West of Dodge

Front matter

West of Dodge

By George W. Ogden

Author of Trail's End, Etc.

Damascus

Whenever one comes upon a town, such as Damascus was in those days, such as others of its type are even now in the less-trodden spaces beyond, let him look for the reason of it instead of vexing his imagination. For there never was a town without a reason, let both town and reason be as inconsequential as next to nothing at all. A town cannot live upon itself: there must be somebody around to come for supplies to its stores, to claim the letters in its post office, to stand horses at its hitching-racks.

There was a reason for Damascus by the Arkansas, therefore, although it doubtless seemed remote and perplexing to those who passed by railroad train through that vast gray plain of western Kansas, tipping upward toward the sky. As you shall see in its time and place.

Damascus seemed only the seed of a town in those days, a seed blown far from its parent plant upon the straining winds which never ceased sounding in the ears day nor night; a seed that had sprouted weakly and languished for the need of rain. Here the Arkansas River came down from its mountain beginnings, as clear in the summer days as the sunlight that struck through it, revealing the ripples of its shallow bars. Flat upon the landscape it seemed to lie, as it seems yet to lie, as it will appear to the stranger who sees it for the first time as long as the snows supply its fountains and the willows bend beside it where old trails of forgotten buffalo trace the sad gray slopes.

It was said, and generally believed by people situated in fairer parts of Kansas in those times, that there was not much chance for a man west of Dodge. Based upon appearances, this seemed a conclusion well grounded, for it was a land of emptiness; bald, bleak, swept by never-resting winds. In summer the heat mounted to torrid intensity; in winter the storm pounced with untempered strength upon a land that offered no shelter of forest or wooded brake, except the thin line of cottonwoods and willows along the meandering Arkansas and its feeble, far-spaced tributary streams.

A land filled from horizon to horizon with endless humps of morose gray billowing hillocks, swell after swell, naked of tree and shrub; a land in its very configuration suggestive of the vast vanished herds of buffalo that once fed upon its meager succulence. It seemed that nature had fixed their likeness there in everlasting earth, prophetic, before their time, of their coming; reminiscent of their presence long after their evanishment.

Not much of a chance for a man west of Dodge.

Indeed, it looked that way in those times. But the same had been said of Abilene in its day, when the frontier of civilization was staked there across the Kansas plain; it had been said of Topeka by the first to come with plows and seed of the field into the valley of the Kaw. Adventure laughed at the limitations of the timid; time pulled up the stakes and set them forward and on. For where water runs and grass grows there always is a chance for a man.

Nature had done much to keep man out of the country west of Dodge, it is true, with its lack of wood, its scarcity of water; arid fierce summers, long and bitter winters, thin air light in the almost-mountain altitude. Yet man is an adjustable creature, and the beasts which serve him share his adaptability to change and conditions. Cattlemen had found their way far west of Dodge in the day, that you come to Damascus on the creaking wain of this story. They had spread their herds over the solemn hills which seemed to press forever like galloping buffalo down to the margin of the Arkansas; they had found profit in a land from which fear had withheld the unadventurous, and Damascus had risen by the side of the railroad to supply their needs, as well as to profit upon their follies.

The town was not as much then as it came to be in later years, as it is to-day, if you could identify it as you glide past on the California limited, cool bowers of elm trees in its green park, its paved streets swept clean by the wind that changes not with the years.

Yet it had its court house even that far back, it being a county seat. The people of Kansas always were a contentious lot: their history begins in controversies, their commonwealth was founded on a quarrel. Out of that ancient habit they always have been a great people for having court houses handy for the settlement, or prolongation, of their difficulties, as it may transpire after they bring them within the doors. The first thing they did was vote bonds for a court house whenever a few of them got together on the prairie and organized a county. It is altogether likely there are more court houses to the man, and better ones, in Kansas than any other state in the union.

Around this court house in Damascus, built of brick, although there was white limestone fit for palaces and railroad bridges close at hand, the town clustered its few dozen dwellings and flat-nosed business fronts. Damascus, being on the front of things, was a sort of permanent railroad camp in addition to its importance as a cattle-lands center. On its skirts there were settlements of dusty tents to shelter man, woman, and the inevitable result of such conjunction; where baled hay was piled high, and raw-boned mules stood hitched to long, unsheltered mangers chopping the sod to dust with stamping hooves.

Not a lovely place at all, this town; no umbrageous elm trees in that day along its sun-warped walks and dusty streets. If there was a flower of any kind within the confines of the place, it was a wild hardy one that wheel and hoof, and ground-gripping Kansas feet had spared. Somebody had set catalpa trees around the court house square, but the life had perished out of them when they had come no higher than the brim of a man's hat. A few of the dry, sad, twisted little trunks remained there still.

