“None of your business.”
“All right, boys, get the rope.”
Dr. Pilgrim’s austere presence asserted itself again.
“I don’t think you should hang him but certainly this type of irregular has got to be discouraged.”
“We hang them up by their thumbs, sometimes,” suggested the corporal.
“Then do that,” said Dr. Pilgrim. “He spoke of hanging me.”
. . . By six that evening the road outside was busy again. Two brigades of Sheridan’s finest were on Early’s trail, harassing him down the valley. Mail and fresh vegetables were moving toward the capital again and the raid was over, except for a few stragglers who lay exhausted along the Rockville Pike.
In the farmhouse it was quiet. Prince Napoleon was waiting for an ambulance from Washington. There was no sound there—except from Tib, who, as his skin slipped off his thumbs, repeated aloud to himself fragments of his own political verses. When he could think of no more verses he tried singing a song that they had sung much that year:
We’ll follow the feather of Mosby tonight;
And lift from the Yankees our horse-flesh and leather.
We’ll follow the feather, Mosby’s grey feather . . .
When it was full dark and the sentry was dozing on the porch someone came who knew where the step-ladder was, because she had heard them dump it down after stringing up Tib. When she had half sawed through the rope she went back to her room for pillows and moved the table under him and laid the pillows on it.
She did not need any precedents for what she was doing. When Tib fell with a grunting gasp, murmuring “Nothing to be ashamed of,” she poured half a bottle of sherry wine over his hands. Then, suddenly sick herself, she ran back to her room.
III
After a war there are some for whom it is over and many unreconciled. Dr. Pilgrim, irritated by the government’s failure to bring the south to its knees, left Washington and set out for Minnesota by rail and river. He and Josie arrived at St. Paul in the autumn of 1866.
“We are out of the area of infection,” he said. “Why, back in Washington rebels already walk the streets unmolested. But slavery has never polluted this air.”
The rude town was like a great fish just hauled out of the Mississippi and still leaping and squirming on the bank. Around the wharves spread a card-house city of twelve thousand people, complete with churches, stores, stables and saloons. Walking the littered streets, the newcomers stepped aside for stages and prairie wagons, bull teams and foraging chickens—but there were also some tall hats and much tall talk, for the railroad was coming through. The general note was of heady confidence and high excitement.
“You must get some cowhide boots,” Josie remarked, but Dr. Pilgrim was engrossed in his thought.
“There will be southerners out here,” Dr. Pilgrim ruminated. “Josie, there’s something I haven’t told you because it may alarm you. When we were in Chicago I saw that man of Mosby’s—the one we captured.”
Drums beat in her head—drums of remembered pain. Her eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and then seen the glory of the Lord hung up by the thumbs . . .
“I had an idea he recognized me too,” Dr. Pilgrim continued. “I may have been wrong.”
“You ought to be glad he’s alive,” said Josie in an odd voice.
“Glad? Frankly, that wasn’t my thought. A Mosby guerrilla would be capable of vindictiveness and revenge—when such a man comes west he means to seek out desperadoes like himself, the kind who rob the mail and hold up trains.”
“That’s absurd,” she protested, “you’re the one who’s vindictive. You don’t know anything about his private character. As a matter of fact—” She hesitated. “I thought he had a rather fine inner nature.”
Such a statement was equivalent to giddy approval and Dr. Pilgrim looked at her with resentment. He did not altogether approve of Josie—in Washington she had had three proposals within the year, actually six but, rather than be classed as a flirt, she did not count the ones she stopped unfinished. But almost from the moment her brother mentioned Tib Dulany she looked rather breathlessly for him among the swarms of new arrivals in front of the hotel.
Tib came to St. Paul with no knowledge of this. He had not recognized Dr. Pilgrim in Chicago, nor were his thoughts either vindictive or desperate. He was going to join some former comrades in arms further west, and Josie came into his range of vision as a pretty stranger having breakfast at the hotel lunch counter. Then suddenly he recognized her or rather he recognized a memory and an emotion deep in himself, for momentarily he could not say her name.
And Josie, in the instant that she saw him, looked at his hands, at where his thumbs should be but were not, and the smoky room went round about her.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” he said. “You know me, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Dulany. In Maryland—”
“I know.”
There was an embarrassed pause. With an effort she asked:
“Did you just arrive?”
“Yes. I didn’t expect to see you—I don’t know what to say. I’ve often thought—”
. . . Josie’s brother was out seeking an office—at any moment he might walk in the door. Instinctively Josie threw reserve aside.
“My brother is here with me,” she said. “He saw you in Chicago. He thinks you may have some idea of—revenge.”
“He’s wrong,” Tib said, “I can honestly say that at no time have I had such an idea.”
“The war isn’t over for my brother. And when I saw—your poor hands—”
“That’s past,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you as if it had never happened.”
“He wouldn’t like it,” she said, and then added, “but I would. If he knew you were at this hotel—”
“I can go to another.”
There was a sudden interruption. Tib was hailed by three young men across the room who started over toward him.
“I want to see you,” he whispered hurriedly. “Couldn’t you meet me this afternoon in front of the post office?”
