The Dago Duke gripped Van Lennop"s hand in dreadful terror.
"Don"t let it come across that seam in the carpet! Don"t let it come!"
"I"ll not; it shan"t touch you; don"t be afraid, old man." There was something wonderfully soothing in Van Lennop"s quiet voice.
"I"ll tell the lady doc to bounce out," said the bartender. "He"s got "em bad. I had "em twict myself and took the cure. It"s fierce. He"s gotta have some dope--a shot o" hop will fix him."
The bartender hurried away on his kindly mission, while the Dago Duke clung to Van Lennop like a horrified child to its mother.
Dr. Harpe came quickly, her hair loose about her shoulders, looking younger and more girlish in a soft negligee than Van Lennop had ever seen her. She saw the faint shade of prejudice cross his face as she entered, but satisfaction was in her own. Her chance had come at last in this unexpected way.
"Snakes," she said laconically.
"Yes," Van Lennop replied with equal brevity.
"I"ll have to quiet him. Will you stay with him?" She addressed Van Lennop.
"Certainly."
"Look here," protested the bartender in an injured voice. "He"s my best friend and havin" had snakes myself----"
"Aw--clear out--all of you. We"ll take care of him."
"Folks that has snakes likes their bes" friends around "em," declared the bartender stubbornly. "They has influence----"
"Get out," reiterated Dr. Harpe curtly, and he finally went with the rest.
"I"ll give him a hypodermic," she said when the room was cleared, and hastened back to her office for the needle.
Together they watched the morphine do its work and sat in silence while the wrecked and jangling nerves relaxed and sleep came to the unregenerate Dago Duke.
Dr. Harpe"s impa.s.sive face gave no indication of the activity of her mind. Now that the opportunity to "square herself," to use her own words, had arrived, she had no notion of letting it pa.s.s.
"He seems in a bad way," Van Lennop said at last in a formal tone.
"It had to come--the clip he was going," she replied, seating herself on the edge of the bed and wiping the moisture from his forehead with the corner of the sheet.
The action was womanly, she herself looked softer, more womanly, than she had appeared to Van Lennop, yet he felt no relenting and wondered at himself.
She ended another silence by turning to him suddenly and asking with something of a child"s blunt candor----
"You don"t like me, do you?"
The awkward and unexpected question surprised him and he did not immediately reply. His first impulse was to answer with a bluntness equal to her own, but he checked it and said instead----
"One"s first impressions are often lasting and you must admit, Dr.
Harpe, that my first knowledge of you----"
"Was extremely unfavorable," she finished for him. "I know it." She laughed in embarra.s.sment. "You thought, and still think, that I"m one of these medicine sharks--a regular money grabber."
Van Lennop replied dryly----
"I do not recollect ever having known another physician quite so keen about his fee."
She flushed, but went on determinedly--
"I know how it must have looked to you--I"ve thought of it a thousand times--but there were extenuating circ.u.mstances. I came here "broke"
with only a little black case of pills and a few bandages. My hotel bill was overdue and my little drug stock exhausted. I was "up against it"--desperate--and I believed if that fellow got away I"d never see or hear of him again. I"ve had that experience and I was just in a position where I couldn"t afford to take a chance. There isn"t much practice here, it"s a miserably healthful place, and necessity sometimes makes us seem sordid whether we are or not. I"d like your good opinion, Mr. Van Lennop. Won"t you try and see my position from a more charitable point of view?"
He wanted to be fair to her, he intended to be just, and yet he found himself only able to say--
"I can"t quite understand how you could find it in your heart even to hesitate in a case like that."
"I meant to do it in the end," she pleaded. "But I was wrong, I see that now, and I"ve been sorrier than you can know. Please be charitable."
She put out her hand impulsively and he took it--reluctantly. He wondered why she repelled him so strongly even while recognizing the odd charm of manner which was undoubtedly hers when she chose to display it.
"I hope we"ll be good friends," she said earnestly.
"I trust so," he murmured, but in his heart he knew they never would be "good friends."
XII
THEIR FIRST CLASH
The Symes Irrigation Company was now well under way. The application for segregation of 200,000 acres of irrigable land had been granted. The surveyors had finished and the line of stakes stretching away across the hills was a mecca for Sunday sight-seers. The contracts for the moving of dirt from the intake to the first station had been let and when the first furrow was turned and the first scoop of dirt removed from the excavation, Crowheart all but carried Andy P. Symes on its shoulders.
"Nothing succeeds like success," he was wont to tell himself frequently but without bitterness or resentment for previous lack of appreciation.
He could let bygones be bygones, for it was easy enough to be generous in the hour of his triumph.
"He had it in him," one-time sceptics admitted.
"Blood will tell," declared his supporters emphatically and there was now no dissenting voice to the oft-repeated aphorism.
Symes moved among his satellites with that benign unbending which is a recognized attribute of the truly great. The large and opulent air which formerly he had a.s.sumed when most in need of credit was now habitual, but his patronage was regarded as a favor; indeed the Crowheart Mercantile Company considered it the longest step in its career when the commissary of the Symes Irrigation Company owed it nearly $7000.
Conditions changed rapidly in Crowheart once work actually began. The call for laborers brought a new and strange cla.s.s of people to its streets--swarthy, chattering persons with long backs, and short legs, of frugal habits, yet, after all, leaving much silver in the town on the Sat.u.r.day night which followed payday.
Symes"s domestic life was moving as smoothly and as satisfactorily as his business affairs. A lifetime seemed to lie between that memorable journey on the "Main Line" with Augusta in her brown basque and dreadful hat, and the present. She was improving wonderfully. He had to admit that. "No, sir," he told himself occasionally, "Augusta isn"t half bad."
Her unconcealed adoration and devotion to himself had awakened affection in return, at least her gaucheries no longer exasperated him and they were daily growing less. Dr. Harpe had been right when she had told him that Augusta was as imitative as a parrot, and he often smiled to himself at her affectations, directly traceable to her diligent perusal of _The Ladies" Own_ and the column devoted to the queries of troubled social aspirants. While it amused him he approved, for an imitation lady was better than the frankly impossible girl he had married. Something of this was in his mind while engaged one day in the absorbing occupation of b.u.t.toning Mrs. Symes"s blouse up the back.
He raised his head at the sound of a step on the narrow porch.
"Who"s that?"