People were not thinking of ornamentation and beauty in Damascus in those days; only of the belief that a man hadn't much of a chance west of Dodge. Such of them as called it home were forging their efforts to hold on in the face of great natural odds, magnified by tradition and report.

The lights were out at Dodge City; the notorious characters who had given the town an infernal fame throughout the country were under the buffalo grass or scattered far. County attorneys were beginning to grow incor- ruptible in western Kansas; the state prohibitory law, which had stood a dead letter in that part of the state since enactment, was beginning to be enforced. These two conditions supplied the fuel for a last flare-up in Damascus, out on the very edge of things as it lay. The prosecuting attorney of that county was not an incorruptible man. He was one, at least, who saw a big chance for a person of his stripe lying around loose west of Dodge, and immediately proceeded to turn it into cash.

The result was that Damascus was just about as wide-open as lawlessness could pry it. Not so violently picturesque as Dodge had been; not so romantically gory. Yet trouble never was so far out of sight that a man could not find it if so bent. Now and then one made the discovery. Not always with happy finale.

Now another kind of adventurers were coming into that land which had felt successively the feet of the soldier, the railroad builder, the stockman, and the scum of the earth which hung parasitically upon them, sweepings which the broom of the law had purged from the threshold of well-regulated society. These newcomers were adventurers of the soil, men who came singly, with eyes far-set, as if they had followed elusive hope from the old places to that frontier, doubt upon them that they had overtaken it yet; who came with young wives at their sides, fresh in the vigor of united courage; who came old and stress-driven, out of the long, long road set with abandoned hearthstones, markers in their progression of defeat; who came in the strength of middle life, ruddy and bearded, with stripling sons and half-ripe daughters, and little ones bulging the canvas of their wagon-tops, as the Goths came to the Danube and knocked at the doors of Rome.

These home-hunters on the great tide that always has set the adventurers and the homeless of humanity sweep ing into the west, were as alien to that raw country as fruit to the desert. That was a time of great unrest among the landless of the older states, the tenant farmers, small landholders, cramped and hopeless of better things. An infectious courage seemed to have swept the country that spring, which resulted in the breaking of old moorings, the uprooting of old ties, and a general rush to the wide unpeopled rim of western Kansas.

It was an unprecedented tide of emigration, even for that state, where the phenomenal is the rule; it carried farther than agricultural enterprise ever had dreamed of penetrating before. If these brave pioneers ever had heard of the saying that there was not much chance for a man west of Dodge, they were undismayed by it, and unchecked. At any rate, there was no other place left for them to go. East of Dodge the best of it was taken; to the west there was plenty of room for freedom and a home. Men live in Iceland for no other reason than they are free.

Damascus had its dusty beginning at the railroad, where the little dark-red depot stood across the mouth of the principal street. This was called Custer Street, in honor of the commander of the historic Seventh Cavalry, who had been the government's besom on that wild highland plain years before, sweeping the savages away, making ready for the peaceful tide of homeseekers which had been so long in sending its crest to the last Kansas frontier.

Custer Street led from the railroad station past great tiers and ranks of railroad ties, which gave off an astringent smell of fresh oak; past stores of gray steel rails, raw from the rolling-mills, built up in platforms with a symmetrical permanence as if to remain so forever; past the livery stable, with a whiff of horses and hay, and on to its end in the public square, into which it emptied all its consequence, however great that may have been.

At this confluence one found the West Plains hotel on one hand; the White Elephant saloon on the other. Across the square the flag waved high and hopefully above the little building of raw pine planks that housed the most important institution in the town, the United States land office, where busy deputies labored early and late over sectional maps, and records of those who came to draw their chance in a land where there was said to be no chance.

Seeking a Chance

Upon this scene of Damascus, when the sun was red on the rim of the world one April evening, there arrived a stranger whose stride was so swift it seemed he must be hastening on in the fear that whatever slim chance there might be for a man west of Dodge would be used up before he could arrive. He carried an overcoat across his arm, a strapped suitcase with swelled sides in his hand.

There was something far more eager and alert about this stranger than the general drift of men who came to Damascus, although he seemed to be an indoors man who had not straightened his back from wrestling with the soil to come to that country looking for land. But there was something in his eye; he seemed to have it just before him as he poled along toward the hotel. Some of the loafers along the way said he looked like he'd been sent for to put out a fire.

