Hell on the Prairie (8 page)

He was roused from his writing about forty
minutes later, when his pipe had long gone out and the ashes had
gone cold, by a rapping on his consulting room door. He glanced at
the wall clock and sighed. It was not even eight o’clock, more than
an hour before his consulting time on a Tuesday, so whoever it was
clearly felt that they needed urgent medical attention.

“
OK, I’m coming,” he called as the
knocking continued.

He opened the door to behold a dapper man of
about his own age, dressed in a fancy suit with a low-crowned hat.
In his hand was a silver-topped Malacca walking stick, which
accounted for the loudness of the rapping. He had a thick but well
trimmed goatee beard, black tie and black gloves. His face was pale
and he looked in pain. A thin patina of perspiration covered his
brow.

“
Ah, Doctor Logan Munro, I presume,”
he said, glancing sideways towards the sign that hung by the
doorframe. “Please accept my apologies for my lamentable timing,
sir. It is just that my damned leg is killing me.”

He brought the cane down hard and thwacked
his left leg with it. There was the loud smacking sound of wood on
wood, but he didn’t as much as wince at the contact.

Logan looked down and saw one elegant,
highly polished boot. Beside it was a wooden peg leg that started
just below his knee.

“
It hurts like hell, doctor. I would
deem it a great service if you could help me out.”

Logan looked up at his face and saw a
startled look flash across his it, as if a sudden pain had pierced
through him. Then his eyes fluttered, and he swayed for a moment
before collapsing forward into Logan Munro’s arms.

***

After carrying the man to his couch, Logan
gave him a volatile waft of spirit of sal smelling salts to bring
him round, before helping him sit forward enough to take a mouthful
of medicinal brandy.

The man swallowed, then stared at him for a
moment, his expression one of bemusement.

Logan smiled reassuringly. “You fainted,
sir. Nothing more.”

“
Excuse me again, Doctor Munro,” he
said with a wan smile. “The name is Barclay Patterson. I just
arrived in Wolf Creek yesterday and I found to my horror that I
have left my medication at my last hotel. I usually take my first
dose as soon as I get up, and without it I am in agony.”

“
Where is the pain, Mr.
Patterson?”

“
This is where you will think me mad,
Dr. Munro. It is my wooden leg, it feels cold and it has a shooting
pain, as if I am being stabbed by cold steel all the way
down.”

“
Do you mean the stump is paining
you?”

“
No, sir. It feels like it is my own
leg as it was before it was cut off. I get this feeling all the
time, even when I am not wearing this damned peg leg. I can feel
the pain in my toes, even though I know they are not
there.”

“
And can you wriggle these invisible
toes?”

“
I feel as though I can. It sort of
makes me feel as if I am mad.”

“
You are not mad, Mr. Patterson. I’ve
come across it a lot since the War and figured out that it happens
when certain nerves were not adequately separated, and they end up
getting inflamed. The brain then messes up the signals from the
nerves and it thinks it is feeling pain.”

Barclay Patterson wiped some perspiration
from his brow and gave a wan smile. “That’s a relief to know –that
I’m not mad.”

Logan crossed the room and picked up a
magazine from a pile in the corner. “This is the latest issue
of
Lippincott’s Magazine of Popular
Literature and Science
,” he explained as he thumbed
through it and returned with it folded open at a page. “Curiously,
here is an article by Dr. Silas Mitchell of Philadelphia. He
started up a ‘Stump Clinic’ back there the year after the War
ended. He calls them ‘Phantom limbs.’”

Barclay Patterson ran his eye over the page,
then, to Logan’s surprise, tossed his head back and laughed. “So
I’m not mad,” he said after he stopped laughing. “I’m just haunted.
Haunted by my own goddamned leg!”

***

After administering a dose of laudanum mixed
with valerian, a combination of his own invention, Logan brewed
coffee and sat talking with Barclay Patterson. He knew from
experience not to pry too much into where and when a man lost a
limb. Some volunteered it freely, others were far more reticent,
which was understandable considering that feelings about the War
still ran high and those who had lost limbs had maybe more than
most to be resentful about. All that Barclay Patterson would let
out was that he had fought for the Union and felt let down by the
benefactions that the government had announced for those who had
lost limbs during the war.

