Tawny Marsh

I

WHEN copper was found in the cliffs that faced the north shore of Tawny Marsh, men predicted confidently that Sunville, spreading east and west between marsh and cliff, would become a big city before a dozen years had passed. And for a time it seemed that the prediction would come true. The Tin and Copper Syndicate laid a railroad, built workmen’s cottages, and put up the most efficient machinery for mining and loading, and later on for smelting. Spacious streets were laid out, numerous stores sprang up, farms were plotted and occupied, north and east and west. Long serpents of freight cars every week carried the finest copper in America to the big markets in the blast. The Tin and Copper shares boomed. Everything seemed flourishing and full of promise.

And then the shadow came. Sunville became aware of a deadly enemy within her gates. There had been ominous whispers the second year, but not till the third year had men said right out that the little cemetery was growing faster than it should. The town authorities proclaimed that drinking water, obtained mostly from wells, should be boiled or at least filtered. But the uneasiness increased. Immigration slackened perceptibly. The Syndicate, alarmed for its labor supply, secured a young medical graduate who had won golden opinions in the hospitals of Chicago and sent him to Sunville, along with two trained nurses, to fight the enemy, equipping in his behalf a medical laboratory with all the most efficient drugs, instruments, and literature.

Dr. Valentine came and plunged immediately into the fray. The first case he visited was a boy of fifteen years, who two days before had been perfectly well. Now he lay with sunken cheeks, heavy eyelids, ugly dark rings round the eyes, almost imperceptible pulse — obviously near to death. It looked convincingly like ptomaine poisoning. Yet the most searching inquiry failed to elicit a scrap of evidence that the boy had taken food or drink differing in the slightest from what the rest of his family had taken.

The young doctor realized the importance of winning the first fight. He put on both nurses. He came four times to the house that day. By evening the treatment began to take effect. At ten o’clock Valentine was able to come out of the sickroom and tell the parents that little Robbie — his father’s pride, his mother’s darling — would probably recover, and recover soon. The gratitude of the poor people was affecting in the extreme. When Mrs. Peirce sobbed out a prayer that God would reward the man who saved her boy’s life, the doctor could only shake her hand and hurry from the house.

He cherished no illusions. ‘That was a near thing, won by a fluke. Next time it may be the other way, unless we unmask the enemy.’

Many cases were malarial, aggravated by panic. On all such, Valentine’s competent handling and cheery optimism acted like a charm. Wherever he went he brought hope and vitality. The little community recovered some of its old spirit. The shadow seemed to be lifting.

And yet the panic had been far from unfounded. Many deaths of alarming suddenness had occurred and still occurred. Valentine soon found that these illnesses consisted of two classes: one like that of Robbie Peirce, another apparently a high fever, not typhoid, not cerebrospinal meningitis, yet resembling both. Nothing in his medical books gave him definite light, but he had no doubt that here were two disease germs, comparatively new to American medicine, which, until expert bacteriologists isolated them, he could fight only by the most careful and scientific nursing.

So for three years the fight went on. Valentine soon put every household right and alert about the most effective devices for keeping flies, gnats, and mosquitoes out of sickrooms and away from food. By patient coaching he made every young mother in Sunville as trustworthy at the bedside and almost as deft as his own trained nurses. More than once he himself took a turn at watching a patient through critical midnight hours when relatives were worn out. And even when his efforts ended in failure he could say a word worth saying to desolate husband or broken-hearted wife or terrified child, and the very sound of his voice in those hours was like a caress. Before those three years ended, the doctor had endeared himself to the whole population. The men honored him, the women worshiped him, the children loved him, his two nurses would have died for him.

It can be guessed, then, what consternation reigned in Sunville when the news spread that the doctor himself was down with sickness.

’Dr. Valentine?’

‘Yes, and he’s bad.’

‘Not the “poison death"?’

‘No, but it’s the “quick fever,” and that’s bad enough.’

‘I should say. He’ll be wanting grapes and ice, and he shall have them right now if I have to carry them myself.’

But everyone was saying and doing this same thing, and soon traffic to the door had to be stopped. Neighbors took charge and put up a bulletin every two hours.

