She might have been even more glad if she could have foreseen the result of Aleck’s staying at the Ridge.
CHAPTER XV.
And even as Ess installed herself as sick nurse at the Ridge there was being enacted over at the township another sick-bed scene, which was still closer bound up with the threads of her own life.
Mrs. Durgan was sinking fast. The doctor had been called in hot haste, and the woman’s child was born, and died, and the mother walked with faltering steps on the very brink of death.
She still lay in the bedroom of the house next the police station, and the trooper’s wife was still attending her. The doctor had told her that the end was very near, that there was not the slightest hope, and that he must go now. So he left her there, and went out and strapped his instrument case to the saddle, and mounted and rode down the quiet dusty street, to carry himself and his skill and his instruments for long miles across parched plain and hardly discernible tracks, to where some other sufferer was patiently waiting the relief he rode so hard with.
And although the lake-level plains, with the mirage gleaming on the horizon, and the pleasantly cool trees and bushes all looking innocent and peaceful enough, there was no doctor, whoever tended the wounded under fire or carried a stricken soldier back into the friendly shelter of the trenches, who faced a greater risk or took more chances with his life than this rough out-back doctor in the wide-brimmed hat and the red-dusty clothes.
If the horse he rode put its foot in one of the rabbit holes that riddled the plains; if he dismounted to walk and stretch his saddle-weary limbs, and the horse broke away and left him; even if he strayed off the track, which was so faint that a man who was not a bushman would examine the ground for it in vain, the patient out there might wait and wonder why the doctor hadn’t come when he promised, and suppose that some more urgent case had detained him. And if the doctor were missed in time, and the black trackers laid on, and no rain came to wash out his tracks, and no dust storm blew over them and hid them, he might be found alive—or dead. But in a country where the sheep tanks are the only water within hundreds of miles; where the same tanks are merely holes scooped in the plain, with nothing to mark them until you are right on them; where an ordinary paddock is ten miles across, and you may walk forty miles round the fence and see no soul, and have to cross into the next paddock and repeat the walk; where the sun is beating down like iron flails; where the ground underfoot is hot enough to burn the soles of the boots off the heat-rotted stitches; where every drawn breath dries the moisture out of a man’s body, the man who is lost and without water does not walk far or live long.
So a doctor in the back country has to be a bush man who can find an unerring way by dark or light, a rider who, when his own horse is knocked up, must be able and willing to sit any half-broken brute he can pick up, or at a pinch swim a flooded river “running a banker,” with whirling tree trunks and drowned bullocks to add to the hazard, as well as a man brave enough to count life and death risks as nothing worth the counting; who on every round he makes must ride, with his own life in the hollow of his hands and the strength of his knee-grip, to keep the flame of life alive in other people; and, lastly, a man who has body strength and endurance to sit in the saddle, to ride, to walk, to drive, or to swim through a long day; on again through the night, and, if need be and the case is urgent enough, to take the road and start over again. A doctor is a doctor, but in the outside country he is a great deal more—or he is a great deal less.
So the doctor left Mrs. Durgan, first, because he could do no more for her, and second, because at the end of some of those long miles there was someone else he could do perhaps everything for.