CHAPTER IX
THE ancient bromide to the effect that man proposes but God disposes was never better exemplified than in the case of John Stuart Webster, who, having formulated certain daring plans for the morrow and surrendered himself to grateful slumber in his stateroom aboard the Gulf States Limited, awoke on that momentous morn to a distinct apprehension that all was not as it should be with him. His mouth reminded him vaguely of a bird-and-animal store, and riot and insurrection had broken out in the geometric centre of his internal economy.
“I believe I'm going to be too ill to eat breakfast,” he told himself.
By seven o'clock this apprehension had crystallized into certainty. Webster had spent much of his life far from civilization, and as a result had found it necessary to acquire more than the layman's knowledge of rough-and-tumble surgery and the ordinary ills to which mortal is heir; consequently he was sufficient of a jack-leg doctor to suspect he was developing a splendid little case of ptomaine poisoning. He was aided in reaching this conclusion by memories of the dinner his friends had given him the night before, and at which he had partaken of a mallard duck, killed out of season and therefore greatly to be prized. He recalled the waiter's boast that the said duck had been hung for five days and had reached that state of ripeness and tenderness so greatly desired by those connoisseurs of food whose fool philosophy has been responsible for more deaths than most doctors. .
“That brute of a duck was too far gone,” Mr. Webster soliloquized bitterly. “And to think I'm killed off in the mere shank of my celebration, just because I got so rich and stuck-up I had to tie into some offal to show what a discerning judgment I had in food, not to mention my distinctive appetite. I ought to be knocked on the head with something, and I hope I may be if I ever accept any man's judgment in opposition to my own, on the subject of ripe mallards. This is what comes of breaking the game laws.”
He decided presently to go into executive session with the sleeping-car conductor, who wired ahead for a doctor to meet the train at the next station. And when the sawbones came and pawed Jack Webster over, he gravely announced that if the patient had the slightest ambition to vote at the next Presidential election, he should leave the train at St. Louis and enter a hospital forthwith. To this heart-breaking program Webster entered not the slightest objection, for when a man is seriously ill, he is in much the same position as a politician—to wit: he is in the hands of his friends. A sick man is always very sick—or thinks he is, which amounts to the same thing; and as a rule he thinks of little else save how sick he is. John S. Webster was, in this respect, neither better nor worse than others of his sex, and in his great bodily and mental depression his plans of the night before for getting acquainted with Dolores Ruey occurred to him now as something extremely futile and presumptuous. That young lady was now the subject least in his mind, for she was at most naught but a bright day-dream; whereas his friend Billy Geary was down in Sobrante with a rich wildcat mine waiting to be developed, while the source of development lay on a bed of pain assailed by secret apprehensions that all was over!
“Poor Billy-boy!” the sufferer murmured. “He'll wait and wait, and his old Jack-partner won't come! Damn that duck!”
He had one little stab of pain higher up, and around his heart, as they carried him off the train at St. Louis and stowed him in an ambulance thoughtfully provided for by telegraph. In a nebulous way it occurred to him that Fate had again crossed her fingers when paradise loomed on the horizon; but recalling how very ill he was, he damned the duck. He told himself that even if he should survive (which wasn't possible), there could be no doubt in his mind, after all he had been through, that the good Lord had marked him for a loveless, friendless, childless man; that it was useless to struggle against the inevitable. He felt very, very sorry for himself as the orderlies tucked him into bed and a nurse thrust a thermometer under his tongue.