“Tonight is better. Seven o’clock.”
Josie paid her bill and went out, followed by the eyes of the new arrivals, a dark young man with undefeated southern eyes burning under a panama and two red-headed twins.
“It didn’t take you long, Tib,” said the former, Mr. Ben Cary, late of Stuart’s staff. “We’ve been here three days and we haven’t found anything like that.”
“Let’s get out of here,” said Tib, “I have reasons.”
Seated in another restaurant, they demanded, “What’s it all about, Tib? Is there a husband in the wind?”
“Not a husband,” said Tib. “There’s a Yankee brother—he’s a dentist.”
The three men exchanged a glance.
“A dentist. Boy, you interest us strangely. Why are you running away from a dentist?”
“Some trouble during the war. Suppose you tell me why you’re in St. Paul. I was starting out to meet you in Leesburg tomorrow.”
“We’re here on business, Tib—or rather it’s a matter of life and death. We’re having Indian trouble up there. About two thousand Sioux are camped on our door-step threatening to tear our fences down.”
“You’ve come to get help?”
“Fat chance. Do you reckon the government would back a rebel colony against a privileged Indian. No, we’re on our own. We think we can persuade the chief that we’re his friends, if we can do him a big favor. Tell us more about the dentist.”
“Forget the dentist,” said Tib impatiently. “He just arrived here. I don’t like him and that’s the whole story.”
“Just arrived here,” repeated Cary meditatively, “that’s very interesting. They have three here already and we’ve been to see them all and they’re the most cowardly white men that ever breathed—” He broke off and demanded, “What’s this man’s name?”
“Pilgrim,” said
Tib, “but I won’t introduce you.”
Another glance passed between them and they were suddenly uncommunicative. Tomorrow they would all start for Leesburg—Tib was relieved that it was not tonight. But his relief would have been brief had he heard their conversation when he left them.
“If this dentist has just arrived he’s still traveling, so to speak—a little bit further won’t hurt him.”
“We won’t consult him. We’ll have the consultation out where the patient is.”
“Old Tib would enjoy it—right in the Mosby line. But then again he might object. It’s been a long time since I saw a girl like that.”
IV
Dr. Pilgrim began the installation of his office that evening—Josie gave an excuse to remain at the hotel to sew. She slipped out at seven to the post office where Tib waited with a rented rig, and they drove up on the bluff above the river. The town twinkled below them, a mirage of a metropolis against the darkening prairie.
“That represents the future,” he said. “It doesn’t seem much to leave Virginia for—but I’m not sorry.”
“I’m not either,” Josie said. “When we got here yesterday I felt a little sad and lost. But today it’s different.”
“The trouble is that now I don’t want to go any further,” he said. “Do you know what made me change?”
Josie didn’t want him to tell her yet.
“It must have been the little signs of the east,” she said. “Somebody’s planted some lilac trees and I saw a big grand piano going through the street.”
“There’ll be no pianos where I’m going, but then there hasn’t been much music in Virginia for the last few years.” He hesitated. “Sometime I’d like you to see Virginia—the valley in spring.”
“ ‘Lynchburg thy guardsmen bid thy hills farewell’,” she quoted.
“You remember that?” He smiled. “But I didn’t want to stay there. My father and two brothers were killed and when Mother died this spring it was all gone. And then life seemed to start all over again when I saw your pretty face in the hotel.”
This time she didn’t change the subject.
“I remembered waking up that morning two years ago and crawling off through the woods trying to think whether a girl cut me down or whether it was part of the nightmare. Afterwards I liked to believe it was you.”
“It was me.” She shivered. “We really ought to start back. I must be there when my brother comes in.”
“Give me a minute to think about it,” he begged, “it’s a very beautiful thought. Of course I would have fallen in love with you anyhow.”
“You hardly know me. I’m just the only girl you’ve met here—” She was really talking to herself, and not very convincingly. Then after a minute neither of them were talking at all. In such a little time, that place, that hour, the shadow cast by the horse and buggy under the stars had suddenly become the center of the world.
After a while she drew away and Tib unwillingly flapped the rein on the horse’s back. They should have made plans now but they were under a spell more pervasive than the breath of northern autumn in the night. They would meet tomorrow somehow—the same place, the same time. They were so sure that they would meet—
Dr. Pilgrim had not returned and Josie, all wide awake, walked up the street to his office, a frame building with rooms for professional men. She stepped into a scene of confusion. A group gathered around the colored scrubwoman trying to find out exactly what had happened. One thing was certain—before Dr. Pilgrim had so much as hung out his shingle he had been violently spirited away.
“They wasn’t Indians,” cried the negress, “they was white people dressed up like Indians. They said they chief was sick. Whenever I told them they wasn’t Indians they begun whoopin and carryin on, sayin they was goin to scalp me sure enough. But two of them had red hair and they talk like they come from Virginia.”
The life went out of Josie—and terror took its place. No vindictiveness, no revenge—and this was what his friends had done while he gallantly occupied her attention. An eye for an eye—no better than men had been a thousand years ago.
