Part 55

Her lips felt stiff and dry and she moistened them frequently as she stumbled across the hummocks of sagebrush growing on the vacant lots between the hospital and the hotel. She fell, and cursed aloud as she felt the sting of cacti spines in her palm. She sat where she fell and tried to extract them by the light of the moon. Then she arose and stumbled on.

"God! I'm drunk--jus' plain drunk," she said thickly, and was glad that there would be no one but Nell Beecroft about.

Nell was safe. She had long since attended to that. They shared too many secrets in common for Nell to squeal. Nell was not easily shocked. She laughed foolishly at the thought of Nell being shocked and wondered what could do it.

Her contract with Symes called for a graduate nurse--Dr. Harpe snorted--a graduate nurse for hoboes! Nell was cheaper, and even if her reputation was more than doubtful she was big and husky--and they understood each other. The right woman in the right place, and with Lamb helped form a trio that stood for harmony and self-protection.

"Graduate nurse for hoboes!" She muttered it scornfully again. "Not on your tintype!"

She fell against the kitchen door and it opened with her weight.

"Hullo, Nell!" She blinked foolishly in the glare of the light.

The woman looked at her in silence.

"Hullo, I say!" The cloak slipped from her bare shoulders and she lunged toward a chair.

The flush on her face had faded and her color was ghastly, a grayish white, the pallor of an anaemic; the many short hairs on her forehead and temples hung straight in her eyes, the filmy flounce of her gown was torn and trailing, while a scraggly bunch of Russian thistle clung to the chiffon ruffles of her silk drop-skirt.

The woman stood in the centre of the kitchen with her arms akimbo--a huge raw-boned creature of a rough, frontier type.

She spoke at last.

"Well, you're a sight!"

"Been celebratin', Nell," she chuckled gleefully, "been celebratin' my S'preme Moment."

"You'd better git in there and fix that feller's arm or we'll be celebratin' a funeral," the woman answered curtly. "He's bleedin' like a stuck pig."

"That's what he is--good joke, Nell. Where'd it happen?" She seated herself in a chair and slid until her head rested on the back, her sprawling legs outstretched.

"Gun fight at the dance hall. Look here," she took her roughly by the arm, "I tell you he's bad off. You gotta git in there and do somethin'."

"Shut up! Lemme be!" She pulled loose from the nurse's grasp, but arose, nevertheless, and staggered down the long hallway into the room where the new patient lay moaning softly upon the narrow iron cot.

"Hullo, Bill Duncan!"

His moaning ceased and he said faintly in relief--

"Oh, I'm glad! I thought you'd never come, Doc."

"Say," her voice was quarrelsome, "do you think I've nothin' to do but wait at the beck and call of you wops?"

The boy, for he was only that, looked surprise and resentment at the epithet, but he was too weak to waste his strength in useless words.

She raised his arm bound in its blood-soaked rags roughly and he groaned.

"Keep still, you calf!"

He shut his teeth hard and the sweat of agony stood out on his pallid face as she twisted and pulled and probed with clumsy, drunken fingers.

"Nell!" she called thickly.

The woman was watching from the doorway.