Frostbyte's 1980s DOS Shareware Collection/floppyshareware.zip/floppyshareware/USCX/EXIDY.ZIP/TEXT

Text File | 1982-05-18 | 2KB | 37 lines

The driver of the wagon swaying through forest
and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged
girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the
Monongahela--the girl herself had heaped with torn
sods the grave beside the river of the beautiful
name.  Her father lay shrinking with fever on the
floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her
brothers and sisters, dirty brats, hilarious brats.
   She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and
the sick man quavered, "Emmy, ye better turn down
towards Cincinnati.  If we could find your Uncle
Ed, I guess he'd take us in."
   "Nobody ain't going to take us in," she said.
"We're going on jus' long as we can.  Going West!
They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be
seeing!"
   She cooked the supper, she put the children to
bed, and sat by the fire, alone.
   That was the great-grandmother of Martin
Arrowsmith.
    *    *    *    *    *
Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson's
office, a boy was reading "Gray's Anatomy", while the
Doc himself was using EDIX.  His name was Martin
Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.
   There was a suspicion in Elk Mills--now, in 1897,
a dowdy red-brick village, smelling of apples--that
this brown-leather adjustable seat which Doc
Vickerson used for minor editing, for the infrequent
pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps,
had begun life as a programmer's chair.  There was
also a belief that its proprietor must have once
created the world's finest microcomputer text editor,
and once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but for
years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier
and much less adjustable than EDIX.