Swan Peterson
Old “Doc” Dust drove up in a squeaky buggy with an ancient top. His lazy gray mare seemed glad to get her feet into the hollowed ground in front of the hitching rail.
Certain types in the medical profession are never called anything but “Doc,” except when more profane appellations are required. Dust was a befitting name for the old man, for he appeared to be much dried up. His parchment like skin was drawn tightly over his protruding cheek bones, and his emaciated figure seemed almost ready to blow away. A frayed Prince Albert coat was secured with one button at the waist, and a rusty plug hat was jammed down on the back of his head. These things were evidently intended to impart a professional air, but they completed a sad satire. The Doc looked like a hypocritical old scamp.
Much human character, or the lack of it, may be indicated by a hat, and the manner of wearing it, particularly if it is a “plug.” Worn in the ordinary conventional way, a “correct” plug is supposed to provide a roof for a certain kind of dignity, but usually it indicates nothing beyond a mere lack of artistic sensibility. Tipped forward, it suggests sulkiness, obstinacy, and self-complacency—a sort of sporty rowdyism, when worn on one side—and disregard of the rights and opinions of others, when it is tilted back of the ears.
Of course the condition and the year of coinage of the plug enter into the equation and complicate it, but even a very shabby plug is an entertaining story teller. To a careful and discriminating student of human folly, it is replete with subtleties.
A Fiji Island cannibal, whose only wearing apparel was a plug hat, was once made chief of his tribe on account of it. It was probably as becoming to him as it had been to the spiritual adviser he had eaten. Such dignity and distinction as it was capable of imparting was his. He had attained what is possibly the apotheosis of barbaric head dress of our age.
Doc carried two medicine cases under his buggy seat on his professional rounds. One of them was stocked with a dozen large bottles with Latin labels, and the other with small phials containing white pills the size of number six shot. If his patient preferred “Alopathy,” he or she got it with a vengeance. If “Homepathy” was wanted, the smaller receptacle was drawn upon. The “leaders” in the “Alopathy” box were castor oil—calomel, and quinine. Aconite and Belladona–100, and Magnesium Phos–10 occupied the places of honor in the other.
Dust had weathered several matrimonial storms, and his last wife was now under the wild flowers in the country cemetery, where the epitaph on the unpretentious stone—erected by her own relatives—was more congratulatory than sorrowful.
“Doc” Hopkins, or “Hoppy Doc” as he was irreverently dubbed along the river, was Dust’s only rival. The competition was bitter, and many untimely ends were ascribed by each of them to the other’s criminal ignorance. Hoppy Doc often told, with great relish, a story of Cornelia Kibbins, Dust’s first wife, alleging that after a year of tempestuous married life, she had fled to her father’s home late one winter night for refuge. Her irate parent refused her an asylum. He had felt greatly outraged when the wedding took place and never wanted to see his daughter again. In answer to the plaintive midnight cry at his door, he leaned out of a second story window and delivered a torrent of invective. As he closed the window he shouted, “Dust thou art, and unto Dust shalt thou return!”
The suppliant disappeared, and evidently the worm turned, for Dust was a physical wreck for a month afterwards. Old man Kibbins subsequently declared that while his daughter “was a damn fool, she had fight’n blood in ’er, an’ the Doc ’ad better look out fer squalls.”