# West of Dodge/Chapter 24

Dr. Hall was reluctant to go to Old Doc Ross and discharge his debt of gratitude, not because he was afraid of the fiery old scamp, or gave a thought to the material such course would provide the humorists of Damascus. Pride alone restrained him. It was hard matter to dismount from his high horse and eat a dish of crow before Old Doc Ross.
He knew that Burnett and the others who did not like him were saving up the episode to use some day to his discomfort, yet he could not get himself in the proper state of mind to go. Pride always stepped in front of him and: barred the way, and pride has made many a valiant man seem a coward in the judgment of the world.
A week passed in that indecisive way, between upbraidings of conscience for his delinquency and weak justifications on the promptings of pride. Sunday afternoon came, and with it a resolution laid hold of Dr. Andrew Hall as he sat in his surgical chair surrounded by the cast leaves of the Kansas City papers. It was as if the plan of action had come flying into the door of the boxcar from its fledging-place somewhere in the unknown.
Dr. Hall opened the closet door where Old Doc Ross' pistol and holster lay, put them in his black surgical bag; got into his black mohair coat and broad-brimmed ​Panama hat, and set off for Old Doc Ross' door. The hot wind flapped the pliant brim of his hat and ballooned his thin coat out at the back; heat glimmered up from the hard, dry ground, which was riven in jagged cracks as if ripped by lightning, gaping fissures appealing to the mottled hot sky for the rain that did not come.
There was not a loafer in sight the length of Custer Street. Jim Justice's veranda was swept by hot wind and hotter sun clean of the human rubbish that commonly eddied around its posts. Even Jim's splint-bottomed chair was gone from the place where its legs had worn hollows in the floor, and Jim's head had made a dark spot on the side of the house where he leaned.
Several horses were hitched in front of the saloon and around the square, some with heads thrust under the pole of the hitching-racks for the little line of shadow; others stood in the dejection of misery, stamping fretfully to dislodge the swarms of flies which gnawed their fetlocks and shins. The owners of these beasts were in the saloon, out of which the sound of clashing pool balls came, and the droning of a mouth organ, and a drift of cigar smoke over the latticed doors.
Hall passed on his way with a freedom from publicity that was quite a comfort to his pride, but he might as well have advertised the object of that hot Sunday afternoon walk in the paper, for all the somnolence of the town. Pink Fergus was as persistently active as the southwest wind. She came to her door, nodding her false bangs, grinning her perfectly natural big teeth at Dr. Hall as he tried to swish by on an especially hard gust of wind. She opened the screen to put her head out and watch him; followed the head with her flounced, tight-laced, bustle-​padded body as Hall turned in at Old Doc Ross' little plank office next door.
Ross was sitting at his table-topped desk, as Hall had hoped to find him, reading a paper. He was dressed in his garb of sobriety: a heavy, dark suit, stiff-bosomed white shirt with high collar, and the same light-colored sombrero he had worn when he came to shoot Hall out of town. His vest was buttoned to the top, his long coat draped him almost to the floor. In this garb Ross concealed the tops of his boots under the legs of his trousers, after the Missouri fashion. It appeared to add somewhat to his length of legs.
Ross looked up from his reading as Hall swung into the room without a moment's pause at the door, making a poor pretense of going on with it immediately, paying no heed to the younger man's salutation, which was as friendly and cheerful as Hall's somewhat reluctant tongue could pronounce it. But Ross was not to carry it off in that manner of high disdain. Hall had come on the impulse of that flying resolution, and he was going to have an end of it that day.
There was another straight-backed kitchen chair in the office, such as Ross himself occupied, the pioneer doctor's equipment being very meager. This extra chair was the seat of agony that patients occupied for the extraction of teeth, lancing of boils, stitching of wounds, and all the office ministration which Ross's broad field covered. Hall took possession of the chair, put his hat on the desk, and his bag on the floor.
He was indecisive about the way to come to the core of this uncomfortable moral obligation; whether to lead up to it with a sort of local anesthetization of pacific pre​liminaries, or stick the knife into it at one bold stroke.
Ross did not offer any encouragement. The old sinner did the best he could to carry off a pretense of oblivious indifference, holding his newspaper before his whiskers as if absorbed in it entirely, flicking the top of it now and then with pettish little movement to scare away the flies.
"I've been putting this visit off a good while, Doctor—longer than I should have done," Hall began.
There he seemed to run out of words. He stopped, fingering his hat-brim nervously, looking at Old Doc Ross's averted face and three-quarters presented body, as if for help to go ahead.
Old Doc Ross flipped his paper; read on a little way; turned the page with hateful, vindictive suddenness, rustling it more than necessary, jerking it to stretch out the fold.
"You might 'a' put it off a little longer," he growled.
Hall was encouraged by the speech, ungracious as it was. He grinned, beginning to feel easier, to get himself headed right.
"I might have, like any deadbeat that's dodging his debts," he admitted. "I didn't know until a few days ago, Dr. Ross, that I was under obligation to you for your timely interference the night I butted my fool head into other people's troubles and came pretty near getting it shot off for my pains. I've put off coming to you and thanking you for your friendly hand longer than a strictly honest man ought to have put it off. But I guess I'm not a strictly honest man."
"Who in the hell is?" said Old Doc Ross.
He threw his paper down with the question, turning to ​confront his visitor with severity, scowling as if he had caught the most notoriously dishonest man in Damascus and had him where he wanted him.
"I didn't know who put in that good shot until I met Gus Sandiver on the road the other day," Hall went on, not trying to answer Ross's general impugnment of mankind. "It's a kind of weak acknowledgment for a turn like that, especially when it's been put off this way."
