Chapter 10

WHERE HEALTH BEGINS

In a little white cottage tent, at the end of a long row of minutely similar, little white cottage tents, sat David and Carol in the early evening of a day in May, looking wistfully out at the wide sweep of gray mesa land, reaching miles away to the mountains, blue and solemn in the distance.

"Do--do you feel better yet, David?" Carol asked at last, desperately determined to break the menacing silence.

David drew his breath. "I can't seem to notice any difference yet," he replied honestly. "It doesn't look much like Missouri, does it?"

"It is pretty,--very pretty," she said resolutely.

"Carol, be a good Presbyterian and tell the truth. Do you wish you had gone home, to green and grassy Iowa?"

"David Duke, I am at home, and here is where I want to be and no place else in the world. It is big and bleak and bare, but-- You are going to get well, aren't you, David?"

"Of course I am, but give me time. Even Miracle Land can't transform weakness to health in two hours."

"I must go over to the office. Mrs. Hartley said she wanted to give me some instructions."

Carol rose quickly and stepped outside the cottage.

Crossing the mesa she met three men who stopped her with a gesture. They were of sadly similar appearance, tall, thin, shoulders stooped, hair dull and lusterless, eyes dry and bright. Carol thought at first they were brothers, and so they were,--brothers in the grip of the great white plague.

"Are you a lunger?" ejaculated one of them in astonishment, noting the light in her eyes and the flush in her cheeks.

"A--lunger?"

"Yes,--have you got the bugs?"

"The bugs!"

"Say, are you chasing the cure?"

"Of course not," interrupted the oldest of the three impatiently. "There's nothing the matter with her, except that she's a lunger's wife. Your husband is the minister from St. Louis, isn't he?"

"Yes,--I am Mrs. Duke."

"I am Thompson. I used to be a medical missionary in the Ozarks. How is your husband?"

"Oh, he is doing nicely," she said brightly,--the brightness assumed to hide the fear in her heart that some day David might look like that.

Thompson laughed disagreeably. "Sure, they always do nicely at first. But when the bugs get 'em, they're gone. They think they're better, they say they are getting well,--God!"

Carol looked at him with questioning reproach in the shadowed eyes. "It does not hurt us to hope, at least," she said gently. "It does no harm, and it makes us happier."

"Oh, yes," came the bitter answer. "Sure it does. But wait a few years. Bugs eat hope and happiness as well as lungs."

Carol quivered. "You make me afraid," she said.

"Thompson is an old croak," interrupted one of the younger men, smiling encouragement. "Don't waste your time on him,--talk to me. He is such a grouch that he gives the bugs a regular bed to sleep in. He'd have been well years ago if he hadn't been such a chronic kicker. Cheer up, Mrs. Duke. Of course your husband will get along. Got it right at the start, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes, right at the very start."

"That's good. Most people fool around too long and then it's too late, and all their own fault. Sure, your husband is all right. It's too bad Thompson can't die, isn't it? He's got too mean a disposition to keep on living with white folks."

"Oh, I shouldn't say that," disclaimed Carol quickly. "He--he is just not quite like the people I have known. I didn't know how to take him. He was only joking of course." She smiled forgivingly at him, and Thompson had the grace to flush a little.

"I am Jimmy Jones," said the second man. "I was a bartender in little old Chi. Far cry from a missionary to a bartender, but I'll take my chances on Paradise with Thompson any day."

"A--a bartender." Carol rubbed her slender fingers in bewilderment.

"I am Arnold Barrows, formerly a Latin professor. _Amo, mas, mat,_" said the third man suddenly. "I am looking for my Paradise right here on earth, and I am sorry you are married. My idea of Paradise is a girl like you and a man like me, and everything else go hang."

Carol drew herself up as though poised for flight, a startled bird taking wing.

Thompson and Jones laughed at her horrified face, but the professor maintained his solemn gravity.

"He is just a fool," said the bartender encouragingly. "Don't bother about him. It is not you in particular, he is nuts on all the girls. Cheer up. We're not so bad as we sound. I have a cottage near you. Tell the parson I'll be in to-morrow to give him the latest light on the bonfires in perdition. I know all about them. Tell him we'll organize a combination prayer-meeting; he can lead the prayer and I'll give advanced lessons in bunny-hugs and fancy-fizzes."

"Good night,--good night,--good night," gasped Carol.

Forgetting her errand to the office, she rushed back to David, to safety, to the sheltering folds of the little white cottage tent.

He questioned her curiously about her experience, and although she tried to evade the harsher points, he drew every word from her reluctant lips.

"Lunger,--and bugs,--and chasers,--it doesn't sound nice, David."

"But maybe it is the best thing after all. We are not used to it yet, but I suppose it is better for them to take it lightly and laugh and be funny about it. They have to spend a lifetime with the specter, you know,--maybe the joking takes away some of the grimness."

Carol shivered a little.

"Aren't you going to the office?"

"No, I am not. If Mrs. Hartley wants to see me, she can come here. I am scared, honestly. Let's do something. Let's go to bed, David."

