“The position was a sinecure in a way, but I captured an occasional accident case that paid something, and the position of surgeon to the railroad gave me a certain amount of prestige among the country folk around. Then too, I had an annual pass over the road, and that helped some. It would have helped more if I had had time to ride and money for meals on the dining cars. Small though my railroad practice was, however, I had occasion to thank the Lord that I was a railroad surgeon and that one of my patients had a good memory, before I was done with the job. “The winter of ’80 and ’81 was a hard one, and practice was not a simple, lightsome game. It seemed to me that when I had important work to do, my patient was always a long way off in some out of the way farm house, or at a crossing station where the trains ran every other week. “The day before Christmas I received a call to attend a gunshot injury, about fifty miles from my home. The weather was abominable, being cold and stormy enough to make the hungriest and most ambitious young surgeon hesitate to face it. They get the blizzards from that devilish Medicine Hat at first hand up there, you, know--the raw stuff in the way of weather. But needs must when patients called, and as there was nothing to do but face the music I took the first and only available train for X----. “My patient lived some miles away from the little hen coop of a station, the several stores and half a dozen houses that constituted the little town. A couple of young country yokels, eighteen or twenty years of age, met me at the train with a buck-board. There was just snow enough drifting to make the roads almost impassable here and there, but not enough for sleighing, so that the trip was not the pleasantest I had ever experienced. “It was supper time before I had finished with the wounded man, and I was as hungry as a Sioux Indian on a long trail in the Bad Lands. I was very glad to participate in the humble but abundant meal. “Supper over, I was informed that there was just time to catch the south bound train--then to the buckboard and miserable roads again; the gawky country boys who had met me at the train still doing the honors. When we arrived at the station, what was my disgust to learn that my train was fully two hours late. “The prospect of spending the entire evening at a little tumble down way station waiting for a belated train was too uninviting for adequate description. As the storm was increasing every moment and the fierce wind was piling up the snow drifts higher and higher across the railroad tracks, there was no certainty that the expected train would come at all. My prospects for getting home that night were certainly dubious--locomotives stalled in snow drifts were sufficiently familiar to me to make me decidedly uneasy.