Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/132

 on that side seem snug, but here, on the other hand, there was no boundary. The gray land merged dimly into the sky.

"Yes, I had that thought the evening I came here," Hall said softly. "The sun was only a hand's breadth high; I could look under it to the uttermost bounds of the earth, it seemed to me. I filled up on something I never had tasted before. It made me glad."

Elizabeth turned to him eagerly, appreciation in the line of her parted lips, her animated eyes.

"I felt as if I'd come home that evening, after long wanderings. I was glad to be here. I said, just as you have said, that it was a place for a man."

"Then you'll stay," she said conclusively.

"It didn't look so good to me next day. I think the people at the inquest spoiled it for me, together with the way the country seemed to pull me into its troubles and feuds as a sort of sardonic joke. I don't know, Miss Elizabeth, whether it will ever look as good to me again as it did that first evening. It seems a long time ago."

"We've got to have a doctor in Damascus," she said with business-like decision. "When the board investigates old Ross they'll find him nothing but a quack and a fraud. He'll have to go back to his peddling. But it makes little difference whether he goes or stays, we need a doctor here."

"It's not very alluring."

"This is going to be the biggest town west of Dodge."

"That's what the railroad people say. Even at that, it wouldn't be much of a place for a doctor to realize on his aspirations."