At the corner of the square in front of the White Elephant, the stranger stopped, put his over-packed valise on the ground to rest his arm, and stood looking around the town, and such of the country beyond it as he could see. Not with the undecided, dazed look of a man who had come to the end of the road and did not know which way to turn, but with something of a glad expectancy, a swelling eagerness, as if he had made that pause only to rest a moment, when he intended to gather himself and break forward faster than before.

He appeared to be smiling, although his face remained set, his lips immobile. It was that light of great eagerness, or great ambition, or great hope, in his eyes that seemed to illumine his face with pleasure. In a little while he took up his heavy luggage and crossed over to the hotel.

Jim Justice, proprietor of the West Plains hotel, was sitting on his porch in a chair bottomed with hickory bark, in the very spot where he would be found, from that time of the year forward, until the wind began to roll tumble-weed in the autumn, and whip clouds of dust against his windows in stifling assault. Jim's chair-posts had notches worn into the side of the house where he leaned; the hinder legs had sockets drilled into the floor of the porch. He was anchored in the serene comfort of proprietorship; he would no more lower his tilted chair to rise and meet a guest than he would stand on his head in the middle of the road.

Justice had been a Missouri bushwhacker in the days of the Southern rebellion. While he had been a rebel in spirit, it was a spirit small in proportion to his body, altogether inadequate to the task of carrying him out into the open to uphold his sentiments. Those days of brush-skulking were far behind Jim now, to be sure, but the habit of them endured as close-fitting upon him as his own skin. While he might not shoot a man from ambush any longer, he would take under-handed advantage of him in every other way.

Justice was a thick, short man, rounding out like a pigeon in front, standing with something of a pigeon strut about him; a man vain of his parts and his properties, illiterate, bombastic, full of words. He had a walrus-like dignity about his face, more the dignity of impassibility than wisdom, not altogether unpleasant in its well-nourished rotundity. He was a brown and toughened man, having interests on the range which carried him abroad in sun and storm. His heavy gray mustache hung like a curtain over his mouth, his fat cheeks having the appearance of being distended always to puff it out of the way of his words.

The traveller passed Jim without as much as an eye turned in his direction, entered the office, where the winter stove still stood in its desert of tobacco-sprayed sand, its immense pot red and sullen from the ardor of past fires. The stranger paused a moment, questioningly, just within the door, seeing the place empty; advanced toward the counter, where the register lay spread beside a showcase displaying cigars.

Jim Justice retained the dignity of his repose outside the door, proclaiming, by his attitude, to the public of Damascus that he was contemptuous of business, especially business that passed so much importance with such indifference. Meantime, the stranger was looking around on the dingy discomforts of that frontier hotel.

There was a large map of Kansas on the wall, flanked by pictorial calendars of rival St. Louis breweries. These were very large, bright-colored oleographs, displaying ladies in startling undress, as if to suggest to the beholder the thought that beer and indecent exposure were to be associated, from what trade reason not revealed. A brown-painted, blistered wainscot almost the height of a man lent a cloudy gloom to the cheerless place, which the row of chairs drawn back against the wall increased. It seemed as if these uninviting chairs had discharged the last of their guests from their crude, curved arms; that the business of the house was concluded and sealed. A little stock of tobacco in sacks and caddies filled the shelf behind the counter. There was a smell of lye; the boards of the floor were leached by it, with dark strips, where the joints had gathered greasy sweepings, running like column rules of a newspaper between.

Justice came in presently, placing himself behind the counter with something the manner of a high judge disposing himself to hear the plea of inferior counsel in a despised cause.

Judging him by his baggage, Jim did not rate the guest as first class. This single piece of luggage the traveler had put down in the middle of the floor, where its battered and kicked condition was apparent to the hotel man's critical eye. No man of consequence stuffed all his belongings into one suitcase, Jim Justice believed. He adjusted his small mental machinery to give the fellow a reception fitting the outward appearance of his bag.

The guest appeared to be either indifferent to the presence of the landlord, or too rustic to know what such appearance behind the counter implied. He stood near his bag, hands in his breeches pockets, looking at the pictures on the wall as if absorbed in a comparative study of brewers' art. Justice sized him up as a timber cruiser estimates a tree, scanning him for all that could be cut out of him in a sharp and frowning sweep of his bristle-shaded eyes.

Not much to him; just an ordinary gangle-shanked farmer who had been working in town through the winter. Jim thought. A tall fellow, broad in the shoulders but rather flat, the kind that cannot be worn out on a job nor left behind in a race; bony and stringy-muscled, a look about his legs that suggested boots. Dark, not the kind of a man that bleaches working in a livery stable or store; big nose, hard, bleak-looking cheek-bones that looked as if they had been hammered and had stood it pretty well, and were up for more hammering if it came along.

