HERE 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.
For nearly thirty years Dr. Harvey had worked among us up there in the mountains. He was responsible for some of us being permitted to come into the world, and, when his efforts and science proved unavailing, helped some of us bury our dead. He was crusty, and homely, and rough; but his heart and hands were tender and his pocketbook empty, because he felt that he belonged to us, and we did to him. And that combination went far. Time and again, as we knew by accident, the great city, so near and yet so remote, had sent its summons to him, clamorous and insistent, or insidious and alluring, and yet he had refused its invitations because he felt that to minister to us had become his duty. 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.
He kept no accounts. If a patient paid him, he accepted the money, and usually it had not warmed in his pockets before he found some one whom he believed needed it more than he; and so passed it on, to his own financial detriment. His very home was mortgaged, although few of us knew that the money thereby raised was spent in sending a girl genius with a deformed spine abroad for long, expensive treatment. She died; but the mortgage lived. Sometimes Dr. Harvey paid the interest; sometimes the interest wasn't paid and was added to the principal. Sometimes the money was hoarded to meet it; and then along would come the philanthropic demand on the heart and sympathy which made him scatter it broadcast and say that the mortgage could wait.
And those were the conditions when the distinguished millionaire, who made his money from the patent liniment, came obtrusively among us. You may have heard of “Larkin's Living Liniment, Good for Man or Beast”? Well, this was Larkin.
Larkin was the sort of man that we of the humbler planes always imagine as living in a ten thousand-dollar automobile, because it is about as close a view as we ever get—through the dust. At first, he fenced off a game preserve with barbed wire and netting. It took quite a piece out of our mountains, and small boys discovered that they could neither fish, shoot, nor swim within its confines without being called before a justice of the peace by some English gamekeeper. Larkin took a mighty large amount of room in all our affairs. He bought stock in the iron mines where so many of us work, and once I met him. He was a brusk, hard man, who snapped questions at me and bored me through with sharp eyes and appeared ignorant of small amenities. He was red and burly from high living, and those who worked for him said his temper was none of the best, and that frequently he displayed aggravation by the free use of fist or foot. Employees came and went in a never ending stream from his place,—chauffeurs and cooks, gardeners and gamekeepers,—all with tales of his irascibility and overbearing. But in the end he too, like all the others of us, had to come to Dr. Harvey.
T was in the fall and the rains had turned the roads to slippery mush, when Larkin made his man speed a big touring car over the twenty-mile pike to catch a train for some directors' meeting in the city that he wanted to attend. On the turn below the old Westmoreland inn the machine slipped and skidded. There were a few frantic motions by the chauffeur, an oath or two from Larkin, and then a smash that could have been heard for a mile as the car took the embankment, crashed down through the chestnuts, naked in the season's loneliness, and then everything was still.
The millionaire was badly smashed, and the chauffeur lay beneath the machine.
“It seemed very fortunate that I happened to be coming along the road just then,” Dr. Harvey said afterward; “for an hour or two exposure would have cost Larkin his life. The driver, poor chap, was already gone.”