Page:Arrowsmith - Sinclair Lewis.pdf/198

 The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had been well for four years? The County Commissioners and the County Board of Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the next county. He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every meeting of the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was uncertain whether Martin would be ruined or throned.

Leora saved him, and the seamstress. "Why not take up a collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can be treated, or where they can keep her if she can't be cured?" said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium—and was amiably forgotten by everybody for the rest of her life—and his recent enemies said of Martin, "He's mighty smart, and right on the job." Hesselink drove over to inform him, "You did pretty well this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you're settling down to business."

Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of small-pox and several which he suspected. Some of these lay across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink's domain, and Hesselink laughed at him. "It's probably all chicken-pox, except your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox in summer," he chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two counties, proclaiming the scourge, imploring every one to be vaccinated, thundering, "There's going to be all hell let loose here in ten or fifteen days!"

But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheatsylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and he preached against it. The villages sided with him. Martin went from house to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them without charge. As he had never taught them to love him and follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued long and easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk. Though for weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid coffee of the countryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose him from the pulpit.

And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the first case did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.

He had only a little resented their gossip about his wickedness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated