As the years passed on and Carshena’s head whitened, it naturally grew to be a less and less easy task for Dr. Michel to bring his patient back to the place where he had been before apples ripened. If the situation had not tickled a spice of humor that lay under the physician’s grim exterior he would have refused these autumnal attentions. As it was he confined himself to futile warnings and threats of non-attendance, but he always did obey the summons when it came. The townsfolk of Leonard would all have taken the same humorous view of this weakness of Carshena’s but for the trouble which it gave his too-good sister Adelia—liked and pitied by every one. Adelia nursed her brother in each attack with a tenderness and anxiety that aggravated all the community. Nobody but his sister Adelia was ever anxious over Carshena. It was, therefore, like a bolt from a clear sky when, in this chronicled autumn, the following conversation took place at the Hubblestones’ gate. Dr. Michel’s buggy was wheeling out to the main road as Mr. Gowan, the town butcher, was about to drive through the gateway.
“Well, doctor,” called the genial man of blood, a broad grin on his round face, “how’s the patient?”
“He’s gone, sir,” said Dr. Michel, drawing rein. The butcher drew up his horse sharply, his ruddy face changing so suddenly that the doctor laughed outright.
“Gone!” echoed Mr. Gowan. “Not gone?”
“Yes, sir, as I warned him time and again he would go.”
The butcher shook his head and pursed his lips, the news slowly penetrating his mind. “Well, I certainly would hate to die of eatin’ apples,” he said at last.
“I guess you’ll find you hate to die of anything, when the time comes,” said the more experienced physician. “Carshena,” he added, “got nothing he didn’t bring on himself, if that’s any comfort to him.”
“Don’t speak hard of the dead, doctor,” he urged. “We’ve all got to follow him some day. He wasn’t a nice man in some ways, Carshena wasn’t, but—”
“He was a nasty old man in most ways,” snapped the doctor.