An Indian was driving the wagon. He might have been mixed with negro. It was hard to tell. I'd never seen the likes of him before. He had shoulders broader than any man I've ever known, and he was darn near seven feet tall.
He had a woman with him. A colored. A high yeller, to be exact. And she was a comely thing. Still, they were an Indian and a colored, and that got a lot of folks in these parts off on a bad foot with them immediately. If they had not been such a curiosity, and things hadn't been so dead around town, they might have got run out the first day they showed up.
The Negress read palms and that sort of thing. The Indian made potions. Not like a snake oil man, but like a medicine man. You know, someone that wanted your money but was trying to give you something for it too. They also sold some harmless things. Love potions and charms. The usual rubbish. But mostly they sold medicine, and it went fast, and I'll tell you why. It wasn't for the reason you'd think. It wasn't alcohol-laced with a bit of sugar and vinegar. It was medicine that worked.
It sort of got my goat, and I'm not ashamed to say it. I'm a trained doctor. Just a country sawbones, mind you, but no slouch either. But there were things this Indian could do, I couldn't even come near doing.
Old Mrs. Jameson had the misery for years. Her hands would knot up like old plowlines.
The knuckles would swell, inflame. It would get so bad sometimes the skin would crack.
I'd tried all the conventional treatments, and the best I could manage was a bit of relief from her pain. Something to get her through a bout until another came. And it got so the bouts were closer and closer together. The poor woman could hardly open her hands.
They looked like broken bird talons.
But when the Indian came to town, and word got around that his medicine worked—
everything from taking warts off the face to the curing of the croup—she went over there and bought some salve from him. Up until that point I'd been surprised at some of his cures, but I hadn't seen anything that struck me as miraculous. Then old Mrs. Jameson rubbed that salve on her poor old hands and the pain went away. And she came by to show me how she was doing. As much to gloat and show me up for a quack as anything else, I guess. But there was no denying. Not only were her hands better, they were starting to cure themselves of the damage already done. In a week's time of rubbing on that stuff the Indian gave her, she had hands like a twenty- year-old. Not only cured of their misery, but soft and pliant and attractive. If you'd had Abby put her hands down beside Mrs.
Jameson's, the old lady's would have looked better.
Well, to shorten the story some, that Indian and his Negress came to be looked upon as saints, and the town's attitudes toward coloreds softened considerable. Except maybe for Caleb who hates anything non-white with a passion. But then again, he wasn't sick and didn't suffer any ailment. The man has the constitution of a jackass and the brain to match.
So, that couple was looking lighter skinned every day to folks hereabouts, and they parked their wagon out on the edge of town.
Since there was always someone with something wrong with them, they were doing a land-office business, and things had dried up here considerable. I took a few splinters out of fingers and things of that nature, but anything of importance was taken to the Indian. It got my goat. You live in a town this size, deliver babies, see the old go out, and take care of people's ills all your life, you sometimes develop a self-importance about yourself that you don't deserve.
I went out there to talk to them, and to thank them for all they'd done in town, but the Indian saw right through me. He knew I was there primarily because I was curious, and maybe because I was hoping to latch onto some of his healing secrets. And I'll admit that I was.
But the way that Indian looked at me and smiled made me feel lower than a plump snake's belly, and foolish. And the woman—well, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this with Abby in the room, but I was attracted to her. Not only was she pretty, but she was unique too. Tallish, with sleek skin like creamed coffee, and her hair was plaited in Indian-like braids. And she had the bluest eyes I've ever seen. They drew you to her. She had a fine figure—pardon me, Abby— and even at my age I felt a stirring I didn't think I was capable of anymore.
It disturbed me. Guess I felt guilty about your mother, Abby. I went away from there and didn't go back. I didn't want that Indian looking down his nose at me, knowing what I was really up to. And I didn't want to have to look at that sleek Negress and know she wasn't ever going to be mine.
I had dreams about her at night, and the kind of dreams you would expect. I loved her so hard—please excuse this talk, Abby, but I have to get the entire story out—I'd finally keel over with a heart attack in her embrace. Then I'd wake up sweating, feeling guilty toward my dead wife—God bless her soul.
I say all this to give you some idea of how impressive the two of them were.
So they'd been here a week, or a little better, and it started to rain. One of those late season drenchers that just wouldn't go away. At first it was welcomed. Crops needed it, and it cooled things off some at night. But pretty soon it was nothing but misery. The streets turned to mud, and the rain just kept coming, and people began to pick up on summer sicknesses, and of course they went to the Indian for help—which he sold them—and then the Webb girl got ill.
I remember when I first heard of it. I wasn't in the office much then. Abby sort of hung around here in case anyone wanted a splinter out, or some such thing, but I had started going over to the saloon to toss a few drinks. Got so I spent a lot of my time there. More than I ever had before. I tell you, I had gone from feeling like a little god with a black satchel to feeling like an incompetent old man who couldn't even match heathen medicine. It may seem crazy to you, but more than once I took that shotgun off the wall over there and put it under my chin and thought about finding the trigger with my toe.
When a man gets so he's useless, especially at my age when there doesn't seem to be no turning around or finding another avenue, he begins to think he might just be better off without the worry.
But I guess common sense prevailed, and of course thinking about Abby. And maybe most of all, I figured that there would come a time when they'd just take up and move on, and people would have to come back to me, and gradually I could regain my exalted status as a little demigod.
I was drinking at the bar when David Webb came in, and he looked terrible. He was splashed with mud from all the rain, and his face was haggard. He looked ready to drop.
Being a family doctor dies hard, and I slid up beside him and said he didn't look so good.
He said it was because he'd been up nights with Glenda and that she was bad sick and getting sicker.
Course I asked him why he hadn't brought her by, and his face went kind of odd, and he reminded me of a dog that has been kicked and was slinking under a porch.
'Well, Doc,' he said. 'I just figured the Indian could do better by her,' then he spotted someone at a table he wanted to talk to bad and that left me alone, and I got good and drunk.
That night—I reckon it was on past midnight—I heard a banging at the door, and I got up and went to answer, and there stood David and his wife, and he's holding the little Glenda in his arms, and she's as limp as a dish towel. I've seen enough dead people to know at a glance that that little girl was fresh died, but I brought them in, and I did what I could for her—which was nothing. Thing I remember most about that night was hearing Webb cry.
Seems he had taken the little girl to the Indian with a lung problem— pneumonia, I figure—and the Indian sold them some stuff, and they gave it to her and took her home, and she promptly died. That's when they brought her to me. I reckon she'd been dead a couple of hours. About the length of time it took the Webbs to get to town from where they lived.
But to make it all shorter, Webb went crazy. He went over to the saloon, and there were enough drunks and near-drunks there that he got them roused. Caleb got behind it in an instant, and pretty soon he was talking it up big, saying about the treachery of the colored races and such, and a mob started forming. Everything they'd done that was good was forgot in an instant. It didn't matter that they'd darn near worked miracles, this dead white girl was what the crowd needed to turn evil.
To make matters worse, the Indian chose that night to move on, so that didn't look good for them. Looked as if they'd deliberately poisoned the little girl then hightailed it. Least it looked that way to a maddened crowd.
They caught up with the pair, pulled them out of the wagon—after the Indian broke Cane Lavel's neck and smashed Buck Wilson's jaw. I heard it took a dozen men to bring him down, and then they had clubs, pistol butts, and the like to do it with. They beat the woman and burned the wagon.
That's where Matt came in. He got word of the crowd and what was going on, and he rode out after them,
