Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/267

 face began to wear a shadow of sadness as he turned these gaunt applicants away day after day.

Dr. Hall's popularity had increased, his fame had spread among these courageous pioneers who had come to this last frontier of Kansas to make homes and establish an industry where success seemed not a chance in a thousand. Hardly a day passed without a call to some distant homestead, where too often the mother of the family had been overtaken by accident or disease.

These were not the type of pioneers Major Cottrell had supposed them to be. Those hardy, self-doctoring, self-burying frontiersmen which he had in mind belonged to a generation past. These were more the products of civilization and interdependence. They were even subject to appendicitis, ailment unknown among the tough sodbreakers who subdued the central Kansas plains a generation before these more modern people came into: the country west of Dodge.

They appeared to consider Dr. Hall a sort of public institution, as has been said, something like a county surveyor or recorder of deeds, except that no fee ever figured in any of their dealings with him. They called him without hesitation or restraint of delicacy, to set their bones and cure their fevers, service which he never accepted until the possibility of Old Doc Ross had been eliminated by that notable's blank refusal.

It had become such a common thing to be called into the country on these charitable missions that Dr. Hall had bought a horse, which he boarded in Kraus' barn. But as he had not purchased the horse from Kraus, the liveryman looked on the creature with scorn only a degree tempered from the contempt in which he held its owner.