“A doctor’s wife gets over ‘expecting’ very young, Billy. They won’t think I’m dead if I don’t come home to lunch. But your mother?” His inflection finished the question.
“She’ll be all right. May Nell and me—I—we took our lunch and went over to Potter’s pasture. Shoot! She’s waiting now! I hope the poor little kiddie—little girl—eats, don’t wait for me,—she an’ Bouncer.”
“Oh, she’ll eat when she gets hungry, never fear.”
But Billy thought with pride that May Nell was one person he knew better than the Doctor.
They turned into the town’s finest hotel, just opened.
“I didn’t—I haven’t washed. I’m—” All at once as Billy walked through the tiled entrance, and felt himself in the midst of splendors he had viewed only from without, he was overcome with the suspicion that he looked rather queer beside the immaculate Doctor. He knew his hair “stood up all ways for Sunday”; and his face must be dirty. “But they won’t know how dirty,” he reflected; “this is the time them plaguey freckles’ll get in an’ hide the dust.” Freckles were Billy’s sorest point.
“Come with me, Billy; I must wash up. I’ve had a dusty drive up Spring Mountain; you know the roads aren’t watered up there.”
Billy looked the Doctor over and wondered. He was not subtle enough to suspect the Doctor’s purpose. “Golly! I’d hate to have to wash as much as a doctor,” he exclaimed, as they stepped into the exquisitely appointed lavatory. “You look now like you’d just had a Turkish bath. But I’m glad of the chance for myself.” He surely did look better when the two came out and crossed to the big dining-room; though there was a tell-tale streak around his neck, and his crown lock stood stiff and divided.
At first he could not eat with relish, his mind was so distracted with admiration of the magnificent room, and impatient to get his worrying secret off his heart and conscience. But his wise host ordered so artfully, and filled the intervals of waiting with such delightful stories and anecdotes, explanations of the decorations, funny facts or conjectures concerning the hotel and guests, that before he knew it, Billy had, he told his mother afterward, referring to his stomach, “loaded her up to the guards, ’nough to make you ’shamed of me, mother.”
When they entered the Sheriff’s office again it was two o’clock. He was there, and gave Billy a private audience far more graciously than he would have done had not Doctor Carter’s presence been voucher for the importance of the matter. When the boy repeated his story, less confidently, less dramatically than before, yet not needing the Doctor’s comment to prove its value, the Sheriff drew a long breath and emphasized it with a blow of his fist on the table.