The Reverend Charles Medway, the only clergyman in the place, who had recently turned a rough shed into a church and begun to hold Sunday services, announced by placard that a prayer meeting would be held at eight o’clock, to ‘intercede for a beloved fellow citizen’s life.’ Over one hundred and fifty people, three times the usual congregation, gathered there that night.

Next evening, when Dr. Hinton, who had been rushed from Cheyenne City in the manager’s high-powered car, announced that the patient’s temperature had reached 105 degrees and that there was very little hope, Mr. Medway’s church was crowded to suffocation. Men were there who had not been at worship for forty years. It was long remembered how Marwin, the old copper miner whom Valentine had attended after the rock fell on his leg, — a man who had never prayed publicly in his life, — got up and said very quietly, ‘O God Almighty, if someone must die, let it be me. Let it be me, old Marwin, and let Dr. Valentine live.’

Next morning the dreaded bulletin was put up, written in a shaky hand: ‘The doctor died this morning at six o’clock.’

II

Mr. William Tranquil Ennersly, president of the Tin and Copper Syndicate, trained geologist and engineer, also financier and multimillionaire, arrived in Sunville the morning of the funeral. His car passed through silent streets into the wide yard of his great mining works, where not a sound was to be heard and not a living soul was to be seen, until an office door opened and the manager appeared.

‘Good morning, Fenton. What on earth has happened?'

‘Good morning, President. Dr. Valentine has died.'

‘I know, I know, but why stop the work?’

‘Stop the work! I stopped nothing. I left the gates open, as you see, but I got an intimation last night, quite polite and respectful, that not a man or boy would leave his home this day for play or for work till the doctor was laid in his grave. There’s no ill will to you or me, — we have no labor troubles here of any kind, — and there’s no loss or damage except this stoppage up to the dinner hour. You see, President, Valentine was no common man, and the people are fair broken-hearted. I have never seen anything like it in all my life.'

‘Well, well,’ said the president, ‘I know, I know. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame the men either. But tell me, did Valentine do the trick? Did he get the better of this epidemic or whatever it is?’

‘Yes and no,’ answered the manager. ‘Valentine did all that any good medical practitioner could have done, and far more than most of them would have dreamed of doing. But he often said to me in this office, “Fenton, I am fighting a deadly enemy with one hand tied behind my back. I have sent these bacteria men at Chicago all the swabs and specimens they demanded, but till they have isolated and cultured the coccus that does the mischief, and made a serum that will kill the coccus without killing the patient, I can never give the knock-out.” He was always in hopes that word would come from the laboratories in Chicago, but it never came.’

‘Did he ever say why this microbe was so potent here and so rare in other places?’ asked Ennersly.

‘No,’ replied the manager. ‘He was certain it was not the water. He tested and analyzed the water in every possible way, and was sure there was no better drinking water in the States. But I rather think he blamed the flies and mosquitoes. We do have a plague of them.’

Both men then put on appropriate garb and went to attend the funeral. When the body was committed to its rest and the service had quite finished, Mr. Ennersly invited the company to remain for a few minutes, as he had something to say.

‘I wish first of all to endorse all that has been said by Mr. Medway about our departed friend. He was an honor to a noble profession. He served this community with his whole heart. He was also a most faithful servant of the syndicate over which I have the honor to preside.

‘At the proper place and time, you, the citizens of Sunville, will doubtless consider what form of memorial will best enshrine and express your gratitude for all that he was and all that he did for you. But on behalf of my fellow directors and myself I wish to announce that we have decided to commemorate our faithful servant and express our gratitude by building and endowing in this town a memorial hospital, to be known henceforth as the Valentine Hospital, where all sufferers from accident or disease in this community shall receive treatment or nursing free of all expense.’

Mr. Medway uttered a few words of heartfelt thanks, and the mourners then dispersed.

That afternoon Mr. Ennersly took the opportunity of having a good look round. He procured a horse and rode out along the crest of the range of low hills that runs due south from the eastern outskirts of Sunville. Tawny Marsh extended level and ugly on his right, a quadrilateral about six miles east and west and five miles from north to south — a waste of wild grass and rushes, here and there stagnant pools, a bank of black slime near Sunville, farther out vast stretches of light brown or yellow weed, from which the great swamp took its name of Tawny Marsh.

