Village Horse Doctor (24 page)

He said, “Well, fool, I didn’t call you up here for company. What’s the matter with me?”

I said, “Well, me and the rest of the boys will go have our blue serge suits cleaned and pressed and some will have to set the buttons over on their vests since they wore them last. This is Friday and you have virus pneumonia, and you’ve got it bad, and you ain’t goin’ to take no medicine or cover up or do anything that anybody tells you, and you’ve already told all of us not to call Ruth, so I’d say by Tuesday, you’ll be deader than hell and we’ll have to wear them dark suits.”

We hadn’t been able to keep the cover on him and he reached down to the foot of the bed, pulled up the blanket under his chin and said, “My, God, call the old lady.”

Then, he said, “Why don’t ya give me something? You gonna let me lay here and die for the lack of medical attention?”

Aureomycin was a new drug and was not readily available. The advanced literature on it indicated that it was at that time the most effective antibiotic to treat virus pneumonia. By my various connections in research, I always managed by some devious means to have the latest so-called wonder drugs, and I had a good supply to use on Frank Hinde.

The prescribed treatment was two capsules the first dose and one capsule every three hours thereafter for about twenty-four hours. Well, I knew old Frank was nearer the size of a horse than he was a man, so I gave him four the first dose and two every three hours thereafter.

I told the rest of the boys who had gathered around (they were all old men) that they could go home and go to bed
and I would go in the other bedroom and spend the night with my patient. I took the alarm clock in the bedroom and when it would go off every three hours, I would raise up and holler for Frank to take his medicine.

About the third time I hollered that night, he didn’t answer. I said to myself, I never have gone to sleep and let a horse die. I wonder if I’ve gone to sleep and let a man and a half die.

I slipped my boots on and walked into the bedroom and Frank had gone to sleep and the bed covers were wringin’ wet with sweat which, of course, meant that the fever had broke. I changed the covers on him and kept givin’ him medicine for the rest of the night.

Ruth had a big linen closet full of nice clean linens and every time I got a fresh batch, I threw the ones I took off in a corner of the room. By morning I had all the corners of that great big bedroom covered up with wadded-up sheets thrown against the wall. My patient was well, with no fever, no sweat, and damn little color. He had quit cussin’ me and was really too weak to brag on me, but was awful proud to be alive.

In the meantime Ruth had landed at the airport at Midland, which was a hundred and ten miles away, and Lige had gone over there after her. I had never used female nurses in my large-animal practice and didn’t care to be around when she saw her husband (and my patient) after this siege of sickness and miracle medicine administered by the eminent horse doctor.

Albert Kay came in about sunup and I told him I believed I’d go and tend to my more pleasant large-animal practice, and if Frank wanted some breakfast, he could fix it for him. Soon after that, Lige and Ruth came in and when Ruth walked in the room and saw all them dirty sheets and saw Frank layin’ there kind of an ash color, sensitive
womanlike that she was she nearly came apart and asked him if he had had the doctor.

She, knowing that he never went to a doctor, asked, “Who did you have?”

He said, “Doc Green.”

Well, she blowed all to pieces and broke to the telephone and called a young doctor that was just out of the army, Ben McReynolds. In fact, he was still wearing his army uniform on calls. He was a nice little fellow with a kind, quiet bedside manner and a cute little mustache.

Ruth met him at the front door and as he came down the hall, she was explaining to him the awful thing that had happened and that she sure hoped that Frank wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t save him. The little young doctor had never seen Frank standing up and didn’t know how big he was and when he walked into the room and looked from the foot of the bed to the head of it, he thought he was lookin’ up the highway.

Ruth told Frank who the young doctor was. In cowboy fashion, Frank said, “I’m glad to meet ya. Have a seat.”

Dr. McReynolds pulled up a chair and in his very best manner asked Frank a few simple questions and then began to examine him. He asked Frank whether I gave him any medicine and Frank said, “Yep, and it sure got the job done. I was sick as hell this time yesterday.”

The young doctor asked, “How do you feel now?”

“I ain’t got a pain. I’m just weak and hungry as hell.”

Dr. McReynolds asked, “Do you know what kind of medicine Dr. Green gave you?”

Well, I had known this was comin’ so I had left the empty vials from the medicine we had used up under the corner of Frank’s mattress close to his head and told him not to throw ’em away. So, he told the young doctor, “Yeah, he left
these empty bottles,” as he reached under the mattress and handed him a big handful of empty bottles.

Dr. McReynolds studied the labels and the quantities, got up out of the chair, pushed it back to the corner and said, “Mr. Hinde, you are a well man.”

All during that time Ruth had been taking on about how foolish it was to call me for a human being. The young doctor turned to Ruth and said, “Mrs. Hinde, you will never realize how fortunate you were to get Dr. Green on this case.”

Ruth burst into another fit and said, “What do you mean by that?”

He said, “I mean to tell you that I would never have known the dosage required for an animal of this size.”

I left in early January and went back to the Indian reservation in New Mexico to continue my work on the sick Navajo sheep. I had determined that some of the toxic substance in pinguey was the same as that in yellowweed, and I took enough medicine to compound into the feed to run some experiments.

