When Maje Sampson got back into the cab he could not speak--at least not for publication. He was tearing mad and sputtered like a safety. He gathered up his cushion and a water bottle and a bottle that would explode if water touched it, and crawled with his plunder into the box car. He straightened Delaroo up and out and gave him a drink and by way of sanitary precaution took one personally, for he himself had never had the smallpox--but once. When he had done this little for Delaroo he finished his run and came back to the Bend hauling his pest-house box car. The fireman quit the cab immediately after Maje exposed himself; the conductor communicated with him only by signals. The Anderson operator wired ahead that Maje Sampson was bringing back a man with smallpox on Thirty, and when Maje, bulging out of the 264 cab, pulled into the division yard nobody would come within a mile of him. He set out the box car below the stock pens, cross-lots from his house up on the hill, and, not being able to get advice from anybody else, went home to consult Martie.
Though there were a great many women in Medicine Bend, Maje Sampson looked to but one, Martie, the little washed-out woman up at Sampson's--wife, mother, nurse, cook, slave--Martie.
No particular color hair; no particular color eyes; no particular color gown; no particular cut to it. A plain bit of a woman, mother of six boys, large and small, and wife of a great big wind-bag engineer, big as three of her by actual measurement. By the time Maje had taken counsel and walked down town prominent business men were fending off his approach with shotguns. The city marshal from behind a bomb-proof asked what he was going to do with his patient, and Maje retorted he was going to take him home. He wasn't a M. R. W. of T. nor a P. S. G. of W. E., but he was a roundhouse man, and between Maje and a railroad man, a wiper even, there was a bond stronger than grip or password or jolly business of any kind. The other things Maje, without realizing it, merely played at; but as to the railroad lay--if a railroad man was the right sort he could borrow anything the big fellow had, money, plug tobacco, pipe, water bottle, strong bottle, it made no odds what. And, on the other hand, Maje wouldn't hesitate to borrow any or all of these things in return; the railroad man who got ahead of Maje Sampson in this respect had claims to be considered a past grand in the business.