“
Benefactions! Hogwash! They talked
about us all getting new limbs!” Barclay exclaimed sourly, before
giving a short sarcastic laugh. ”And what did I get? Just this
damned piece of timber that hurts so much.”

He took a sip of his coffee and then pointed
with the cup at the wall above Logan’s desk, at his framed degree,
a framed copy of the Hippocratic Oath, beside his citation for the
Crimean and Turkish Medals from the Crimean War, and to the picture
of Helen and himself on their wedding day in Lucknow, surrounded by
his comrades from the British East India Company.

“
You seem to have travelled a lot,
doctor. And I see that you are married. Does your good lady like
the frontier here?”

“
I am a widower,” Logan returned, his
eyes threatening to well up at the thought of Helen. “She died in
India.”

“
My condolences, Doctor. I am a
widower also. The hurt never goes, but I found that it softens.” He
pointed to the framed oath, screwed his eyes up to read, then
recited:

“’
I swear by Apollo, the healer, by
Asclepias, Hygieia and Panacea and by all the gods and goddesses of
the pantheon…’” He smiled. “Mighty fancy words. I am guessing this
is the famous Hippocratic Oath.”

“
It is, Mr. Patterson. Like all
university-trained doctors, I took that oath the day I qualified. I
find it a good philosophy for life.”

He stood up and crossed to his medical bag.
He delved inside and drew out a small bottle. “Here is enough
laudanum to keep you going for a couple of days. Come back then,
and I’ll have a fresh supply ready for you.”

Barclay Patterson lay his coffee cup down.
“That’s a big bag you have to carry around, Dr. Munro. I suppose
you need to carry a lot of medicines and instruments about with
you?”

“
I have to be prepared for any
eventuality, whether it is to deliver a baby, set a broken bone or
dig out a bullet. Wolf Creek may look like a sleepy frontier town,
but all sorts of things happen here.”

“
I imagine so.”

Barclay Patterson paid the bill, replaced
his wallet, then leaned forward and pushed himself upright –with
surprising nimbleness –and held out his hand.

“
Seems to me the good folk of Wolf
Creek are lucky to have you, Dr. Munro. I’ll call back as you
ordered for more of this life-saving medicine. And now, I wonder if
I could trouble you a little more. I am partial to the odd hand of
poker. Are there any establishments that could accommodate me here
in Wolf Creek?”

“
Saloons and gaming houses we have in
plenty, Mr. Patterson. All supplied with their own professional
gamblers. I would caution you to be careful, sir.” He told him
where each of them was to be found.

When he had left, Logan wondered whether
Barclay Patterson was an honest gambler or not. If not, then he
would have a real need to be very careful indeed.

***

Logan was kept pretty busy over the next
week with an outbreak of dysentery that seemed to rattle its way
through Dogleg City and then filter across Grant Street. He had
seen twenty-three cases, and prescribed his own concoction of tea
made from slippery elm bark, sweet gum, willow and dogwood to each
one. Between visiting these emergencies and keeping his regular
consulting hours, he had scant time to eat or sleep, let alone
check up on some of his regular patients. Among those that he had
managed to re-visit were some of the folks that had been wounded
during the Kiowa raid on the town a few weeks before, and little
Kenny Parker. Fortunately, the baby had not had a recurrence of the
croup attack.

Mollie Parker was apologetic about her
husband’s drunkenness and his behavior.

“
Rob is a good man, but when he takes
too many whiskeys at the saloon he doesn’t know when to stop. But
he is a good father to Tommy and Kenny. He worries about
them.”

Logan had listened sympathetically. Mollie
was one of the many widows that the War had created, but she had
been fortunate enough to meet and be courted by Rob Parker when he
came to Wolf Creek after the War. And Logan had to admit that he
had shown due concern for both his adopted son, Tommy Brewster, and
his own son, Kenny, whenever he had consulted Logan about an
ailment. He reassured her and got on with the rest of his
rounds.