‘I am no biologist,’ said Ennersly to himself, ‘but I would hazard a guess that there’s the big mother of the flies and all the bugs that worried poor Valentine.’

Ennersly was no biologist, but he had a good eye for country. Tawny Marsh he soon recognized as the bed of an ancient lake. Halfway down the slope from where he was riding he spied the long narrow line of the ancient lake beach, keeping its dead level round all the little sinuosities of the hill front and running far south toward Roy Gap with the precision of a Roman road.

‘An ancient lake, of course, where the water was suddenly drawn off. But why was it drawn off? And where did all the water come from and why is it not there now?’

When Ennersly reached Roy Gap, a fold of the hills at the southeast corner of the Marsh, he found the answer to some of his questions. The overflow of the ancient lake had there had its outlet and, pouring over a cliff some miles to the east, had cut backward through the cliff edge — back and back through long ages to the shore of the lake, and then in a few hours the last thin barrier burst and the whole lake poured down the gorge and drained itself dry. Dry? Yes, perhaps; but what had happened to the river or rivers that fed the lake? And why this big swamp, Tawny Marsh ?

It was not apparent yet what had happened to the river, but at Roy Gap, some time after the river ceased to flow, a landslip had occurred. Thousands of tons of clay, stone, and gravel had suddenly broken away from the steep mountain to the south and pitched into the hollow. The old outlet was completely blocked for more than half its total depth and for a distance of one hundred and fifty yards. Away to the east the gorge ran winding for seven miles, two hundred feet in depth, but as dry as a bone. To the west of the landslip the brooks from the hills accumulated the mud and rain of winter, but never could remake the old lake — only wide shallow pools that grew stagnant and evaporated in the heat, feeding rushes and asphodel and yellow moss, and nurturing the pests, the winged enemies of man. So came Tawny Marsh. Ennersly rapidly jotted down in his engineer’s pocketbook some notes on the apparent differences of levels and returned to Sunville.

The consumption of fuel at the copper works had increased seriously, and Ennersly liked to look into things for himself. The rest of that day was occupied with investigation into costs.

The following morning saw the president again on horseback, making for the northwest up a wide valley that bounded the west end of the copper cliffs. He returned at night, tired but in high spirits.

‘Fenton,’ he cried, ‘those cost calculations of last night are out of date. You may burn them all. In eighteen months I will give you all the electricity you require here, and all that Sunville requires, at one third the present cost.'

‘Struck oil somewhere?' asked Fenton skeptically.

‘No, sir, water. You know the Yellow Fork that flows from the Eastern Rockies in this direction and then turns about twenty miles from here at a sharp angle and makes northeastward? Well, that same Yellow Fork used to flow straight on down into Tawny Marsh where the little creek now runs that you call the Trickle.'

‘That was before my day,’ said Fenton, still skeptical.

‘Yes, about ten thousand years before you were born. It was diverted by some slight obstacle up there on that plateau where it winds and goes slow, and I am going to coax it back into its own old channel and bring it down into Tawny Marsh. Three or four miles out from here we shall lay pipe lines and bring over those cliffs, into turbines right here at your door, as much water as will make all the power we need for the next fifty years.'

‘But you forget. Our town stands barely fifty feet above Tawny Marsh. You will swamp the place. You can’t play tricks with a river.'

‘I thought of that. I will see to it that no house is swamped. And you forget Roy Gap.'

And then the discussion turned on ways and means.

But the president in the end made out his case and took his own line.

About two years after this conversation, there came a day when all Sunville turned out to see the Yellow Fork overwhelm the little Trickle and enter Tawny Marsh. The engineers upcountry took care to increase the diverted flow only very gradually. There was no sensational rush of a mighty flood. But there was nothing disappointing in the view from Sunville next morning. Tawny Marsh was gone. In its place lay and flashed and dimpled and laughed in the sun one of the loveliest lakes that men in that part of the world had ever seen. The hills on the east and south looked smaller, but the high hills on the west, wooded halfway up and beautified just then with the tints of autumn, had a majesty and a color which the level silver of the lake now revealed for the first time, while from the foot of those hills ran out some long promontories — the land’s fingers laid caressingly on a newfound treasure. Three or four islets also ‘leaped to the eye’ in the northwest and southwest corners, like emeralds left lying on a silver shield. For a whole day Sunville could talk of nothing else. No human eye ever saw Tawny Marsh again.