That much Jim noted, taking the man side-on. It was at that point in the inventory that the stranger turned. Jim Justice felt as if somebody had opened a door and a cold breeze had struck him in the face. It was the man's eyes that gave him this unpleasant start. They reminded Jim of the eyes of the judge back in Clay county, Missouri, before whom he had been taken to stand trial once for stealing a horse. Jim had thrown the crime upon his partner and come clear, but he always shivered when he remembered the mind-reading eyes of that judge.

"The guest pushed back his broad-brimmed black hat, a regular Missouri hat, Jim thought, resenting it somehow, just why he did not know. Only that it seemed lawyer-like, even judicial, creased sharply in that manner, its shadow over the stern features of this unaccountable, and not too welcome guest. Hair as black and straight as an Indian's, thought Jim. Needed the shears laid to it. Kind of a judge's coat, too, dang him. Long, nearly down to his knees. He kept one hand in his breeches pocket, like he was going to pull out a pair of brass knucks and smash a man between the eyes.

"Something you wanted?" Jim inquired.

"Can I get accommodations for the night—maybe sev- eral days?" the traveler inquired, his voice deep and gentle, but with that judicial note in it exactly as Jim had expected to hear.

Jim was resentful. This thing was working out too unpleasantly all around. He could afford to be ugly and bullying with his guests, having no competition.

"What do you suppose I'm runnin' this ranch for?" he asked, whirling the register around, scowling as if the answer to his question were in his look, and that answer was robbery and murder of impertinent upstarts.

"To make money, I'd say," the stranger answered, unmoved by the landlord's sneering interrogation.

The reply mollified Jim a little. It had been given in such even, unmoved, unconcerned tone; the stranger had taken the pen so casually. He must not be as much of a rustic as at first supposed. Traveled around some; agent for something. Maybe some kind of a detective, dang his nickel-plated eyes!

"I might be runnin' it for profit anywheres else but this dern-blasted country," said Jim. "There ain't no show for no man to make money out of no hotel this fur west of Dodge. I'd sell to-morrow if I could run acrost a bigger fool than I am."

The stranger was so little interested in this complaint against the country that he did not glance up from the page where he was entering his name. Out of long practice in upside-down reading, Jim followed the pen as the stranger wrote:

Andrew Hall, Topeka, Kansas.

"I used to know a Hall that run a sawmill in Spickardsville, Missouri," said Jim, coming a little nearer now in his mental attitude, seeing the guest had a common, human name. "I don't suppose you might be related?"

"No telling; it's a big family."

"Blowed up and killed one of the boys about your age. Aimin' to stay here some time, you said?"

"A day or two, maybe longer."

"Not much of a country for canvassin' in," Jim informed him, ready to talk to any length when he could knock the land that gave him his living. "People's comin' here in droves, but they ain't the kind to sell books or enlarged pictures to. Poor as snakes; not enough money, most of 'em, to buy grub to hold 'em over till they make a crop—if they ever do make one in this daddasted country, which I doubt like misery."

"I'm not interested in spreading either literature or art," the stranger said, his face as solemn as the back of a fiddle, Jim thought.

"I thought you might be one of them college students startin' out to sell something, they wander out here sometimes, but you're old for a student—thirty-five, I'd judge."

"You're near enough to it," Andrew Hall replied, leaving it worse than if he had said nothing at all, for all the satisfaction Jim found in it.

"Horse liniment don't go out here, nor insurance, nor chromos to hang on the wall, 'less you git 'em for advertisement, free gratis, like I got them of mine. A feller was through here last fall with foldin' lightnin' rods he carried in a valise, but he never sold none of 'em that I ever heard of."

"I don't handle them," said Hall. His face remained as solemn as before, but there was a grin in his eyes, as Jim described the humorous softening. Jim liked him a little better for that. Curiosity had hold of him now like an itch.

"We ain't got no use for a dentist this fur west of Dodge," Jim speculated aloud again. "People's borned with teeth out here and never loses 'em—they've got all the teeth they need. What's worryin' most of 'em is gittin' something to chaw between 'em."

"I expect that's the big question everywhere," Hall agreed.

He went to the window, where he stood looking out, his long legs spread a little in a rather ungainly way, hands in his pockets, the skirts of his black coat held back in that lawyer-like fashion of parting the curtain to display the watch-chain and vest.

"If you're lookin' for a business openin' this hotel's for sale," Jim suggested.

"Not at all," Hall replied indifferently. "I'm not a—business man, Mr 2?"

"Jestice," prompted Jim.

"Mr. Justice. Thank you; hope to know you better."

