Roy Norton

“ Larkin looked at him for an instant as if he wanted to have another go at him, and then, without a word jammed his hat on his head and banged the door behind him. He looked sharply at his chauffeur as he climbed into the tonneau and told him to drive on to Dover; but the man's face was as wooden and unreadable as that of a Chinese joss.
A COUNTRY doctor has the best of a city man, because he has to be a specialist on everything, from the pharmacopoeia to mastoidectomy. ”

“ THERE is no accounting for what men will do when “rubbed the wrong way.” It makes the weak combative, and the combatant as peaceful as any member of the Hague Court. It brings out streaks of character that a man's most intimate friends never knew he possessed; and, where two men are concerned, the effect is sometimes interesting. Such was the case of Dr. Harvey, country practitioner, and John Larkin, Esq., capitalist and conquistador. ”

“ Rich men, or corporations, as a rule, pay what they owe far less promptly than poorer individuals. Perhaps it is because they want to steal from a month's to a year's interest on the money. Larkin was like them. He didn't ask for Dr. Harvey's bill, and as Harvey didn't send one it ran along into September of the year after the automobile accident, and then one day he had his big car stopped outside the doctor's office at the crossroads. ”

“ There was not a bridlepath in the mountains that had not felt his horse's hoofs, nor a cabin so isolated that he had not, at some time in those thirty years, pushed open the door for a grim fight with death, or a brave encouragement of life. ”

“ Another chauffeur brought a second car down from Larkin's castle, and it wasn't long till its owner was laid out in his room ready for Dr. Harvey to work on broken bones.
Now, most men suffering such an accident would have been too weak to swear when they recovered consciousness; but the very first thing Larkin did when he came to his senses was to start in to curse his luck and everything in general. ”

“ Harvey, who, swathed in an apron, was straightening out some bandages, “that you have much to be thankful for without exciting yourself, and several things in which other men would ordinarily be interested. Your chauffeur, for instance.”
“Cussed clumsy fool!” Larkin groaned; but Dr. Harvey frowned at him.
“Pray do not trouble to curse the dead,” he said. “The man is beyond ever hearing your criticisms. ”

“ I ain't as fast as I used to be! If you're a good specimen they certainly do teach something at Yale. More'n I ever thought they did. Were you and Johnson class mates?”
Being from Virginia, Dr. Harvey didn't like that either; but he helped Larkin on with his coat and vest after which the capitalist fumbled with his nervous fingers for his fountain pen and pulled out a checkbook Harvey put on his own coat and vest and retied the rusty old string tie he always wore. Larkin was just tearing out a check for a thousand dollars. ”

“ Sometimes he operates in the shade of a coal truck and within an hour is trying to cure the wife of a woodchopper of some heart complication. And so he gets to know his profession.
Larkin's oldest daughter was taken down sick the next summer, and the attack was an acute one. I don't know what it was; but I do know he had his private car hooked on down at Hoboken and it brought several specialists up to Mount Arlington, from which it took two automobiles to take them around the mountain ridge to the big country house. ”

“ Then Larkin used a few rough exclamations to hide sentiment and bolted for the door. He rushed out as if running away from something; for it is hard for men of his sort to betray themselves, fairly jumped into his car, and bawled to the driver, “Go on!”
ON Harvey's desk lay an envelop which appeared strange. After he had run his fingers through his hair a few times, berated himself for having emotions, and calmed down, he opened it. There was a cancelled mortgage and a check which was signed but left in blank, and this note ”