But Bob did not hear the rest of it, nor was it ever uttered indeed. For Mrs. McCord, when she found that her husband had gone, did not think it worth while to finish her lamentations; she only drew a sigh of complacent long-suffering and submission to fate, and went to sleep.
Hardened sinner that he was, Big Bob felt a little twinge of shame as he made his way rapidly to Butts's house. His wife's set speech about being more than half sick, often as he had heard it, and little as he had ever heeded it, had now made a sufficient lodgment in his consciousness to suggest a way out of his difficulty; but it was a way which a loafer of the superior sort, such as Bob, might feel ashamed to take, knowing that such a scheme as he was concocting would be an outrage on all the sacred principles of good neighborhood—an outrage only to be justified by military necessity. All the way to Butts's, hurried as he was, his hands were ramming his trousers-pockets, after his fashion of groping there for a solution of his difficulties. It was the carrying over into other affairs the habitual research which the hunter makes for bullets, caps, patching, or jack-knife to meet the exigencies of the forest.
Arrived at the unpainted, new frame-house, which, being two feet longer and one foot broader than any other in the neighborhood, was the particular pride of the Butts family, he noted that all the lights were out, and after hesitating whether to capture the horse by stealth or by strategy, he went to the front door and rapped. The head of the proprietor came out of one of the lower windows with an abrupt "Who's there?" spoken with that irritation a weary man is prone to express when awakened from his first nap to attend to some one else's wants.
"I say, Mr. Butts," said Bob, pushing his hands harder against the bottoms of his pockets, "kin I git the loan uv one uv your hosses un your leetle wagon to fetch the doctor? My ole woman's purty bad; been sick ever sence the sun was 'n 'our high, un we can't git nothin' to do no good."
"What seems to be the matter?" said Butts, wishing to postpone an unpleasant decision.
Bob hesitated a moment: lying is a dangerous business unless it is carried on with circumspection. "Blamed 'f I know jest what it is. I suspicion it's the dyspepsy."
The name of dyspepsia was new to the country at that day, though the complaint was ancient enough, no doubt. Just what dyspepsy might be Bob did not know, but he hit on it as the vaguest term he could recall and one that had a threatening sound. It would not have served his purpose to have repeated Mrs. McCord's diagnosis of her own case, that she was "feelin' kind-uh slarruppy like." "Whatever 'tis, she don't think she kin git through till mornin' 'thout I git a doctor."
"Well, I doan know. The sorrel's lame; un I don't like to let the bay colt go noways, he's sech a sperrited critter."
Butts drew his head in at this point to consult with Mrs. Butts as to how he could evade lending the cherished bay colt.
"Looky h-yer, Mr. McCord," presently called Mrs. Butts, keeping her nightcapped head well out of sight as she spoke, "you don't want no doctor nohow." Mrs. Butts had come by virtue of superior credulity to hold the position of neighborhood doctress, and she was not friendly to regular physicians. "You jest take along with you a bottle of my new medicine, 't I call the 'Scatter Misery,' It's made out-uh roots an' yarbs, an' it's the best thing I know fer mos' every kind of complaint. It's good insides an' outsides. You rub the Scatter Misery onto the outsides un give her a swaller now un then insides. It'll fetch 'er 'roun' in an hour or two."