Frontier and pioneer life -- Idaho -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction; Western stories
"Thank you, I can't stop. My brother has been hurt terribly. A sheep
herder attacked him and beat him almost to death. He must have a doctor
at once. Can you send to town for me?"
Harry spoke rapidly. She was spent with weariness and heartache, and
the mention of Rob brought a strangling sob to her throat.
"How about! Mr. Holliday hurt!" Mrs. Robinson set the baby on the
floor, and putting her hands on her hips, stared in mingled curiosity
and sympathy at her visitor, and poured out questions and exclamations.
Wiping her forehead nervously with her handkerchief, Harry had turned
abruptly away. She shrank from the eager interest of a stranger,
and had to force herself to answer the woman's questions. "It's an
imposition, I know, to ask you to send to town for the doctor," she
said, "but I can't leave my brother alone long enough to go, and I
don't know how to ride very well, anyway."
"Sakes alive, girlie! Nobody don't have to ride to git him. You kin
just phone over. There's the phone right there. P'r'aps I better ring
him up for you. Like's not he's at the hotel gassin', 'stead of in his
office."
Harry was only too glad not to have to repeat her troubles to the
doctor; she sat limply in the rocking-chair and fanned herself with her
hat, while Mrs. Robinson hunted vocally among the front stoops in town
for "Doc" Bundy.
"If a body was to wait for him to come to his office," declared Mrs.
Robinson, "we could all die of old age before ever seein' him. I got
him, though. He's to the drug store gittin' him some sody. Hello, that
you, Doc? Yep, Mrs. Robinson. 'Tain't for us. Listen while I tell you,
so's you can come on."
When she had finished a lengthy description of Rob, his ranch, the
quarrel, and Rob's injuries, and had adjured the doctor to hurry and to
bring the sheriff with him, Mrs. Robinson dropped into her chair and
prepared to enjoy her visitor's call; but when she looked at Harry's
face, she exclaimed:
"You pore thing! You're all beat out, 'ain't you? You're as white as
curdled milk. See here! You catch hold of the young one and I'll hook
up the rig and carry you back home. Vashti can look out for the others
and get her dad's supper. I'll call her now."
Mrs. Robinson left the room followed by three or four tow-headed
youngsters, who were clamoring for bread and jam. Harry, with the baby
on her knee, leaned back in the plush rocking-chair and looked vaguely
about her. Evidently this was the room where the family lived, for
besides the big cookstove and the table covered with oilcloth, there
were a plush-covered lounge, a phonograph, and a very new, shiny bureau
with an immense plate-glass mirror. The Robinsons had money to spend
if not good taste in spending it, she decided; at the same time she
noticed the unpapered board walls, which were decorated with gaudy
calendars and advertising posters, and the china, which had evidently
been recruited from "prize package" cereal boxes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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