He stepped across the threshold, his eyes trained to quick observation of details taking in at a glance all there was to be seen. The room showed all signs of a fresh unpacking, the one table and two chairs piled high with odds and ends. For the most part the miscellany consisted of big, fat books, bundles of towels and fresh white napkins, rubber-stoppered bottles of varicolored contents, and black leather cases, no doubt containing a surgeon's instruments. Through an open door giving entrance to the adjoining room he noted further signs of unpacking with a marked difference in the character of the litter; the girl stepped quickly to this door, shutting out the vision of a helter-skelter of feminine apparel. "It is your hand?" she asked, as in most thoroughly matter of fact fashion she put out her own for it. "Let me see it." But for a moment he bestowed upon her merely a slow look of question. "You don't mean that you are Dr. Page?" he asked. Then, believing that he understood: "You're the nurse?" "Is a physician's life in San Juan likely to be so filled with his duties that he must bring a nurse with him?" she countered. "Yes, I am Dr. Page." He noted that she was as defiant about the matter as the Kid had been about the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas; plainly she had foreseen that the type of man-animal inhabiting this out-of-the-way corner of the world would be likely to wonder at her hardihood and, perhaps, to jeer. "I came to-day," she explained in the same matter-of-fact way. "Consequently you will pardon the looks of things. But I am one of the kind that believes in hanging out a shingle first, getting details arranged next. Now may I see the hand?" "It's hardly anything." He lifted it now for her inspection. "Just a slight cut, you know. But it's showing signs of infection. A little antiseptic . . ." She took his fingers into hers and bent over the wound. He noted two things, now: what strong hands she had, shapely, with sensitive fingers ignorant of rings; how richly alive and warmly colored her hair was, full of little waves and curls. She had nothing to say while she treated him. Over an alcohol lamp she heated some water; in a bowl, brought from the adjoining room, she cleansed the hand thoroughly. Then the application of the final antiseptic, a bit of absorbent cotton, a winding of surgeon's tape about a bit of gauze, and the thing was done. Only at the end did she say: "It's a peculiar cut . . . not a knife cut, is it?" "No," he answered humorously. "Did it on a piece of lead. . . . How much is it, Doctor?" "Two dollars," she told him, busied with the drying of her own hands. "Better let me look at it again in the morning if it pains you." He laid two silver dollars in her palm, hesitated a moment and then went out.