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 coa.r.s.ened 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. He was the sort of man who is nearly, but not quite, a gentleman.
The slim little belle of Crowheart seemed to be everywhere, her youthful spirits were unflagging, and her contagious, merry laugh rang out constantly from the centre of lively groups. Her features were delicate and there was pride, sensitiveness and good-breeding in her mouth with its short, red upper lip. Her face held more than prettiness, for there was thoughtfulness, as well, in her blue eyes and innate kindness in its entire expression. Her light brown hair was soft and plentiful and added to her stature by its high dressing. She was natural of manner and graceful with the ease of happy youth and her flushed cheeks were pinker than her simple gown. She looked farther removed from her occupation than any woman in the room and to Dr. Harpe, following her with her eyes, the connection seemed incongruous.
"Moses!" she whispered to herself, "but that little biscuit-shooter would be a winner if she had clothes."
Other eyes than Dr. Harpe"s were following Essie Tisdale and with an intentness which finally attracted her attention. She stopped as she was pa.s.sing a swarthy, silent man in the corner, who had not moved from his chair since the beginning of the dance, and, arching her eyebrows, she asked mischievously:
"Don"t you mean to ask me for a single dance, Mr. Dubois--not one?"
To her surprise and the amus.e.m.e.nt of all who heard, he arose at once, bending his squat figure in an awkward bow, and replied:
"Certainly, m"amselle, if you will give me that pleasure."
And all the roomful stared in mingled astonishment and glee when old Edouard Dubois, the taciturn and little-liked sheepman from the "Limestone Rim," led Essie Tisdale out upon the floor to complete a set.
The evening was well along when Dr. Harpe laid her hand upon the unpainted railing which served as a bannister and turned to look once more at the roomful of hot, ecstatically happy dancers before she went upstairs.
"Harpe," she murmured, and her eyes narrowed, "Harpe, we"re going to make good here. We"re going to win out. We"re going to make money hand over fist."
And even with her own boastful words there came a pang which had its source in a knowledge her dance with Symes had brought her. Something was dead within her! That something was the spirit of youth, and with it had gone the best of Emma Harpe.
III
A MeSALLIANCE
Crowheart was surprised but not shocked when the engagement of Andy P.
Symes to the blacksmith"s sister was announced. It saw no mesalliance in the union. It was merely unaware that he had been attentive to Augusta Kunkel. Now they were to be married in the long dining-room of the Terriberry House and take the night train for Chicago on their honeymoon.
Dr. Harpe standing at the window of her new office on the second floor of the hotel smiled to herself as she saw the chairs going inside which served equally well for funerals or for social functions. The match, she felt, was really of her making.
"You"ve got to do it," she had told him. "You"ve simply got to do it."
He had come to see her at Augusta"s insistence.
"But!" he had groaned; "a Kunkel! Perhaps you don"t know--but I"m one of the Symes of Maine. Great-grandfather a personal friend of Alexander Hamilton"s, and all that. My family don"t expect _much_ of me since I"m the black sheep, but," a dull red had surged over his face, "they expect something better of me than a Kunkel!"
She had shrugged her shoulders.
"Suit yourself, I"m only telling you how it looks to me. You"ll queer yourself forever if you don"t marry her, for this country is still western enough to respect women. You are just starting in to promote this irrigation project and if you succeed you can"t tell what the future will hold for you politically; this is just the sort of thing to bob up and down you. You know I"m right."
"But she looks so obviously what she is," he had groaned miserably.
"Some day I may want to go home--and think of introducing Augusta Kunkel!"
"You are wrong there," she had replied with conviction, "Augusta has possibilities. She has good eyes, her voice is low, her English is far better than you might expect, and, best of all, she"s tall and slender.
If she was short and fat I"d call her rather hopeless, but you hang good clothes on these slim ones and it works wonders. Besides, she"s imitative as a parrot."
He had thrown his arms aloft in despair.
"But think of it!--the rest of my life--with a parrot."
"It"s the lesser of two evils," she had urged, and in the end he had said dully:
"I guess you"re right, Dr. Harpe. Your advice no doubt is good, though, like your medicine, a bitter dose just now. You"ve done me a favor, I suppose, and I"ll not forget it."
"When the door of her office had closed upon his broad back she had said to herself:
"I"ll see that you don"t forget it." And she repeated it again with renewed satisfaction. She liked the feeling that she already had become a factor in the affairs of Crowheart and she intended to remain one.
The practice of medicine with Dr. Harpe was frankly for personal gain.
No ideals had influenced her in the choice of her profession and her practice of it had developed no ambition save the single one of building up a bank account. The ethical distinction between the trades and professions, which is based upon the fact that the professional man or woman is supposed to take up his or her life work primarily because he loves both his profession and the people whom it may benefit, was a distinction which she never had grasped. She practised medicine in the same commercial spirit that a cheap drummer builds up a trade. She had no sentiment regarding it, none of the ambitious dreams of high professional standing attained by meritorious work which inspire those who achieve. It was a business pure and simple; each patient was a customer.
Another consideration in her choice of this profession was the freedom it gave her. Because of it she was exempt from many of the restrictions and conventionalities which hampered her s.e.x, and above all else she disliked restraint.
She was the single result of a "typhoid romance." Her mother, a trained nurse, had attended a St. Louis politician during a long illness. Upon his recovery he married his nurse and as promptly deserted her, providing a modest support for the child. She had grown to womanhood in a cheap boarding school, attaining thereby a superficial education but sufficient to enable her to pa.s.s the preliminary examinations necessary to begin her studies in the medical college which was an outcast among its kind and known among the profession as a "diploma mill." She selected it because the course was easy and the tuition light, though its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted by temperament and education for a profession that calls for the highest and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed murderers to prescribe and operate among the trusting and the ignorant.
