“Now, Doc—”
“Take your stuff and get out.”
“Listen, Doc.”
“If you call me Doc once again. I’ll knock your eye teeth down your throat.”
“Oh, no, you won’t, Doc.”
Dick Boulton looked at the doctor. Dick was a big man. He knew how big a man he was. He liked to get into fights. He was happy. Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw leaned on their cant-hooks and looked at the doctor. The doctor chewed the beard on his lower lip and looked at Dick Boulton. Then he turned away and walked up the hill to the cottage. They could see from his back how angry he was. They all watched him walk up the hill and go inside the cottage.
Dick said something in Ojibway. Eddy laughed but Billy Tabeshaw looked very serious. He did not understand English but he had sweat all the time the row was going on. He was fat with only a few hairs of mustache like a Chinaman. He picked up the two cant-hooks. Dick picked up the axes and Eddy took the saw down from the tree. They started off and walked up past the cottage and out the back gate into the woods. Dick left the gate open. Billy Tabeshaw went back and fastened it. They were gone through the woods.
In the cottage the doctor, sitting on the bed in his room, saw a pile of medical journals on the floor by the bureau. They were still in their wrappers unopened. It irritated him.
“Aren’t you going back to work, dear?” asked the doctor’s wife from the room where she was lying with the blinds drawn.
“No!”
“Was anything the matter?”
“I had a row with Dick Boulton.”
“Oh,” said his wife. “I hope you didn’t lose your temper, Henry.”
“No,” said the doctor.
“Remember, that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city,” said his wife. She was a Christian Scientist.