Traces of the guilty parties appeared. A number of citizens had noticed the “Indians” when they entered the building, and assumed it was horse-play. Later that night a wagon, accompanied by riders who answered the negress’s description, had driven out of town on the run.
Josie remembered the name Leesburg, a trading post, two days journey west of St. Paul. She had letters of introduction not yet presented and next day some sympathetic merchants helped her get the ear of the commandant at Fort Snelling. At noon, accompanied by a detail of six troopers, she started for Leesburg on the Fargo stage.
V
Dr. Pilgrim had once before been kidnapped for professional reasons, so the experience did not even have the charm of novelty. To be carried off by imitation Indians somewhat paralyzed his faculties at first, but when he learned the reason for the abduction he expressed this opinion fluently:
“For the sake of a savage!” he raged. “Why, Indians don’t know what dentistry is: they have their medicine men—or nature takes care of them.”
They sat in a wooden blockhouse, one of the half dozen edifices of Leesburg. A caucus of citizens, all hailing from below the Mason-Dixon line, listened with interest to the conversation.
“Nature didn’t take care of Chief Red Weed,” said Ben Cary, “so you’ll have to. You see before he had the toothache he didn’t mind the fences—now he’s calling in his braves from over the Dakota line. Like to ride out to their village and take a look?”
“I don’t want to see hide or hair of any Indians!”
“It isn’t his hide—it’s his teeth.”
“Confound his teeth! They can rot away for all I care.”
“Now, Doctor, that seems kind of inhuman. The chief is a savage, like you say, but the government says he’s a noble savage. If he was a darky wouldn’t you go for that tooth?”
“That’s different.”
“Not so different. This Indian is mighty dark, isn’t he boys? Especially when you get him in his wigwam. While you’re operating you can just pretend he’s a nigger—then you won’t mind it a bit.”
The tone of bitterness only stiffened the doctor’s resolution.
“It’s the insult to my profession. Would you kidnap a surgeon to sew up an injured wildcat?”
“Red Weed isn’t so wild. He may even take you into his tribe. You’d be the only redskin dentist in the world.”
“The honor does not appeal to me.”
Cary tried another tack.
“In a way, you’ve got us, Doctor—we can’t force you. But we believe that if you fix up one sick Indian you can save women and children from what happened here in ’62.”
“That’s a matter for the army—they handled the rebellion.”
He was on thin ice now but there was no answer except a long silence.
“Boys, we’ll let the doctor think it over.” Cary turned to the Indian interpreter, “Say to Red Weed that the white medicine man won’t come to the village today because he must purify himself on his arrival.”
An hour after this interview Tib Dulany accompanied by a guide rode into Leesburg on lathered ponies; he had read the morning paper in St. Paul and set out long before the stage. He was wildly angry when he dismounted and faced Ben Cary.
“You damned fools! They’ll send troops from St. Paul.”
“It was an emergency, Tib—we acted the best way we knew how.” He explained the situation but Tib was unsympathetic.
“If anybody shanghaied me I’d rather be shot than do what they wanted.”
“Didn’t you do a little body-snatching for Mosby in your day?”
“There’s no comparison. What do you reckon that girl thinks of me now?”
“That’s a pity, Tib, but—”
Gradually as he talked of the imminent danger the image of Josie temporarily receded from Tib’s mind.
“Pilgrim�
�s a stubborn man,” he said. “Does he know I’m one of you?”
“I thought you wouldn’t want that mentioned.”
“Well, it seems I’m in it now. Maybe I can do something. Tell him there’s another patient wants to see him—that and nothing more.”
Dr. Pilgrim had braced himself resolutely against persuasion—and when Tib came to the door a tirade was on his tongue. But the words were not spoken—his jaw dropped and he stared as his visitor said quietly:
“I’ve come to see you about my thumbs.”
Then Dr. Pilgrim’s eyes fell upon what a pair of gloves had hidden in Chicago.
“An odd sight,” said Tib. “I found it an inconvenience at first. But then discovered I could think about it two ways, as a battle wound, or as something else.”
The doctor tried to summon up that moral superiority so essential to his self-respect.
“In other days,” continued Tib, “It would have been quite simple. These Indians out here would understand. They have a torture that isn’t very different—put thongs through a man’s chest and hang him up till he collapses.” He broke off. “Dr. Pilgrim, up to now I’ve tried to consider my thumbs as a war wound, but out here closer to nature I begin to think I was wrong. Perhaps I ought to collect my bill.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“That depends. You did a cruel thing. And you don’t seem to feel any regret about it.”
“It was perhaps an extreme measure,” admitted the doctor uneasily. “To that extent I am sorry.”
“That’s a lot from you, but it isn’t enough. All I asked of you that day in Maryland was to pull that Frenchman’s tooth. That wasn’t so terrible, was it?”
“No, it wasn’t. I tell you I do regret the incident.”
Tib got to his feet.
“I believe you. And to prove it you’ll come along with me and pull another tooth. Then we’ll call the account square.”
The doctor was trapped, but in his moment of relief he could find no words of protest. Irascibly he picked up his bag and a few minutes later a little party started for the Indian village through the twilight.
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