It was a two-roomed cottage, a thin canvas wall separating the rooms. There were window-flaps on every side, and conscientiously Carol left them every one upraised, although she had goose-flesh every time she glanced into the black wall of darkness outside the circle of their lights, a wall only punctuated by the yellow rays of light here and there, where the more riotous guests of the institution were dissipating up to the wicked hour of nine o'clock.

"Good night, David,--you will call me if you want anything, won't you?" And Carol leaped into bed, desperately afraid a lizard, or a scorpion or a centipede might lie beneath in wait for unwary pink toes once the guarding lights were out.

This was the land where health began,--the land of pure light air, of clear and penetrating sunshine, the land of ruddy cheeks and bounding blood. This was the land which would bring color back to the pale face of David, would restore the vigor to his step, the ring to his voice. It was the land where health began.

She must love it, she would love it, she did love it. It was a rich, beautiful, gracious land,--gray, sandy, barren, but green with promise to Carol and to David, as it had been to thousands of others who came that way with a burden of weakness buoyed by hope.

A shrill shriek sounded outside the tent,--a dangerous rustling in the sand, a crinkling of dead leaves in the corners of the steps, a ring, a roar, a wild tumult. Something whirled to the floor in David's room, papers rattled, curtains flapped, and there was a metallic patter on the uncarpeted floor of the tent. Carol gave an indistinct murmur of fear and burrowed beneath the covers.

It was David who threw back the blankets and turned on the lights. Just a sand-storm, that was all,--a common sand-storm, without which New Mexico might be almost any other place on earth. David's Bible had been whirled from the window-ledge, and fine sand was piling in through the screens.

Carol withdrew from the covers most courageously when she heard the comforting click of the electric switch, and the reassuring squeak of David's feet on the floor of the room.

"Everything's all right," he called to her. "Don't get scared. Will you help me put these flaps down?"

Carol leaped from her bed at that, and ran to lower the windows. Then she sat by David's side while the storm raged outside, roaring and piling sand against the little tent.

After that, to bed once more, still determinedly in love with the land of health, and praying fervently for morning.

Soon David's heavy breathing proclaimed him sound asleep. But sleep would not come to Carol. She gazed as one hypnotized into the starry brightness of the black sky as she could see it through the window beside her. How ominously dark it was. Softly she slipped out of bed and lowered the flaps of the window. She did not like that darkness. After the storm, David had insisted the windows must be opened again,--that was the first law of lungers and chasers.

She was cold when she got back into bed, for the chill of the mountain nights was new to her. And an hour later, when she was almost dozing, footsteps prowled about the tent, loitering in the leaves outside her western window. David was sleeping, she must not interfere with a moment of his restoring rest. She clasped her hands beneath the covers, and moistened her feverish lips. If it were an Indian lurking there, his deadly tomahawk upraised, she prayed he might strike the fatal blow at once. But the steps passed, and she climbed on her knees and lowered the flaps on the side where the steps sounded.

Later, the sudden tinkle of a bell across the grounds startled her into sitting posture. No, it wasn't David, after all,--somebody else,--some other woman's David, likely, ringing for the nurse. Carol sighed. How could David get well and strong out here, with all these other sick ones to wring his heart with pity? Were the doctors surely right,--was this the land of health?

Again footsteps approached the tent, stirring up the dry sand, and again Carol held her breath until they had passed. Then she grimly closed the windows on the third side of her room, and smiled to herself as she thought, "I'll get them up again before David is awake."

But she crept into bed and slept at last.

Early, very early, she was awakened by the sunlight pouring upon the flaps at the windows. It was five o'clock, and very cold. Carol wrapped a blanket about her and peeked in upon her husband.

"Good morning," she greeted him brightly. "Isn't it lovely and bright? How is my nice old boy? Nearly well?"

"Just fine. How did you sleep?"

"Like a top," she declared.

"Were you afraid?"

"Um, not exactly," she denied, glancing at him with sudden suspicion.

"Did the wind blow all your flaps down?"

"How did you know?"

"Oh, I was up long ago looking in on you. We'll get a room over in the Main Building to-day. It costs more, but the accommodations are so much better. We are directly on the path from the street, so we hear every passing footstep."

Carol blushed. "I am not afraid," she insisted.

"We'll get a room just the same. It will be easier for you all the way around."

Carol flung open the door and gazed out upon the land of health. The long desolate mesa land stretched far away to the mountains, now showing pink and rosy in the early sunshine. The little white tents about them were as suggestively pitiful as before. There were no trees, no flowers, no carpeting grass, to brighten the desolation.

Bare, bleak, sandy slopes reached to the mountains on every side. David sat up in bed and looked out with her.

"Just a long bare slope of sand, isn't it?" she whispered. "Sand and cactus,--no roses blooming here upon the sandy slopes."

"Yes, just sandy slopes to the mountains,--but Carol, they are sunny,--bare and bleak, but still they are sunny for us. Let's not lose sight of that."