Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/139

130 "Lukie Marsh ought to have known better," he remarked. "I took the new time-tables there last week myself. It was Lukie that served you, of course; not her sister Jane?"

Still smarting under the discomfort of my unnecessary exertion, I intimated that I was, unhappily, a stranger to the personalities of both Lukie and her sister Jane.

"That is so, of course," assented the station-master cheerfully. "Still, you may take it from me that it would be Lukie. Jane would have had more sense. Not but what Lukie has her wits about her in general, but ever since she consulted that horse-doctor that came to Crossgate last autumn she has been absent-minded at times."

"I suppose consulting a horse-doctor was the first symptom of it?" I suggested with covert sarcasm.

"No; it wasn't that. He wasn't really a horse-doctor either, you must understand. That was only what old Doctor Page over at Crossgate called him.

The man has the methods and the knowledge of a common horse-doctor,' he said in a rage whenever the subject came up; 'and those who go to see him are asses.'

"Of course that was because he was nettled at the business the other was doing. However, the word got about and no one used it oftener than Hankins—that was the fellow's name—himself.

I'm not a doctor,' he said every night at the beginning of his talk; 'I'm Hankins the Medicine Man, known also in every important town in Great Britain and Ireland as Hankins the Make-You-Well. In Crossgate, however, I am called the Horse-Doctor. Now, my friends, would you rather be made well by a horse-doctor or kept ill by Doctor Donkey?'

"That was all he said about it; nothing personal, you