Dr. Harpe had framed her sheepskin and been duly photographed in her cap and gown; then, after a short hospital experience, she had gone to the little Nebraska town where perhaps the most forceful comment upon the success of her career there was that the small steamer trunk, which she was now opening, contained very comfortably both her summer and winter wardrobe.
Her pose was an air of camaraderie, of blunt good-nature. Her conspicuous walk was a swaggering stride, while in dress she affected the masculine severity of some professional women. Her hair was the dull red that is nearly brown and she wore it coiled in trying simplicity at the back of her head. Her handsome eyes were the hazel that is alternately brown and green and gray, sometimes an odd mixture of all three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been--a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly unlike her usual self.
This attractive phase of her personality was uppermost as she sought in the trunk for something to wear, and a smile curved the corners of her straight lips and brought out a faint cleft in her square chin, as she inspected its contents.
She found what she wanted in a plain cloth skirt and a white tailored waist with stiffly starched cuffs, and a man"s sleeve links. When she was dressed a man"s linen waistcoat with a black silk watch-fob hanging from the pocket added further to the unfeminine _tout ensemble_. She liked the effect, and, as she thrust a scarf-pin in the long black "four-in-hand" before her mirror, she viewed the result with satisfaction.
Dr. Harpe regarded the wedding as exceedingly opportune for herself, bringing in as it did the settlers from the isolated ranches and outlying districts of the big county, and she meant it to serve as her real debut in the community.
It was in fact a notable event for the reason that it was the first wedding in Crowheart, and, since the invitation was general, the guests were coming from far and near to show their approval and incidentally perhaps to partake of the champagne which it was rumored was to flow like water. Champagne was the standard by which Crowheart gauged the success of an entertainment and certainly Andy P. Symes was not the man to serve sarsaparilla at his own wedding.
When Dr. Harpe came downstairs she found the long dining-room cleared of its tables and already well filled with guests. "Curly" the camp cook was caressing his violin, and "Snake River Jim," tolerably drunk, was in his place beside him, while Ole Peterson, redolent of the livery-stable in which he worked, constantly felt his muscle to show that he was prepared to do his share with the big ba.s.s drum.
As Andy P. Symes moved through the rapidly growing crowd no one but Dr.
Harpe guessed that he winced inwardly at the resounding slaps upon his back and the congratulations or that his heart all but failed him when he saw his bride-to-be in her bobinet veil, a flush upon her broad face and following his every movement with adoring eyes. To all but Dr. Harpe he looked the fortunate and beaming bridegroom and only she saw the tiny lines which sleeplessness had left about his eyes or detected the hollowness of his frequent laughter.
It was more or less of a relief to all when the ceremony was over and the nervous and perspiring Justice of the Peace, miserable in a collar, had wished them every known joy. It was a relief to Symes who kissed his bride perfunctorily and returned her to weeping "Grandmother" Kunkel"s arms--a relief to those impatient to dance--a relief to the thirsty whose surrept.i.tious glances wandered in spite of their best efforts toward the pile of champagne cases in the corner.
But the reward of patience came to all, and as the violin and guitar tuned up the popping of corks was a.s.surance enough that the unsurpa.s.sed thirst created by alkali dust would shortly be a.s.suaged. "Hank"
Terriberry, in whose competent charge Symes had placed this portion of the wedding entertainment, realizing that, at best, pouring from a bottle and drinking from a gla.s.s is a slow and tedious process, to facilitate matters had provided two large, bright, new dish-pans which he filled with wine, also a plentiful supply of bright, new, tin dippers.
They drank Symes"s health in long, deep draughts and it was with some forebodings that Symes noted the frequency with which the same guests appeared in line. Symes had no great desire that his wedding should go down in the annals of Crowheart as the most complete drunk in its history nor was his bank account inexhaustible. Also he observed with, annoyance that his newly-created brother-in-law, Adolph Kunkel, had retired to a quiet corner where he might drink from the bottle unmolested. Adolph Kunkel, sober, was bad enough, but Adolph Kunkel, drunk, was worse.
That his fears were not unfounded was shortly made evident by the appearance of Sylva.n.u.s Starr with a bland, bucolic smile upon his wafer-like countenance and his scant foretop tied in a baby-blue ribbon which had embellished the dainty ham sandwiches provided by Mrs.
Terriberry. By the time the dance was well under way eyes had brightened perceptibly and sunburned faces had taken on a deeper hue while Snake River Jim sat with a pickle behind his ear and his eyes rolled to the ceiling as though entranced by his own heavenly strains.
As the room grew warmer, the conversation waxed louder, the dance faster and the whoops of exuberance more frequent, until Bedlam reigned. Percy Parrot chancing to observe "Tinhorn Frank" sliding toward the door with two unopened bottles of champagne protruding from his coat pockets made a low tackle and clasped him about the ankles. As "Tinhorn" lay p.r.o.ne he was shamed in vivid English by the graceful barber while the new plasterer excused himself from his partner long enough to kick the prostrate ingrate in the ribs. Mrs. "Hank" Terriberry, whose hair looked like a pair of angora "chaps" in a high wind, returning from her third trip to the dish-pan, burst into tears at the man"s depravity and inadvertently wiped her streaming eyes on the end of her long lace jabot instead of her handkerchief.