I explained to the Indian agent what I had in mind and he said that there would be more weed and it would be easier to get it pulled and fed to the sheep by a certain herder over at Nakaibito. He went over there with me and after visiting with the Indian and explaining what we wanted done, we went back to town.

I got some cottonseed meal and mixed the medicines that were in dry powder form into the meal. The next day the old Indian herder had a small corral ready for the sheep; it was built against a rock bluff with brush and cactus cut and piled on the other three sides for a fence. This corral was near a little spring from which he could carry water for them.

We took out of a flock ten grown ewes that you could plainly tell by the stain on their mouths were eating pinguay. These sheep had never been fed any kind of commercial feed, and it was necessary to pull fresh grown pinguay and dust cottonseed meal on it to get them to develop a taste for the feed. This was not real good because they were accumulating more poison while they were learning to eat feed.

This old Indian herder was a good sheepman, and with the patience of his breed, he managed to get them all to eating the medicated feed out of a trough within a week. This experimental bunch of sheep started with the handicap of already being on the weed. However, this was almost typical in that they would be on the weed before they would be sick enough to justify treatment—provided the drugs were going to be effective.

I don’t know how many Indian kids the old Indian herder had pulling weed, but every time I was by to look at the sheep during the next three weeks, the pen would be bedded with dry wilted weed that had been left and there was always fresh weed that had just been pulled and given to them.

I stopped posting any sheep, and where flocks would get sick, I would advise that they be moved to some other range. Since they were under herd, this was not hard to do.

While I was killing time waiting on the little bunch of ewes that we were running the test on, I, true to my nature and in keeping with my weakness, went up around Shiprock and Farmington and bought a few Indian horses and sent them home by truck. This helped fill some time and, besides, I hadn’t had any Indian horses in a few years and an old horseman always likes to change colors and models.

The sheep on feed got better and, in fact, had begun to get fat. I had the medical answer to the pinguey problem
and decided to make a complete report to the Indian agent. He had been fully aware of all the details of the medicated meal and experiments that he had helped me set up with the old herder.

When we were talking about this work, he asked me to give him a written report for the government records of his Indian agency. I dictated and had this report typed out in good order and delivered it to his office and was making arrangements to pack up and leave. However, I had offered to help secure the necessary drugs and furnish them with the proper proportions and let them mix and feed it themselves.

In a day or two, the Indian agent read my report, asked for a bill for my services, told me he appreciated the information, and wound up his conversation by sayin’ that it would be impractical because the Indians, the sheep, and the Indian Agency weren’t interested in going into the business of “feeding” sheep.

Even though I was being paid for my services, I didn’t appreciate this government attitude, so I packed my riggin’ and told him that the sheep and the Indians didn’t have as bad a case of poison as the damn Indian agent and said, “Goodbye!”

On a nice spring Sunday morning I was called out west of town where several good gentle horses had run through a barbed-wire fence during the night, which at the time appeared to be unexplainable. They were rather badly cut up on their forelegs and breasts. It was later proven by the owners of these horses that they were buzzed by some fly-boys in planes from the nearby training field at Fort Stockton, and this scared the horses into the fences. Horse hair was even found on the bellies of some of the airplanes in the investigation.

I sewed these horses up carefully, matching the muscle
as best as I could in each case and very carefully suturing the skin in such a pattern that drainage would not be a problem. I had used all the wound dressing that I had with me.

When I came back to town, I went by the office and washed up and just before noon went by the Stockton Pharmacy to give Joe Henson some prescriptions to be filled for the people who owned the horses; they would come in later and get the medicine for further treatment.

There was a beautiful lady in the drugstore who had just gotten into town; she had come in to tell Joe she was present and would be ready to start a cosmetic demonstration at the drugstore Monday morning. Well, cosmetic companies don’t send out thick-hided, coarse-haired girls to demonstrate their products, so, needless to say, she looked to me like she would be real good company to take to lunch. It didn’t take me more than a minute to make the proposition.

She was delighted and we went up to Beanie Christian’s Dixie Café. The local Sunday diners were there and also a fair number of tourists, because Beanie ran a better-than-average West Texas café.

Beanie was a little fellow, past middle age, an old bachelor, very mild mannered, with a broken tremorlike voice. The natives were speculating about who Doc’s new girl friend was and Beanie was more curious than he appeared to be. I saw him and one of his local customers gettin’ their heads together, talkin’ and smilin’ and lookin’ over our way.

When this cosmetic queen and I came up to pay the bill, she was standing that nice, proper social distance from my elbow. As Beanie looked at her, he said in a shaky voice, “Doc, your wife just called and said for you to come home and bring home paregoric for the baby.”

Half the house began to laugh. It was funny to me that
old Beanie would take after me, as tough as I was known to be, verbally speakin’, and for that split second, I was about to let him get away with his joke when I suddenly caught up the slack by saying, “No more certain than I am about the little devil, maybe you ought to take him that paregoric.”

A second later he bumped his head on the kitchen door and wasn’t seen for the rest of the day.