The Lady of Big Shanty Part 19

"We ought to be thankful for _that_," he said, as he filled his lungs with a deep breath. "Think of how many poor devils and delicate women struggling for a living, and little children it would save."

"And the other people, too," she ventured boldly. "Poor Dr. Sperry told me he would be lucky if he got out of New York at all this summer. There are some important cases of his, I believe, which may need him at any moment."

The mention of the doctor's name would have jarred on Sam at any other time, but this morning he was too happy to care, and Alice, quick to notice it, pressed on:

"I do wish he could come up here for a rest. I saw him at the Trevises Thursday; he seemed utterly used up. Do you think he would come if we asked him, Sam? Besides," she added cleverly, "I should like him to see Margaret."

Thayor stopped abruptly and looked at his wife with a curious expression.

"So should I," he replied with some severity. "I should like him to see that child now, if for nothing more than to have the satisfaction of seeing how much even these few hours in the woods have accomplished, and what a mistake he made when he said the child's lungs needed looking after. Sperry is a surgeon, not a physician--and he only makes himself ridiculous when he tries to be."

"I am quite of your opinion, Sam," Alice declared, not daring to contradict her husband--a feeling of infinite rest creeping through her veins as she spoke.

"He will then see for himself, I believe, that he was mistaken,"

continued Thayor in the same positive tone. "Margaret delicate!

Nonsense, my dear! By George--his diagnosis was not only brutal, it was ridiculous. Why, Leveridge--"

"Be tolerant, Sam," returned Alice. "You know you always tell others to be tolerant. Dr. Sperry evidently said what he believed to be the truth. If he has been wrong I am sure he will be the first one to acknowledge it, as any gentleman who has been mistaken would."

"Then he shall have the chance," replied Thayor. "You may invite him at once, Alice, if you wish, but for one week only. Too much of Sperry gets on my nerves."

When Alice reached her bedroom she locked the door and threw herself on the bed in an ecstasy of tears. After some moments she arose with an exultant look in her eyes, went over to her desk, unlocked a jewel case and extracted from between the lining of a hidden compartment a small photograph of Sperry at thirty, taken at Heidelberg.

Below the torrent of Big Shanty laughed in the sunlight.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

For Thayor to welcome Sperry with a warm grasp of the hand and an outburst of--"Oh! I'm glad you are here; it seems like a special Providence," was so strange and unusual a performance that it is no wonder Alice, moving toward the buckboard to add her own greeting to her husband's, was lost in astonishment even when the cause of the outburst became clear to her.

Her husband's mental att.i.tude toward the doctor, if the truth be told, was one of the things that had never ceased to trouble her. Polite as he was to everybody, he had been so particularly polite to Sperry that it always aroused her suspicions. She knew he had sent for him purely to oblige her and to help her over the chasm which divided Big Shanty from Newport, but what other reasons her husband had for inviting him to share his hospitality at the camp, she was not so familiar with. It therefore came as a distinct surprise when she heard him repeat with increased warmth in his manner:

"Yes, a special Providence, my dear Dr. Sperry"--nor did the real cause of the doctor's welcome set her mind at rest.

"This way, doctor," continued Thayor, dragging Sperry with him.

"Blakeman will bring your bag. One of our men is badly hurt; I was on my way to him when I heard you driving up. He's only a few rods away--hurry!"

The little man lay on his back on the floor of the lower shanty where the men had carried him. The chain cinching down a heavy sapling binding a load of s.h.i.+ngles had snapped, and the wiry little Frenchman--Gaston Le Boeuf--who was standing on top of the load, had been shot into the air and landed in a ditch with his right forearm splintered in two. The pain was intense, both bones of the forearm--the ulnar and radius--being shattered transversely, the ulnar poking through the flesh in an ugly blue wound.

When Thayor and the doctor reached him, the Clown was holding the broken arm taut--he had to keep up a steady pull, for with the slightest release the knotty sinews and muscles would cause the broken forearm to fly back at right angles. Although this had happened a dozen times while they were bringing him in, the wiry little man did not utter a groan. He lay there white, in a cold sweat, the corners of his black eyes crinkling over his bad luck. He had known what pain was before. Once on Bog River his skinning knife had slipped while he was dressing out a deer, and the keen blade had gone through his knotty calf, severing the nerve; yet he had walked nearly a dozen miles back to Morrison's.

As Sperry entered, the circle of lumber jacks about the wounded man widened, then closed again about him, watching the doctor who soon had the broken arm in an improvised splint.

