Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/105

 thousand cases like it, but I'll bet money he never had one before."

"The company'll wish it'd kep' Old Doc Ross—"

"Here he comes!" Fergus warned, cutting Kraus short.

Dr, Hall passed the loafers as if they were so many stones, although he recognized all of them as members of the late moral force behind Ross. He relieved the woman whom he had engaged to watch by Major Cottrell. The patient had regained consciousness, she reported, and fallen into a weary sleep.

Hall felt that he had been unfaithful to his charge, in a measure, concerned to see that he had been gone four hours, although there was nothing more to be done for Cottrell in his present state. Not altogether undisturbed by what had passed since his arrival in Damascus, nor entirely quiet concerning the future, Hall took up his vigil beside the wounded man, the black book that had brought the scorn of Jim Justice upon him, in his hand.

This was a book not more than a quarter as big as the standard medical volume, and as much like such work outwardly as it was inwardly, although it had much to say of a man who had suffered a wound. Tristram Shandy was the name of that book. Dr. Hall sat reading it by the window until the light of day failed away in the west. He was reading it by the light of the lamp when Mrs. Cottrell and her daughter Elizabeth entered the room something past ten o'clock that night.

Mrs. Cottrell was a placid lady several years younger than her husband, a capable woman, firm without severity. She still had much of the grace of figure and face that had been her fame throughout the far-set army posts of the western frontier thirty years before. A comely woman,