There was a beginning, a middle, and finally a scrubbing down of the wagon. The mere steam of a croup kettle set him in mind to pay a visit and was enough to recall one by one his pictures of the great troop of the afflicted. He was a midnight vivisectionist in a cat hospital. When the kettle sang there was no stopping until the point was put to flesh. The little ribs clicked along the backs of his hands, he looked at them and then at the Indian who would sit for him until he ended on his knees with a pail and lick of sponge.
“That’s bad. That feculence buries itself in the root and then one night it comes out in the brain. Even the black salve won’t stop it.”
The beginning was nothing but a look into his pockets, a tug on the vest, a pacing now and then interrupted with a quick, open mouthed inspection. It was a moment of osmotic consideration when, from the vantage of his long walk across broken backs, he could again with serious brows glance down upon the undecided paths of youth. Even when he was only thinking of what he would do to her, before the old deftness came into his warty fingers, he was a man apart, not to be disturbed. So cheerfully preoccupied that when the wagon shook he merely steadied himself with a violinist’s precious hand. And when they shouted, “Come on out of there. We’re going to steal your horse,” he simply put his ear to the wood and nodded.
From the darkness Bohn challenged the wagon, his mastiff voice close upon the back steps. “Ho, Doc, we’re going to kill the Finn.”
But Leech was already to the middle of the one last operation. Slippers padding, pushing the pan near with his toe, he gripped the Indian’s face to his hip. Smashes of greasy hair rubbed the smoking vest. “Black salve … won’t help.”
Bad breath, his whole failing system came through his open teeth, second only to the ether. It was the odor of a lopsided, glistening face, the smell of air tasted in advance before it leaves the bloodstream. Closer, that taint of breath, always absorbing, draining, smelling of a dozen others, it clicked short then commenced again with spores and a squinting whistle. He breathed off the aroma of a poultice. The crook stayed in his arm until he was done.
Not once did the Indian with violet pudendum close her eyes. A shifting of the fat woman leg tops, a twitch of the jingling body and she was still, reaching upward mutely a dark spot on her forehead. The ether, tilted under her nose as if he would make her drink, slowed the rise and fall of the sweatered chest, brought no unconsciousness.
Leech staggered coldly with it himself, pulled her into a better light. The pitch of his bland probing, the ether jag height of diagnosis was upon him and he began, pressing the lip, to make out the selected crooked shell as with a red line.
Once more there was the squawk of wheels, a thudding against the wagon and Cap Leech’s hold was jarred. Sensing the cut of leather, the tramp of feet, he felt the shafts fall dead and knew that the wagon was no longer powered.
“Finn, can you climb up there alone?”