Langford of the Three Bars

by Kate Boyles Bingham; Virgil D. Boyles

“I’m ashamed to tell you, Mother White,” she half whispered. “It is—only—that I was afraid you hadn’t put enough cinnamon in the rolls. I like cinnamon rolls.”

“Lord love the child!” gasped Mrs. White, but without the least inclination to laugh. “Why, I lit’rally buried ’em in cinnamon. I couldn’t afford not to. If I do say it who shouldn’t, my rolls is pretty well known in Kemah County. The boys wouldn’t stand for no economizin’ in spice. No, sirree.”

She hastened wonderingly back to her kitchen, only to return with a heaped-up plate of sweet-smelling rolls.

“Here you are, honey, and they wont hurt you a mite. I can’t think what keeps that fool Doc.” She was getting worried. It was nearly four and he was not even in sight.

Now that she had them, Mary did not want the rolls. She felt they would choke her. She waited until her kindly neighbor had trotted back to her household cares, and pushed the plate away. She turned to her window with an exaggerated feeling of relief. It was hard to watch ceaselessly for some one to top that little rise out yonder and yet for no one ever to do it. But there were compensations. It is really better sometimes not to see things than to see—some things. And it was easier to keep her head clear when she was watching the road.

A younger White, an over-grown lad of twelve, came in from far afield. He carried a shot-gun in one hand and a gunny-sack thrown over his shoulder. He slouched up and deposited the contents of the bag in front of Mary’s window with a bashful, but sociable grin. Mary nodded approvingly, and the boy was soon absorbed in dressing the fowls. What a feast there would be that night if the men got back!

At last came the doctor and Gordon, driving up in the doctor’s top-buggy, weather-stained, mud-bedaubed with the mud of last Spring, of many Springs. The doctor was a badly dressed, pleasant-eyed man, past middle age, with a fringe of gray whiskers. He was a sort of journeyman doctor, and he had drifted hither one day two Summers ago from the Lake Andes country in this selfsame travel-worn conveyance with its same bony sorrel. He had found good picking, he had often jovially remarked since, chewing serenely away on a brand of vile plug the while. He had elected to remain. He was part and parcel of the cattle country now. He was an established condition. People had learned to accept him as he was and be grateful. Haste was a mental and physical impossibility to him. He took his own time. All must perforce acquiesce.

But as he took Mary’s wrist between well-shaped fingers disfigured with long, black nails, he had not been able as yet to readjust himself to old conditions after last night’s grewsome experience. He was still walking in a maze. He occasionally even forgot the automatic movement of his jaws. Ah, little doctor, something untoward must have happened to cause you to forget that! What that something was he was thinking about now, and that was what made his blue eyes twinkle so merrily.

Last night,—was it only last night?—oh, way, way in the night, when ghosts and goblins stalked abroad and all good people were safely housed and deeply asleep, there had come a goblin to his door in the hotel, and cried for admittance with devilish persistence and wealth of language. When he, the doctor, had desired information as to the needs of his untimely visitant, the shoulders of some prehistoric giant had been put to the door, and it had fallen open as to the touch of magic. A dazzling and nether-world light had flamed up in his room, and this Hercules-goblin with lock-destroying tendencies had commanded him to clothe himself, with such insistency that the mantle of nimbleness had descended upon all the little doctor’s movements. That this marvellous agility was the result, pure and simple, of black arts, was shown by the fact that the little doctor was in a daze all the rest of the night. He did not even make show of undue astonishment or nervousness when, clothed in some wonderful and haphazard fashion, he was escorted through the dimly lit hall, down the dark stairway, past the office where a night-lamp burned dully, out into the cool night air and into the yawning depths of a mysterious vehicle which rattled with a suspiciously familiar rattle when it suddenly plunged into what seemed like everlasting darkness ahead. He had felt a trifle more like himself after he had unconsciously rammed his hand through the rent in the cushion where the hair stuffing was coming out. But he had not been permitted the reins, so he could not be sure if they were tied together with a piece of old suspender or not; and if that was Old Sorrel, he certainly had powers of speed hitherto unsuspected.

Witchcraft? Ay! Had not he, the little doctor, heard ghostly hoof-beats alongside all the way? It had been nerve-racking. Sometimes he had thought it might just be a cow pony, but he could not be sure; and when he had been tossed profanely and with no dignity into the house of one White, homesteader, with the enigmatical words, “There, damn ye, Doc! I reckon ye got a move on once in your life, anyway,” the voice had sounded uncannily like that of one Jim Munson, cow-puncher; but that was doubtless a hallucination of his, brought about by the unusualness of the night’s adventures.