"There's no use singin' a song over it," Ross said, crabbed and ill-favored. "You've got it wrong if you think you owe me anything. You don't. Whatever I did wasn't done on account of an individual, and I don't want to hear any mushy talk about thanks and obligations. I acted for the profession, sir. I've never stood by and seen the profession assailed, and I never will. Individuals are nothing to me, sir; the profession is all."
Old Doc Ross said it with dignity, his red face considerably redder under the pressure of his feelings.
"If you acted for the profession, surely you'll permit me to speak for the profession," Hall returned. "The profession is grateful to a chivalrous gentleman."
The fiery red tide subsided out of Old Doc Ross's face as if Hall had brought him news which swept away completely his fortunes and hopes. He looked out of his door at the rising waves of glimmering, shifting, wavering heat, shaking his head in sad denial.
"I'm not a chivalrous gentleman, Dr. Hall," he said. "I'm not even a common one. I'm nothing but a damned old drunken bum!"
Hall couldn't find anything to say. It requires far more than the assurances of a grateful stranger, or even a sympathetic friend, to palliate the bitterness that rises ​from a convicted conscience. No indictment of a grand jury can compare with the arraignment that remorseful guilt pours out against itself.
"I'm sorry there was any misunderstanding of my position and intentions here from the first," Hall said presently.
"I was an old clown," Ross said, contemptuous of himself. "I put on a show for a bunch of single-barreled sports."
"Yes, I figured it that way," Hall replied.
"You've been square with me," Ross said, turning in his chair suddenly, his face so set in its habitual expression of severity it seemed incapable of any change except the rise and fall of color. His attitude and stern look seemed to threaten assault, but it was only the bearing of a man whose habits and deeds made a constant front of belligerence necessary to keep him from sinking under the contemptuous familiarity of the base.
"I tried to explain that I wasn't to be considered a competitor. There's nothing more to be said, that I can see."
Hall tried to pass it lightly, desiring to spare the man any further humiliation. Ross shook his head, appreciative of the courtesy, but refusing to spare himself.
"When a man's played 'em fools for twenty years it rubs the hair off to have 'em turn the trick," he said. "I've come into towns like this and convinced sixty percent of 'em in two days that they either had fits that minute or was liable to have 'em the next. I've sold communities like this enough potassium iodide and aloes at five dollars a bottle to float the Great Eastern. It wasn't so much because I was a quack as because I was a ​natural-born cynic. I liked to play 'em, I liked to slip a ghost under their shirts, I liked to drive along the road and laugh at 'em. I thought everybody was a damn fool but myself. And look at me now! Playin' the clown for a lot of single-barreled sports."
That was an ingenuous confession, Hall thought; that was putting a dignity on quackery he never had heard attempted before, the dignity of a traveling philosopher who roamed around analyzing the follies of mankind. But the five dollars a bottle behind the scheme seemed to—weaken the defense.
"Justice told me about it," he said reminiscently. "He said you had them throwing fits all round here for a while."
"I've been thinking I'd move on, if I could get the little bit of money out of this shack and lot I've put into them," Ross disclosed. "This town and the country around it are filling up with the wrong kind of people for me. I guess I've been drifting ahead with the dross so long I'm out of place among respectable people. This is a young man's town, a young man's country. You've got the edge on 'em here, Doctor. Why don't you settle down here? If you'll give me seven hundred dollars for my property, I'll drive out of town to-morrow."
Hall laughed a little over the proposal, shaking his head.
"Maybe it's because I can't see the future of this country they talk about so confidently here. I'm not able to visualize myself in it; I don't seem to fit."
"Since they opened Oklahoma up last spring I've been turnin' my eyes down in that direction," Ross said. "That country's full of grafters and come-on men. It's ​the place for an old humbug like me. Think it over, and let me know."
Hall promised to think it over, that being the easiest formula for putting off a real estate man or a sewing machine agent. He felt that the new understanding had reached a point where Ross's gun might be introduced without anybody's pride being hurt very much. Acting on the thought, he took it out of the black bag and laid it on the desk.
"This is yours, I believe, Dr. Ross. It was left at my place on a day both of us would regret if we remembered it any longer. I'm sorry it's been there so long."
Ross sat up stiffly, his face flashing as red as one of Little Jack Ryan's switch lights.
"It's no gun of mine!" he disclaimed hotly. "No man ever took a gun off of me and lived long enough to tell me about it. Take that damn thing out of my presence, sir!"
Hall was stung to the quick by this wrathful repudiation, this reopening of the feud which he had believed so happily closed.
"I'm sorry to be misunderstood," he said, as haughty and distant as Ross at his best.
He threw the gun into the open bag, picked up his hat and started for the door.
"Come back here!" Ross commanded sharply, springing to his feet. "Give me that damn fool gun—of course it's mine. How I came to lose it, and when, we don't remember, as you've said like a gentleman and a scholar, sir."
Hall delivered the weapon to Ross, who weighed it and turned it in his hand, a look of satisfaction in his eyes that told how much he prized it. He put it away in ​a drawer of his desk, and solemnly offered Hall his hand.
"The incident is dead," he said.
"And buried," Hall rejoined.
"Will you—step out with me and join me in a little refreshment, Doctor?" Ross proposed, looking at Hall with straight, meaning, invitational glance.
"Why, I"—Hall hesitated a moment—"I'll be honored to do so, Dr. Ross."
Whereon Old Doc Ross settled his hat firmly within an eighth of an inch of his savage eyebrows, took his younger confrère by the elbow with every mark of affection and hospitality, and marched him out into the blazing sun; escorted him in dignity to Pink Fergus' door, opened it with free and easy flourish, followed his new friend and astonished guest within, and ordered ice-cream with as much consequence as if it were champagne across the White Elephant bar.