11

THE RECLUSE

For his starter herd, Rob J. decided to get mostly Spanish merinos, because their fine wool would make a valuable crop, and to cross-breed them with a long-wool English breed, as his family had done in Scotland. He told Alden he wouldn’t buy the animals until spring, to save the expense and effort required to keep them during winter. In the meantime, Alden labored at stockpiling fenceposts, building two lean-to barns, and putting up a cabin in the woods for himself. Fortunately, the hired man was capable of working unsupervised, because Rob J. was occupied. Those who lived nearby had gotten along without a doctor, and he spent his first few months trying to correct the effects of neglect and home remedies. He saw patients with gout and cancer and dropsy and scrofula, and too many children with worms, and people of all ages with consumption. He grew tired of pulling rotten teeth. He felt the same way about pulling teeth as he did about amputating limbs, hating to take away something he was never going to be able to put back.

“Wait until spring, that’s when everybody around here comes down with some kind of fever. You’ll make your fortune,” Nick Holden told him cheerfully. His calls took him onto remote, almost nonexistent trails. Nick offered the loan of a revolver until he could buy one. “Travel is dangerous, there are bandits like land pirates, and now those damned hostiles.”

“Hostiles?”

“Indians.”

“Has anyone else seen them?”

Nick scowled. They had been sighted several times, he said, but admitted against his will that they had molested no one. “So far,” he added darkly.

Rob J. bought no handgun, nor did he wear Nick’s. He felt secure on the new horse. She had great endurance, and he enjoyed the surefooted way she could scramble up and down steep riverbanks and ford swift streams. He taught her to accept being mounted from either side, and she learned to trot to him when he whistled. Quarter horses were used for herding cattle, and she had already been taught by Grueber to start, stop, and turn instantly, responding to the slightest shift of Rob’s weight or a small movement of the reins.

One day in October he was summoned to the farm of Gustav Schroeder, who had gotten two fingers of his left hand crushed between heavy rocks. On the way, Rob became lost, and he stopped to ask directions at a sorry-looking shack that stood next to well-tended fields. The door opened just a crack but he was assailed by the worst of odors, stinks of old body wastes, rotten air, putrefaction. A face peered out and he saw red swollen eyes, dank, dirt-plastered witch’s hair. “Go away!” a hoarse female voice commanded. Something the size of a small dog scuttled in the room beyond the door. Not a child in there? The door slammed like a blow.

The groomed fields proved to be Schroeder’s. When Rob reached the farmhouse he had to amputate the farmer’s little finger and the top joint of the third finger, agony for the patient. When he was through, he asked Schroeder’s wife about the woman in the shack, and Alma Schroeder looked a little ashamed.

“That is only poor Sarah,” she told him.