But the zodiac was strong and he fell once more to creasing the paper against the round of his knee, tongue tip appearing at the corner of his mouth. He considered the indoor gardener’s calendar, a timetable of work, failure, and church holidays, with a slow beating of his heart and patient, slight movements in the cane chair. A gambled harvest, the weather, and days on which accidents were most likely to occur, he calculated; and he discovered, prodding the elements, that they were in the old of the moon. He shut it, leaned forward, and carefully lay it before him on sheets scrawled with dates of years long past and those still to come.
“Wade,” staring at Cap Leech, “go bring me that pointing dog. She shouldn’t be out back.”
The Sheriff stretched forth a palm like a large gland, then Leech; and they shook hands in the last quarter, some few hours after the Minnesota medicine man, hardly planning to pause, had entered Clare. And, having allowed the Sheriff to grasp his own quick fingers — despite lotions of disinfectants and the protection of rubber gloves in the past they were covered with growths of small warts — Cap Leech placed his black satchel on the desk between them, snapped it open. The odor of herbs and germicides, a sharp perfume, rose among the smells of leather and tarnished handcuffs. One smell was strongest, living faintly upon the body of the man with the small bag. Leech pushed up the dirty rolls of his sleeves — nothing tied concealed to that gray flesh — and, reaching into the satchel, brought forth a small tin can and placed it also on the desk. The can and a few pieces of metal were all that remained of the Leech who in his youth had stood thin, well washed, and stern before the cadaver of an aged negro.
Ether. It lay in the bottom of the can like turpentine. The Sheriff bowed slowly forward, sniffed once, twice. He breathed such fumes never before found floating in the far-country kitchens. But, foreign as they were even to the Sheriff, they were fumes that vaguely suggested the fractured leg, were tainted with the going under or coming out of a whimpering sleep. His head nodded. Then the Sheriff straightened and, fumbling with the blade of a little knife, cut at the insides of an apple-large cob pipe. It filled his hand, was covered with kernelless pock holes, missing teeth. He puffed quickly and the sweet fumes disappeared in tobacco smoke.
“You use that on them, then,” said the Sheriff.
“Sometimes,” answered Leech, “sometimes I don’t.”
“It’s in your clothes.” The Clare Sheriff was invested with the office to inspect, whip, or detain any unique descendant of the fork country pale families, was in a position to remember when they settled and how well or poorly they had grown. But before him stood a man concerned even more than himself with noxious growth, who was allowed, obviously schooled, to approach his fellow men with the intimate puncture of a needle.
“Why don’t you sit down?” said the Sheriff. Now and then he still caught a taste, some sort of chloride or oxide, at least a poison, of the medicine man’s evaporating drug. “What else you got in that bag?” He picked up his pamphlet, licked his thumb, then with a sweep cleared the smothered desk. “You fellows have it all,” he said in a friendly, uncertain voice to the stranger who, sixty himself, might have been discovered plucking under the chin an old man suffering a head cold. “Hurt them when you want to, collecting all those bottles and knives. But,” and the Sheriff looked to the door, “there’s not much doctoring or tooth pulling for you here.”
“That so.”
“I don’t believe there’s a tree standing within a hundred mile where you could hang a shingle. If there was, they’d tear it down.”