the Night Horseman (1920) Read Online Free Page A

mountain-desert were big; there was something intensely irritating about their mere physical size; they threw him continually on the defensive and he found himself making apologies to himself and summing up personal merits. In this case there was more direct reason for his anger. It was patent that the man did not weight the strange doctor against any serious thoughts.
    "And this," she was saying, "is Mr. Daniels. Buck, is there any change?"
    "Nothin' much," answered Buck Daniels. "Come along toward evening and he said he was feeling kind of cold. So I wrapped him up in a rug. Then he sat some as usual, one hand inside of the other, looking steady at nothing. But a while ago he began getting sort of nervous."
    "What did he do?"
    "Nothing. I just felt he was getting excited. The way you know when your hoss is going to shy."
    "Do you want to go to your room first, doctor, or will you go in to see him now?"
    "Now," decided the doctor, and followed her down the hall and through a door.
    The room reminded the doctor more of a New England interior than of the mountain-desert. There was a round rug on the floor with every imaginable color woven into its texture, but blended with a rude design, reds toward the center and blue-grays toward the edges. There were chairs upholstered in green which looked mouse-colored where the highlights struck along the backs and the arms-shallow-seated chairs that made one's knees project foolishly high and far. Byrne saw a cabinet at one end of the room filled with seashells and knickknacks, and above it was a memorial cross surrounded by a wreath inside a glass case. Most of the wall space thronged with engravings whose subjects ranged from Niagara Falls to Lady Hamilton. One entire end of the room was occupied by a painting of a neck-and-neck finish in a race, and the artist had conceived the blooded racers as creatures with tremendous round hips and mighty-muscled shoulders, while the legs tapered to a faun-like delicacy. These animals were spread-eagled in the most amazing fashion, their fore-hoofs reaching beyond their noses and their rear hoofs striking out beyond the tips of the tails. The jockey in the lead sat quite still, but he who was losing had his whip drawn and looked like an automatic doll-so pink were his cheeks. Beside the course, in attitudes of graceful ease, stood men in very tight trousers and very high stocks and ladies in dresses which pinched in at the waist and flowed out at the shoulders. They leaned upon canes or twirled parasols and they had their backs turned upon the racetrack as if they found their own negligent conversation far more exciting than the breathless, driving finish.
    Under the terrific action and still more terrific quiescence of this picture lay the sick man, propped high on a couch and wrapped to the chest in a Navajo blanket.
    "Dad," said Kate Cumberland, "Doctor Hardin was not in town. I've brought out Doctor Byrne, a newcomer."
    The invalid turned his white head slowly toward them, and his shaggy brows lifted and fell slightly-a passing shadow of annoyance. It was a very stern face, and framed in the long, white hair it seemed surrounded by at atmosphere of Arctic chill. He was thin, terribly thin-not the leanness of Byrne, but a grim emaciation which exaggerated the size of a tall forehead and made his eyes supernaturally bright. It was in the first glance of those eyes that Byrne recognized the restlessness of which Kate had spoken; and he felt almost as if it were an inner fire which had burned and still was wasting the body of Joseph Cumberland. To the attentions of the doctor the old man submitted with patient self-control, and Byrne found a pulse feeble, rapid, but steady. There was no temperature. In fact, the heat of the body was a trifle subnormal, considering that the heart was beating so rapidly.
    Doctor Byrne stared. Most of his work had been in laboratories, and the horror of death was not yet familiar, but old Joseph Cumberland was dying.