Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories

								

an undertone:
"We only made a superficial examination down-stairs," he was saying,
"but it is evidently a ruptured appendix. If she's living in a couple of
hours I may be able to operate. But it's ten to one she dies on the
table."
"Who are they, and where did they come from?" Miss Fletcher asked
curiously.
"Their name is Hawkins, and they are from somewhere in the Kentucky
mountains. Think of his starting with her in that condition! He can't
read or write; it's the first time he has ever been in a city. I am
afraid he's going to prove troublesome. You'd better get him out of
there as soon as possible."
But anyone, however mighty in authority, who proposed to move Jeb
Hawkins when he did not choose to be moved reckoned unknowingly. All
tactics were exhausted from suggestion to positive command, and the
rules of the hospital were quoted in vain.
In the remote regions where Jeb lived there were no laws to break. Every
man's home was his stronghold, to be protected at the point of a pistol.
He was one of the three million people of good Anglo-Saxon stock who had
been stranded in the highlands when the Cumberland Mountains dammed the
stream of humanity that swept westward through the level wilderness.
Development had been arrested so long in Jeb and his ancestors that the
outside world, its interests and its mode of living, was a matter of
supreme and profound indifference. A sudden and unprecedented emergency
had driven him to the "Settlements." His girl had developed an ailment
that baffled the skill of the herb doctors; so, following one bit of
advice after another, he had finally landed in Baltimore. And now that
the terrible journey was ended and Sal was in the hands of the doctor
who was to work the cure, the wholly preposterous request was made of
him that he abandon her to her fate!
With dogged determination he sat beside the bed, and chewed silently and
stolidly through the argument.
"You gals mought ez well save yer wind," he announced at last. "Ef Sal
stays, I stay. Ef I go, Sal goes. We ain't axin' favors of nobody."
He was so much in the way during the necessary preparations for the
possible operation that finally Miss Fletcher was appealed to. She was a
woman accustomed to giving orders and to having them obeyed; but she was
also a woman of tact. Ten minutes of valuable time were spent in
propitiating the old man before she suggested that he come with her into
the corridor while the nurses straightened the room. A few minutes later
she returned, smiling:
"I've corralled him in the linen closet," she whispered; "he is
unpacking his carpet sack as if he meant to take up his abode with us."
"I am afraid," said the special nurse, glancing toward the bed, "he
won't have long to stay. How do you suppose he ever got her here?"
"I asked him. He said he drove her for three days in an ox-cart along
the creek bottom until they got to Jackson. Then he told the ticket