“Have you family ties?” the doctor asked. He liked the grit this man’s manner indicated.
“None that need to be counted,” was the brief reply.
The doctor noticed that his patient wasted no extra words in self-pity. “That’s good! It lessens a man’s worries. And—where are you staying, Mr. Noland?”
“At the hotel, till I get a place on a farm. Before I invest I’m going to get my bearings about farms, by working around till I get on to things. You don’t know of a place where a man could work for his board for a month till the spring seeding and things come on do you?”
He was pushing the cuticle back from his finger-nails as they talked, and Doctor Morgan smiled.
“Those hands don’t look much like farm work,” he said.
The man laughed easily. “Oh, that’s habit. I’ll get over it after a while.”
“You will if you work for these yahoos around here much. Why don’t you invest in land and have your own home right from the start? A man like you can’t live in the kind of houses and do the kind of work You’ll find in this country.”
“I wouldn’t work for myself—I’ve nothing to work for. When you take away a man’s chances to marry and live the normal life, you make a sluggard of him. I’ve got to have a partner, and have his interests to serve as well as my own, or I won’t work, and in the meantime I want to look about a bit before I pick up some one to go into business with. I won’t be long finding some one.”
“No whine in him,” was the doctor’s mental comment, but what he said was: “Well, You’ll find life about here a bit dull. Come in, and make yourself at home in this office while you’re in town, and I’ll see what I can do about finding a place for you.”