“All right, Joe. I'm as glad as you are Letty's safe. Take care of her.
Take care of your wife. Do a stroke of good, back-breaking work once
in a while. It'll help that tired feeling of yours that's getting to be
dangerously chronic. You've no idea, Joe, what a satisfaction it is, now
and then, to feel that you've accomplished something. Try it. Good-bye.”
He waved his hand at the woman in the door, who responded with a flutter
of her dingy apron; which was immediately thereafter applied to
her eyes. Within, by the window, a little pale-faced girl hugged a
remarkable doll with yellow hair and a red silk frock.
“You'd ought to be pretty proud, Letty Tressler,” said the woman,
returning to the small convalescent, “to think Doc kissed you when he
left. He's been awful good to you, Doc has, and him with that arm in a
sling a-bothering him all the time. But I didn't think he'd do that.”
“Maybe it's 'cause I'm so clean now,” speculated the child weakly. “When
he did it he whispered in my ear that he liked clean faces.”
“Letty, you ain't goin' to have any kind o' face but a clean face after
this, jest on account o' Doc Burns,” vowed her mother emotionally, and
the child, her doll pressed against her face, nodded.
Far down the road Burns was bidding Johnny Caruthers put on more speed.
“We have to make time to-day, Johnny,” he explained. “I'm going to get
off on that ten-thirty to-night if I have to break my other arm to do
it. I don't know that I'd be much more helpless than I am now if I
did. Curious, Johnny, how many things there are a man can't do with one
hand.”
“I should say you could do more with that left hand of yours than most
folks can with both,” declared young Caruthers, honest admiration in his
eye.
Burns laughed--a hearty, care-free laugh. He was in wild spirits, Johnny
could see that, and wondered why the Doctor should be so happy over
pulling a dead-beat family out of their troubles. Everybody knew Joe
Tressler. And Johnny understood that the Doctor had given up going away
on Joe's account ten days ago, when he took the case on the eve of his
departure. Johnny had seen his employer in all stages of tension since
that day, as he had driven him out, at first half-a-dozen times in the
twenty-four hours, to this same little old wreck of a house. Johnny had
driven him to other houses, also to one especially, in the city, where
the lad had sat and speculated much on the extremes of experience in the
life of a busy practitioner.
It was to this same house that Johnny took Burns next; a house reached
by a long drive through wonderful grounds, to a palace of a home within
which the man with his arm in the sling disappeared with precisely
the same rather brusque and hurried bearing characteristic of him
everywhere. But Johnny could not see within. If he had, his honest eyes
might have opened still wider.
On his way upstairs Burns was intercepted by the master of the house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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