“You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart, if you don’t put on a banner I’ll see to it that everybody in town notices it!”
While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that Wheatsylvania was the “Wonder Town of Central N. D.,” Martin’s clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom remarked, “I like to see a fellow have some public spirit and appreciate the place he gets his money outa,” the citizenry nodded and spat, and began to question Martin’s fame as a worker of miracles.
III
He had intimates—the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the garageman—to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too intimate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that it was quite all right for a young professional man to take a timely drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it by yearning over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the clergy Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never concealed.
If he was bored by the United Brethren minister’s discourse on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous pay of pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in the garageman’s salty remarks on the art of remembering to ante in poker.
Through all the state there were celebrated poker players, rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-sleeves, chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was “By me,” and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescending traveling salesmen. When there was news of a “big game on,” the county sports dropped in silently and went to work—the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker from Vanderheide’s Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat man from Melody who had no known profession.
Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the Valley), they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the office of the Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable; it was littered with robes and long whips, and the smell of horses mingled with the reek of gasoline.
The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the floor for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in the game. The stink of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap powerful cigars hovered about the table like a malign spirit; the floor was scattered with stubs, matches, old cards, and whisky bottles. Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingleblad the barber, and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to flannel undershirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards, eyes squinting and vacant.
When Bert Tozer heard of the affair, he feared for the good fame of Wheatsylvania, and to every one he gossiped about Martin’s evil ways and his own patience. Thus it happened that while Martin was at the height of his prosperity and credit as a physician, along the Pony River Valley sinuated the whispers that he was a gambler, that he was a “drinking man,” that he never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning, “Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the dogs.”
Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the well-meant greetings: “You ought to leave a little hooch for the rest of us to drink, Doc,” or “I s’pose you’re too busy playing poker to drive out to the house and take a look at the woman.” He was guilty of an absurd and boyish tactlessness when he heard Norblom observing to the postmaster, “A fellow that calls himself a doctor just because he had luck with that fool Agnes Ingleblad, he hadn’t ought to go getting drunk and disgracing—”