Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a
game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two travel-
ing men who happened to be staying overnight in Moon-
stone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug
store. Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light
in the waiting-room and the double student's lamp on the
desk in the study. The isinglass sides of the hard-coal
burner were aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that
as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting-
room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a
country parlor. The study had worn, unpainted floors, but
there was a look of winter comfort about it. The doctor's
flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide
bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor
to the ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every
thickness and color. On the top shelf stood a long row of
thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled
board covers, with imitation leather backs.

As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially
old, so the doctor in small Colorado towns twenty-five
years ago was generally young. Dr. Archie was barely
thirty. He was tall, with massive shoulders which he held
stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was a distin-
guished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.