The man from the city rarely gets very close to a backwoods people unless he possesses sincerity, democracy, and an inborn love of the woods--three virtues without which a man may remain always a stranger in the wilderness.

The New York doctor possessed none of these qualities; moreover, he was pitifully unadaptable outside of the artificial world in which he posed. So much so that at first sight of the trapper and the Clown--two men whom Thayor had pointed out to him as being his most reliable a.s.sistants next to Holcomb--his only thought had been how Sam Thayor could have such eccentric boors on the place. He noticed, too, with irritation and astonishment, that none of the men raised their hats until Alice and Margaret arrived on the scene; then not a man among them remained covered.

What he did not notice, however, was the way the men around him were, to use the Clown's expression, "sizin' him up," as they did all city men and this before he had been ten minutes among them, with the result that the trapper had concluded that he looked like a man who was afraid of spoiling his clothes; that Holcomb and the Clown thought him sadly lacking in Sam Thayor's frank simplicity; while the others stood about waiting for some word or gesture on which to hang their opinions.

But all this was changed now. With his ready skill Sperry had become, by the turn of his hand, so to speak, the Medicine Man of the tribe.

They were even ready to let down their social barriers and extend to him all their friends.h.i.+p--a friends.h.i.+p he could have relied on for the rest of his days.

"Dunno as I ever see a neater job," remarked a big fellow--a former doubter--peering over the shoulders of the crowd, intent on the doctor's handling of the wounded arm.

"Yes--yes--" drawled the Clown. "Goll! seems 'ough he knowed jest whar to take hold."

"There," said Sperry, as he gave a final adjustment to the improvised bandage. "You had better get him to bed."

"By gar, Doc'," grunted the little man between his teeth, "what you goin' to do now, hein! I feel lot bettaire I tink eff I tak a drink."

He had not even asked for a drop of water before, nor had he spoken a word.

"He may have it," said Sperry, in the voice he used at consultations.

The Clown poured a tin cup full of whiskey and the little man drained it to the last drop.

"He'll suffer," said Sperry, turning to the trapper, "when the arm begins to swell under the bandage."

"Broke bad, Doc'?" asked the trapper.

"Yes, a compound fracture; but he'll be all right, my man, in a few weeks." Sperry opened a thin leather case, which he took from his bag, extracted a phial, and shook two whitish gray pills into the trapper's palm. "Give him one in an hour, and another to-night if he can't sleep," he said. He went over to the patient, felt his pulse, then with a nod to the rest, he started toward the door.

"Hold on, Doc'!" came from half a dozen in the group of lumber jacks; "won't ye take a leetle somethin' 'fore ye go?"

Sperry shook his head and smiled. "No, thank you," he said, half amused. "I seldom take anything before luncheon."

"But, say--we'd like to fix it with ye--what's the damage, Doc'?" and half a dozen rough hands went into their trousers pockets. But Sperry only waved his hand in an embarra.s.sed way in protest, and added:

"Of course not--what I have done for one of you men, I would do for anybody. I shall see him in the morning"--and he strode out of the shanty.

By this time the little Frenchman's eyes were closed, and he was breathing heavily--he was dead drunk.

"Goll! warn't that an awful hooker ye give him, Freme?" asked the trapper. He turned to the sufferer, now that the doctor had disappeared, and drew an extra blanket tenderly over him.

"Wall, he ain't no home'path," replied the Clown with a grin; "'sides, I presume likely he needed all he could git down him."

The days that followed were full of joy to Alice. Never had Thayor seen her in so merry a mood. Le Boeuf's broken arm had somehow changed Thayor's att.i.tude toward his guest--so much so that the man's personality no longer jarred on him. He concluded that whatever suspicions he had had--and they were never definite--were groundless.

Alice was simply bored in New York and Sperry amused her. That was the secret of his success with his women patients; she was bored here, and again Sperry amused her! Why not, then, give her all the pleasure she wanted? With this result fixed in his mind, his att.i.tude to the "Exquisite" changed. He even sought out ways in which his guest's stay could be made happy.

"You must see the trout pond, doctor," he would say. "Ah! you don't believe we've got one--but we have; you must show it to the doctor, my dear"--at which her eyes would seek her friend's, only to be met with an answering look and the words:

"Delighted, my dear Mrs. Thayor," as he dropped a second lump of sugar in his cup. Whereupon the two would disappear for the day, it being nearly dusk before they returned again to camp; Alice bounding into the living room radiant from her walk, her arms full of wild flowers.