered the doctor, avoiding a direct answer. He was pulling off his silk summer gloves, making the operation a trifle elaborate, one which seemed to require much attention. "I came pretty near mistaking another man for you, but his mole patch saved me. I didn't think you could have grown one out here.

Wonderfully like you! Have you met him?"

He glanced up as he asked this question, which seemed the first to occur to him as a warming-up topic of conversation before he came to the business in hand.

"No. I have just heard of him," Jack answered.

The doctor smiled at his gloves, which he now folded and put in his pocket. Don't the lecturers to young medical students say, "Divert your patient's mind to some topic other than himself as you get your first impression"? Now Dr. Bennington drew forward in his chair, rested the tips of the long fingers of a soft, capable hand on the edge of the table, and looked up to Jack in professional candor, sweeping him with the knowing eye of the modern confessor of the secrets of all manner of mankind. With the other hand he drew a stethoscope from his side coat-pocket.

"Well, Jack, you can guess what brought me all the way from New York--just five minutes' work!" and he gave the symbol of examination a flourish in emphasis.

"I don't think I have forgotten the etiquette of the patient on such occasions," Jack returned. "It is an easy function in this Arizona climate."

He drew his s.h.i.+rt up from a compact loin and lean middle, revealing the arch of his deep chest, the flesh of which was healthy pink under neck and face plated with Indian tan. The doctor's eyes lighted with the bliss of a critic used to searching for flaws at sight of a masterpiece. While he conducted the initial plottings with the rubber cup which carried sounds to one of the most expensive senses of hearing in America, Jack was gazing out of the window, as if his mind were far away across the cactus-spotted levels.

"Breathe deep!" commanded the doctor.

Jack's nostrils quivered with the indrawing of a great gust of air and his diaphragm swelled until his ribs were like taut bowstrings.

"And you were the pasty-faced weakling that left my office five years ago--and you, you husky giant, have brought me two thousand miles to see if you were really convalescent!"

"I hope the trip will do you good!" said Jack, sweetly.

"But it is great news that I take back, great news!" said the doctor, as he put the stethoscope in his pocket.

"Yes?" returned Jack, slipping his head through his s.h.i.+rt. "You don't find even a speck?"

"Not a speck! No sign of the lesion! There is no reason why you should not have gone home long ago."

"No?" Jack was fastening his string tie and doing this with something of the urban nicety with which the doctor had folded his gloves. That tie was one of the few inheritances from complex civilization which still had Jack's favor.

"What have you found to do all these years?"

Jack was surprised at the question.

"I have just wandered about and read and thought," he explained.

"Without developing any sense of responsibility?" demanded the doctor in exasperation.

"I have tried to be good to my horses, and of late I have taken to ranching. There is a lot of responsibility in that and care, too. Take the scale, for instance!"

"A confounded little ranch out in this G.o.d-forsaken place, that a Swede immigrant might run!"

"No, the Swedes aren't particularly good at irrigation, though better than the Dutch. You see, the Hollanders are used to having so much water that--"

Jack was leaning idly against the table again. The fas.h.i.+onable pract.i.tioner, accustomed to having his words accepted at their cost price in gold, broke in hotly:

"It is past all understanding! You, the heir to twenty millions!"

"Is it twenty now?" Jack asked softly and sadly.

"Nearer thirty, probably! And s.h.i.+rking your duty! s.h.i.+rking and for what--for what?"

Jack faced around. The doctor, meeting a calm eye that was quizzically challenging, paused abruptly, feeling that in some way he had been caught at a professional disadvantage in his outburst of emotion.

"Don't you like Little Rivers?" asked Jack.

"I should be bored to death!" the doctor admitted, honestly.

"Well, you see this air never healed a lesion for you! You never uttered a prayer to it for strength with every breath! And, doctor,"

Jack hesitated, while his lips were half open, showing his even teeth slightly apart in the manner of a break in a story to the children where he expected them to be very attentive to what was coming, "you can take a piece of tissue and a.n.a.lyze it, yes, a piece of brain tissue and find all the blood-vessels, but not what a man was thinking, can you? Until you can take a precipitate of his thoughts--the very thoughts he is unconscious of himself--and put them under a microscope, why, there must be a lot of guesswork about the source of all unconventional human actions."

Jack laughed over his invasion of psychology; and when he laughed in a certain way the impulse to join him was strong, as Mary first found on the pa.s.s. So the doctor laughed, partly in relief, perhaps, that this uncertain element which he was finding in Jack had not yet proved explosive.

"That would make a capital excuse for a student flunking in examinations!" he said.

"It might be a worthy one--not that I say it ought to pa.s.s him."

"Now, Jack," the doctor began afresh, the rea.s.suring force of his personality again in play.

He took a step and raised his hands as if he would put them on Jack's shoulders. One could imagine him driving hypochondria out of many a patient's mind by thus making his own vigorous optimism flow down from his fingertips, while he looked into the patient's eye. But his hands remained in the air, though Jack had been only smiling at him. This was not the way to handle this patient, something told his trained, sensitive instinct in time, and he let his hands fall in semblance of a gesture of protest, gave a shrug and came directly to the point very genuinely.

"Well, Jack--your father!"

"Yes." And Jack's face was still and blank, while shadows played over it in a war among themselves. "He did not even tell me you were coming," he added.

"Perhaps he feared that it would give you time to develop a cough or you would start overland to Chihuahua so I should miss you. Jack, he needs you! All that fortune waits for you!"

"Now that I am strong, yes! He did not come out to see me even during the first year when I had not the health to go to him, nor did he think to come with you."

"He--he is a very busy man!" explained the doctor, in ready champions.h.i.+p.

And yet he looked away from Jack, and when he looked back it was with an appeal to conscience rather than to filial affection. "Is it right to remain, however much you like this desert life? Have you any excuse?"

"Yes, an overwhelming one!" exclaimed Jack in a voice that was high-pitched and determined, while his eyes burned and no trace of humor remained on lips that were as firm as the outline of his chin. "Yes, one that thrills me from head to foot with the steady ardor of the soldier who makes a siege!"

"I--I--you are beyond me! Then you will stay? You are not coming home?"

"Yes," Jack answered, in another mood, but one equally rigid. "I am coming at once. That was all settled last night under the stars. I have found the courage!"

"The courage to go to twenty millions!" gasped the doctor. "But--good!