After he had seen his last patient, he went
to Isabella’s Restaurant on Washington Street and ate a hearty meal
before heading to The Eldorado Saloon. He was in time to catch the
tail end of the Du Pree Players’ first act. He enjoyed a drink at
the end of the bar with Virgil Calhoun, the stout, jovial owner,
whose ingrowing toenail he had removed the week before.

The saloon was
full. The air was full of banter and raucous laughter following the
first part of the Du Pree Players’ show. One week a month, Howard
Du Pree and his partner Eddie Foyle were the house entertainers.
They had another five members who brought a range of skills and
talents, including singing, dancing, and a bit of conjuring,
juggling and fire-eating. But the things that they prided
themselves on most were their risqué excerpts from the works of
William Shakespeare. Eddie Foyle, whose female impersonations were
so good that he was not infrequently propositioned by a drunken
customer –much to the chagrin of several of the dance girls who
felt they had been slighted in the process –felt that it was their
way of bringing culture to the west.

The audience had shuffled away from
the elevated stage after laughing themselves raw as the players
performed a pastiche of
The Taming of the
Shrew
, in which the henpecked husband –played by the
tall beanpole Howard Du Pree –turned on the shrew, played to
perfection by Foyle, bending ‘her’ over his knee and delivering a
noisy spanking with the flat of his hand. Clearly, it was a
performance that struck a chord with many in the audience, if they
only had the gumption to confront their own sweet
shrews.

Logan had seen the play performed at the
Lyceum Theatre in London many years before, but had to admit that
the Du Pree version was far more comedic and better suited to a
very mixed Wolf Creek clientele.

“
You sure are a wizard with that
scalpel and those tong things of yours, Doc,” Virgil Calhoun said
in his South Carolina drawl, as he brought the conversation round
to his favorite topic – himself. “When you wrapped that rubber tube
around my toe I thought you were going to maybe lop the blasted
thing off. I don’t mind telling you that it was hurting me like
hell. Who would have thought that a darned toenail could dig in and
cause so much pain?”

Bob Sutton the bartender, a gangly middle
aged fellow with a grin as toothy as his boss’s, wiped spilled beer
from the counter in front of them and sucked air in though his
teeth. “I can’t say I’d care for that, Doc. What do you use them
tongs for?”

“
They’re called forceps, Bob,” Logan
returned with a grin. “I just stop the blood supply with a length
of rubber tube that I wrap round the toe, then I take a small wedge
of nail away before I shove one blade of the forceps down behind
the nail.” He held up his own left thumb and made gestures with the
first two fingers of his right hand to illustrate how the procedure
was done. “Then we clip it and yank the whole nail out. It’s a bit
like pulling a tooth, really.”

Bob Sutton grimaced and went pale as a
sheet. He turned to Virgil. “My jaw ached for a week when that
drunk dentist Doc Cantrell pulled one of my back teeth,” he said,
gingerly touching his cheek. “Do you mind if I help myself to a
snifter, boss? I reckon that’s the worst thing I could think of. I
feel like I might keel over.”

“
Worst blamed excuse I ever heard you
come out with for a free drink,” replied Virgil Calhoun with a
shake of his head. Then magnanimously, “Go on, then, before the doc
has another patient.”

Logan grinned and turned to lean his back
against the bar counter. The dance girls were ambling about, smiles
fixed and their charms all too clearly visible, while one of the Du
Pree Players bashed out a medley of musical favorites to keep the
punters in the mood for entertainment. All three gambling tables
were in action as the Wolf Creek hardened gamblers strove to beat
Lady Luck at poker, faro and monte.

“
Human nature never fails to amaze me,
Virgil,” Logan mused. “All of these men work their hides off in one
way or another to earn enough dollars to live. Then they come here,
play whatever game takes their fancy, and eventually hand their
money over to Tom Scroggins or one of your other dealers. And that
effectively means to you.”

Virgil Calhoun grinned as he hooked a thumb
into each pocket of his vest. “Well now, that is just the way that
the world works, Logan. Each to his own, I always say. People have
certain desires and I provide means for them to satisfy them. I
make sure that the games are honest, which is as fair as I can be.
What is wrong with me making a living out of it?”