I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription.
"It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle," he said.
"Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord?" said I.
I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little superst.i.tion, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets.
Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill.
I couldn"t work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say: "Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?"
Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John"s. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an alt.i.tude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold.
He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big, neighbourless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John"s family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously.
A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the house.
I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the gra.s.s and wept disconsolately.
"I can"t catch a rabbit any more," I sobbed. "I"m of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead."
"Oh, what is it--what is it, Brother John?" I heard Amaryllis say.
"Nerves a little unstrung," said John, in his calm way. "Don"t worry.
Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold." It was about twilight, and the mountains came up n.o.bly to Miss Murfree"s descriptions of them.
Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn.
Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence.
I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of gra.s.s sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I listened.
Suddenly some belated little bird alighted upon the window-sill, and, in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise generally translated as "cheep!"
I leaped into the air.
"Hey! what"s the matter down there?" called John from his room above mine.
"Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that I accidentally b.u.mped my head against the ceiling."
The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains.
There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the big hall sitting room of the house, selected "Pancoast"s Family Practice of Medicine" from a bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred acres furnished with the usual complement of barns, mules, peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink.
Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. "Oh, yes," said I, "wasn"t she in the chorus of--let"s see--"
"Green, you know," said John, "and tender, and you plow it under after the first season."
"I know," said I, "and the gra.s.s grows over her."
"Right," said John. "You know something about farming, after all."
"I know something of some farmers," said I, "and a sure scythe will mow them down some day."
On the way back to the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing at it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern farmer. After ten minutes he said: "Are you going to stand there looking at that chicken all day? Breakfast is nearly ready."
"A chicken?" said I.
"A White Orpington hen, if you want to particularize."
"A White Orpington hen?" I repeated, with intense interest. The fowl walked slowly away with graceful dignity, and I followed like a child after the Pied Piper. Five minutes more were allowed me by John, and then he took me by the sleeve and conducted me to breakfast.
After I had been there a week I began to grow alarmed. I was sleeping and eating well and actually beginning to enjoy life. For a man in my desperate condition that would never do. So I sneaked down to the trolley-car station, took the car for Pineville, and went to see one of the best physicians in town. By this time I knew exactly what to do when I needed medical treatment. I hung my hat on the back of a chair, and said rapidly:
"Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries, neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at night and a cold one in the morning. I shall endeavour to be cheerful, and fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to take a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and a tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any pharmacy. Good morning."
I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly nervous start when he saw me again.
"I forgot to mention," said I, "that I shall also take absolute rest and exercise."
After this consultation I felt much better. The reestablishing in my mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much satisfaction that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful.
John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in his White Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains nearby. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans.
In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick, sounded my chest, stuck out my tongue, and asked him the price of cemetery lots in Pineville.
He lit his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. "Brother,"
he said, after a while, "you are in a mighty bad way. There"s a chance for you to pull through, but it"s a mighty slim one."
"What can it be?" I asked eagerly. "I have taken a.r.s.enic and gold, phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hydrotherapeutic baths, rest, excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything left in the pharmacopoeia?"
"Somewhere in these mountains," said the doctor, "there"s a plant growing--a flowering plant that"ll cure you, and it"s about the only thing that will. It"s of a kind that"s as old as the world; but of late it"s powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it up. I"m not engaged in active practice now: I"m getting along in years; but I"ll take your case. You"ll have to come every day in the afternoon and help me hunt for this plant till we find it. The city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they don"t know much about the cures that nature carries around in her saddlebags."
So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine--road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant.
As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find.
But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too fatigued to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning. This we kept up for a month.
One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old doctor, Amaryllis and I took a little walk under the trees near the road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes around them for their night"s repose.
"I"m glad you"re well again," she said. "When you first came you frightened me. I thought you were really ill."
"Well again!" I almost shrieked. "Do you know that I have only one chance in a thousand to live?"
Amaryllis looked at me in surprise. "Why," said she, "you are as strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want?"
"I tell you," said I, "that unless we find the magic--that is, the plant we are looking for--in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me so."
"What doctor?"
"Doctor Tatum--the old doctor who lives halfway up Black Oak Mountain.
Do you know him?"