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For James and his history Cooper had unbounded contempt. This horse-doctor, as he termed him, he looked upon as being as well fitted to describe a naval engagement as the proverbial horse-marine would be to take part in one.
Walter Babson was born in Kansas. His father was a farmer and horse-doctor, a heavy drinker, an eccentric who joined every radical political movement. In a country school, just such a one as Una had taught, then in high school in a near-by town, Walter had won all the prizes for essays and debating, and had learned a good deal about Shakespeare and Cæsar and George Washington. Also he had learned a good deal about drinking beer, smoking manfully, and tempting the giggling girls who hung about the "deepot." He ran away from high school, and in the most glorious years of his life worked his way down the Mississippi and up the Rio Grande, up to Alaska and down to Costa Rica, a butt and jester for hoboes, sailors, longshoremen, miners, cow-punchers, lunch-room owners, and proprietors of small newspapers. He learned to stick type and run a press. He returned to Kansas and worked on a country newspaper, studying poetry and college-entrance requirements in the evening. He had, at this time, the not entirely novel idea that "he ought to be able to make a lot of good fiction out of all his experiences." Actually, he had no experiences, because he had no instinct for beauty. The proof is that he read quite solemnly and reverently a vile little periodical for would-be authors, which reduced authorship to a way of earning one's living by supplying editors with cheap but ingenious items to fill space. It put literature on a level with keeping a five-and-ten-cent store. But Walter conned its pompous trade journal discussions as to whether the name and address of the author should be typed on the left or the right side of the first page of a manuscript; its lively little symposia, by such successful market-gardeners of literature as Mamie Stuyvesant Blupp and Bill Brown and Dr. J.
The chaplain said he had caught up with the regiment about midnight, and had rode at the rear, with the horse-doctor. He said this expedition was foolish, and had no object except to try the endurance of the horses and men. I told him that we were going to have a fight in less than an hour, and burn a town, and probably we would all be killed. The chaplain turned pale and looked faint.
That Scotch hybrid McAlpin knows a few things, too, that he won't tell. All I want to say is, you can trust that man too far. He's got all my recent salary. Every time Jeffries raises my pay that hairy-pawed horse-doctor reduces it just so much a month. And he does it with one pack of fifty-two small cards that you could stick into your vest pocket."
It had always seemed to me at home that the attending physician, under whose auspices the person died, should attend the funeral of his patient, and when I told the colonel about it, he called the horse-doctor and told him he would have to go.
When the day of the auction came everything went. Even his best suit of clothes was sold to a blacksmith, while his fur-coat was bought by a horse-doctor for fifteen dollars.
Somehow the song had got into my head, and I went meandering on through the adventures of my respectable fellow-countryman, who, on emerging from the 'shebeen shop, fell into a river, from which he was fished up to be 'sat upon' by a coroner's jury, who having learned from a 'horse-doctor' that he was 'dead as a door-nail, so there was an end, returned their verdict accordingly, just as he returned to his senses, when an angry altercation and a pitched battle between the body and the coroner winds up the lay with due spirit and pleasantry.
One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful, shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in the refrain: "There is rest for the weary, There is rest for you!" Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted "There is rest for the weary, There is rest for you!"
The horse-doctor went to the negroes who were sick, and after examining them he said they had been poisoned by eating melons that had been doctored, and he advised them to get to town as quick as possible.
One, two verses he sang as the men, at first snorting and scornful, shuffled angrily; then Jake Hough, the English horse-doctor, roared in the refrain: "There is rest for the weary, There is rest for you!" Upon which, carried away, every one of them roared, gurgled, or shouted "There is rest for the weary, There is rest for you!"
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