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- 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 DR 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 scruffier
- and much less adjustable than DR EDIX.
-