III

Six months after the coming of the lake the Reverend Charles Medway, availing himself of a lull in his pastoral work, made his way to the Valentine Hospital to call on Dr. Hinton.

‘Good morning, Doctor.'

‘Good morning, Minister. Want a new heart? Or a secondhand appendix? Or any little trifle like that? Town and country orders promptly attended to.'

‘Yes,’cried Medway with a smile. ‘I want you to conceive and deliver yourself of a fine infant in the form of a popular lecture to my St. Telemachus Literary Society.'

‘And when do you think I could find time to get up a popular lecture?'

‘Six months ago I would not have mentioned it. I know the load poor Valentine carried alone, and the town is a third bigger now. But I am sure it is healthier. I know I have not heard of one “poison death” or one “quick fever” in the last four months.'

‘ I am sure you have not. There has not been one case notified for five months anywhere about here.’

‘How do you account for it? Have you any idea?’ asked the minister.

‘I am not going to speak positively,’ said the doctor, ‘but my present belief is that those diseases were wiped out with Tawny Marsh.’

‘The Lord’s name be praised,’ said Medway. ‘And about the lecture—’

Just then the telephone bell rang. The doctor took up the receiver. After the usual ‘Yes —yes’ came a pause of listening, then ‘My heavens!’ Then another pause. ‘Here, of course, at once. Everything will be ready. Be careful. Good-bye.’

‘Medway, there’s been an accident. Ennersly is badly hurt. They’re bringing him here right now. Has had a bad fall and is unconscious.’ So saying, he pressed the electric bell.

‘I thought he was in New York!’ cried Medway.

‘He returned to inspect the Roy Gap sluices yesterday.’

Soon the matron and two nurses were on the move, and in little over ten minutes the special ward was in perfect readiness for the injured man.

‘Hinton, you’ll be busy, but I’ll remain within call,’ said Medway. ‘When you’ve done your work he may need me also, and in any case I ought to know the best or the worst.’

So Medway remained, and saw the limp figure of the president carried on a stretcher from his car into the hospital. The minister strolled about for nearly an hour in the warm evening sun. He noted the extraordinary stillness of the air, the amazing loveliness of the scene. He thought of the change this man had wrought, who now lay there helpless — perhaps dying. At last he saw Hinton come out through the wide door-window of the special ward on to the verandah and sign to him. He hurried forward. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘All going right for the present,’ said Hinton with a grave face. ‘But, my word! He’s battered and bruised from head to foot. It seems he and his head engineer were watching the water roaring out of their overflow pipes in the gorge below Roy Gap and lamenting the fact that such power was going to waste, when Ennersly said, “Let us have a look at some of the rocks up there where this landslip came from. It would be better to find something at hand rather than fifty miles away.”

‘So they climbed up some three hundred feet of the steep slope above the southern edge of the gorge. When they reached the bare rock above, Ennersly, after some knocks of his geologist’s hammer, called out, “Man alive, it’s hematite!” That moment a lump of rock of no great size fell and struck him on the head. Ennersly gave a cry and suddenly tumbled backward, rolling and tumbling and sliding right away down the slope among the loose stones for about fifty yards, and then lay still against a boulder.

‘He has a broken arm, which I have just set, and concussion which may or may not be serious, but the best chance for him is to lie as still as death for as long as he can.’

‘Well, I hope and pray he will recover,’ said Medway, ‘and if he does not —’ he paused, thinking a bit — ‘well, we will build him a monument as big as we built for Valentine, and set it up at the other end of Hamilton Square.’

‘ Will you?’ asked the doctor. ‘He’s all right in his own way, but he is not and never was and never will be a man like Valentine,’

‘Hinton,’ said Medway, ‘you know how I honored and loved your predecessor, your heroic predecessor, but I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that the man lying in there delivered the goods.’

‘You mean?’