"Lookin' at you," Jim replied, in his most elegant barroom style. "Just out here to take your pleasure and look around, heh?"

"I expect to settle here, Mr. Justice, for a while, at least. I'm an Esculapian."

"A which?"

"Esculapian; a plain Esculapian."

"Might as well be a ruffled one for all the difference it'd make to me," Jim declared, highly resentful, feeling that the guest was poking covert fun at him, which was not altogether wrong.

"In other words, I'm a physician. I'm the railroad doctor."

Hall had turned to look at Justice as he revealed himself in language plain to the country west of Dodge. He was grinning, humorously and expansively, as if it might be some kind of a lark, out of which he expected to get a lot of fun.

"The hell you say!" Jim exploded in astonishment, being too shallow to receive the shock of a surprise without considerable splash.

"That's about it."

"Company doctor, heh? Old Doc Ross has been 'tendin' to the company cases here for two or three years. Does he know he's fired, do you reckon?"

"I don't know about that, but I suppose it's likely. I never heard of the gentleman."

"Bumped old Doc Ross out of his job, heh? Never heard of Old Doc Ross?"

"I never did. Is he especially famous in this part of the country?"

"He used to be a fit doctor, travelin' around with a wagon. Had a sign painted on the side of it: 'Old Doc Ross, He Cures Fits.' I remember the day he drove up here in that wagon. I don't reckon we had more than forty people in this town then."

"He must have found it fit headquarters to settle down here," Hall said, holding no high opinion of Old Doc Ross from this public fame.

"Well, if all of us didn't have fits he made us think we had," Jim said, laughing over the recollection, reddening in the heat of his mirth like a turkey gobbler. "Old Doc Ross can convince any man, woman or child they've either got fits, have had 'em or will have 'em before long. He says fits is at the bottom of all human cussedness and diseases, but when I figger back I can't recall of anybody ever throwin' a fit here in Damascus, and I've been here since it started."

"How much a bottle was it?"

"Five dollars," Jim replied, impressively. "I guess the price had a good deal to do with folkses' confidence in it. He's give up the fit business now, settled down to regular practice."

"He's probably an infernal old quack, and no doctor at all."

"I'd go light on spittin' out things like that here in Damascus if I intended to stay over night," Jim cautioned. "No, you're off there. He's a good doctor, good as they make 'em, if you can ketch him sober. He's been on a tear now four or five days. Wouldn't wonder if it was the news of gittin' fired out of that railroad job started him off."

"He may be consoling himself for the loss of the job," Hall said indifferently, plainly indicating that Old Doc Ross was a creature beneath his consideration.

"He used to practice back in Dodge till it cooled down too much for him," Justice explained. "They say he put a good many men out of business with his gun, but I don't know, personal. All I know is he's put hot embers under the feet of a couple of doctors and one dentist that tried to settle here."

"He seems to be a picturesque old villain," Hall commented, entirely undisturbed by this report.

Hall had faced to the window again, where he stood lifting himself to his toes with slow, easy movements ex- pressive of great strength and elasticity of limb. It exasperated Justice to behold him so unmoved by this account of Old Doc Ross' savage disposition in the face of rivalry.

"I wouldn't like to stand in the boots of the man that'd come to root Old Doc Ross out of that good-payin' job," Justice said, adding seriousness to the declaration by expelling his breath with hissing sound through his drooping mustache.

"I guess nobody's going to be murdered over it," Dr. Hall replied.

"I wouldn't be too dam' sure, mister. Married man?"

"Not yet."

"Lucky for your wife you ain't. It ain't no place to bring a woman to, starvation country like this west of Dodge."

"It looks pretty good to me—pretty good," said Dr. Hall, in that provocative, mild, serenely satisfied way of his. Jim thought he said it like the words of a taunt repeated by a vexatious boy.

"Maybe it won't look so dam' pleasant to you after you've met Old Doc Ross!" Justice nagged.

Dr. Hall swung around from the window, confronting Justice again in that judicial, breath-cutting, abrupt fashion of his, hands in his pockets, the skirts of his long coat held back.

"Doctor Ross is free to continue his business of curing the men, women and children of Damascus of fits in his notable and established style, Mr. Justice. I'm not here to take a single patient out of his hands. I'm the railroad doctor; I'm hired and paid by the year for my services. I haven't the slightest intention of setting up opposition to your notorious Doctor Ross."

"That may help some," Jim admitted, but with a reservation of doubt.

"I want to buy a horse—"

"What do you want a horse for if you ain't goin' to practice around?"

"Because I take my exercise that way. Do you know of anybody that's got a good gelding for sale?"