Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/75

 hands, in the mighty business of laying and surfacing track. At any hour the doctor might be called to piece together some unlucky fellow who had been caught under a falling rail, or splint and bandage breaks and wounds of the most distressing severity. They might come for him with a handcar, to take him five miles, or with the work-train engine, to take him fifty.

If prominence was to be desired in a doctor's beginning in a strange place, the freight-car office left nothing unsatisfied in that respect. It stood at the end of Custer Street, protruding more than half its length beyond the building line of that thoroughfare, a barrier that swerved and deflected the stream of incoming and outgoing business. The car had been ceiled with bright new lumber, making it snug against the winter winds.

Pete Farley, the superintendent, was a big, gentle-spoken man with an Irish fairness in his broad face, an Irish strength in his long neck, brown splotches and red hairs on the backs of his walloping big hands. He made no ceremony of installing the new company doctor in his office. He turned over the surgical chair, the box of miscellaneous new instruments and supplies sent on from Topeka, the granite-ware water pails and basins, with a mention of Little Jack Ryan, who would keep the office scrubbed and provided with two white lanterns hung on each side of the door at night. For anything else he needed, Farley said, put on a wire to Topeka. Farley put on a wire for anything and everything. Operators along the line said he ordered a chew of tobacco that way. There was no time for letters in his busy life.

Farley warned the new doctor against the graders who lived in tents by the river at the edge of town. They