' I mean what you told me yourself, and what I am sure is true. Ennersly — not Valentine — wiped out the “poison death” and the “quick fever.” Think of what that means to this community for years to come.’

‘Yes, my dear fellow, but, granting all that, did Ennersly intend to do it, or was he simply out to get heaps of cheap electricity — and brought off our deliverance as an accidental byproduct? It seems to me that intention counts, or ought to count, for a good deal in a matter of a man’s deserts. Why, padre, is n’t that what you yourself are always telling us on Sundays? But stop, here’s Nurse. Well, Nurse, anything wrong?’

‘No,’ said the nurse, ‘he’s lying perfectly still; has never raised an eyelid — only moans a little now and then. But the air is so calm I can hear every word you say, though you speak so softly.’

‘Oh, that’s all right. What do you think? Ought he to have a monument for giving us the benefit of Ennersly Lake?’

‘I think the lake is monument enough. Besides, he has made plenty of money out of it,’ said the nurse, going back to her duty.

‘There you are, Medway,’ said the doctor. ‘Hear the voice of the people.’

‘She’s wrong, Hinton; and if that is the people’s voice the people will be wrong. Look here. Suppose that you and Ennersly one hot day were swimming in that lake, and that you saw something bright on the brown bottom below and dived for it and brought it up, finding it to be a gold watch and chain with no end of jewels and rings and lockets attached to it; but that after you secured it you found Ennersly in trouble and drowning, and you took the chain in your mouth and gripped Ennersly by the ears and brought him safely ashore — would he be excused from all expression of gratitude to you by noting that you had made a good thing out of it, that you never went into the water to rescue him, and were all that gold to the good?’

’I should think not,’ admitted Hinton.

‘Very well, then, gratitude must have its place and expression in our case also. And about intention,’ went on Medway, ‘you are right: we make a lot of it in the pulpit, because we speak there of man’s deeds as viewed by God, who knows our motives through and through. But what do we know about Ennersly’s intentions? Do we know he never intended to destroy the pests of Tawny Marsh? We do not. We were perfectly right in giving high honor to Valentine, the man who laid down his life trying to accomplish a great work, though he failed to accomplish it. But we cannot afford to ignore efficiency, or to ignore solid achievement because we are not sure of the intention. We must honor the man who delivers the goods, and we ought to attribute the best motives to him that the plain facts permit. I must say I think people are unfair to rich men. If rich men make money, they meant to make it; but if they confer a great benefit, they did not mean to confer it—it was an accident, an unintended by-product; or else they did it deliberately because they hoped thereby to achieve some reputation or position or ulterior gain for themselves. It’s not fair. But supposing Ennersly and his like are out for themselves and what they can get, and only that all the time; even then I would praise them to their faces for their services and their benefits, because I have far more hope of changing a hard man by treating him generously than by perpetual suspicion and ingratitude.’

‘Medway, my boy, it seems to me you would build that monument now and set it up for Ennersly himself to see — if he recovers.’

‘I would,’ said the minister. ‘I know it’s not the custom, but I would.’

‘Well, I would not. I hate all this flattery and slavering of the rich and powerful. I would wait till they were dead, when no one could say we were on the lookout for further favors to come.’

‘Hinton, I feel the force of that. I only want to say I detest and loathe ingratitude, or what comes to the same thing — gratitude that conceals itself until it is too late. But enough of this. Think over that popular lecture you ’re going to give at my Literary Society, and good-bye.’

’Oh, I can safely promise to think,’ rejoined Hinton with a smile. ‘Goodbye, padre.’ And the two friends parted.

The events which had happened in Sunville now attracted the attention of the whole state. Mr. Ennersly had scarcely recovered from his bruises and his concussion when the leaders of one of the great political parties had him nominated for the governorship. On election day many citizens voted for their own party candidate, as they had always done. But a section of thoughtful people were swayed by the same considerations which had been discussed by the minister and the doctor in the grounds of the Valentine Hospital, and the party managers on both sides have since admitted that these voters upset their calculations and made all the difference between victory and defeat .

The result of the election has now passed into history, but there are still people interested in the controversy which once raged so hotly who think they know the principle that should have governed the voting. But these people do not all agree.