Song of the Lark | Page 3
THE SONG OF THE LARK
PART I
FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD
I
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the
Jewish clothier and two travel- ing men who happened to be staying
overnight in Moon- stone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the
drug store. Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light in the
waiting-room and the double student's lamp on the desk in the study.
The isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in
the study was so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into
his little operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting- room
was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The
study had worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter
comfort about it. The doctor's flat-top desk was large and well made;
the papers were in orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove
a wide bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the
ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every thickness and color.
On the top shelf stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all
alike in dark mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.
As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the doctor
in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally young.
Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders which
he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a distin-
guished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.
There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown
hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over his high forehead. His nose
was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a curly,
reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a
little like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large and well
kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with crinkly
reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge; the
traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver
tailor. The doctor was al- ways well dressed.
Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in the swivel
chair before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees
with his fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored. He glanced
at his watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys,
selected one and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely percepti-
ble, played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative. Behind the
door that led into the hall, under his buffalo- skin driving-coat, was a
locked cupboard. This the doctor opened mechanically, kicking aside a
pile of muddy over- shoes. Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses
and decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters. Hearing a step in the empty,
echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cup- board again, snapping
the Yale lock. The door of the waiting-room opened, a man entered and
came on into the consulting-room.
"Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg," said the doctor care- lessly. "Sit
down."
His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard,
streaked with gray. He wore a frock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a
white lawn necktie, and steel- rimmed spectacles. Altogether there was
a pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his
coat and sat down.
"Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the
house with me? I think Mrs. Kronborg will need you this evening."
This was said with profound gravity and, curi- ously enough, with a
slight embarrassment.
"Any hurry?" the doctor asked over his shoulder as he went into his
operating-room.
Mr. Kronborg coughed behind his hand, and contracted his brows. His
face threatened at every moment to break into a smile of foolish
excitement. He controlled it only by calling upon his habitual pulpit
manner. "Well, I think it would be as well to go immediately. Mrs.
Kronborg
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