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Page 21
"Could you tell me which window he's near, Miss Nellie?"
She pointed out the window, and Johnny Fraser's mother stood,
holding to the bars, peering up at it. Her lips moved, and Jane
Brown knew that she was praying. At last she turned her eyes away.
"Folks have said a lot about him," she said, "but he was always a
good son to me. If only he'd had a chance--I'd be right worried,
Miss Nellie, if he didn't have Doctor Willie looking after him."
Jane Brown went into the building. There was just one thing clear in
her mind. Johnny Fraser must have his chance, somehow.
In the meantime things were not doing any too well in the hospital.
A second case, although mild, had extended the quarantine.
Discontent grew, and threatened to develop into mutiny. Six men
from one of the wards marched _en masse_ to the lower hall, and were
preparing to rush the guards when they were discovered. The Senior
Surgical Interne took two prisoners himself, and became an emergency
case for two stitches and arnica compresses.
Jane Brown helped to fix him up, and he took advantage of her
holding a dressing basin near his cut lip to kiss her hand, very
respectfully. She would have resented it under other circumstances,
but the Senior Surgical Interne was, even if temporarily, a patient,
and must be humoured. She forgot about the kiss immediately, anyhow,
although he did not.
Her three months of probation were drawing to a close now, and her
cap was already made and put away in a box, ready for the day she
should don it. But she did not look at it very often.
And all the time, fighting his battle with youth and vigour, but
with closed eyes, and losing it day by day, was Johnny Fraser.
Then, one night on the roof, Jane Brown had to refuse the Senior
Surgical Interne. He took it very hard.
"We'd have been such pals," he said, rather wistfully, after he saw
it was no use.
"We can be, anyhow."
"I suppose," he said with some bitterness, "that I'd have stood a
better chance if I'd done as you wanted me to about that fellow in
your ward, gone to the staff and raised hell."
"I wouldn't have married you," said Jane Brown, "but I'd have
thought you were pretty much of a man."
The more he thought about that the less he liked it. It almost kept
him awake that night.
It was the next day that Twenty-two had his idea. He ran true to
form, and carried it back to Jane Brown for her approval. But she
was not enthusiastic.
"It would help to amuse them, of course, but how can you publish a
newspaper without any news?" she asked, rather listlessly, for her.
"News! This building is full of news. I have some bits already.
Listen!" He took a notebook out of his pocket. "The stork breaks
quarantine. New baby in O ward. The chief engineer has developed a
boil on his neck. Elevator Man arrested for breaking speed limit.
Wanted, four square inches of cuticle for skin grafting in W. How's
that? And I'm only beginning."
Jane Brown listened. Somehow, behind Twenty-two's lightness of tone,
she felt something more earnest. She did not put it into words, even
to herself, but she divined something new, a desire to do his bit,
there in the hospital. It was, if she had only known it, a
milestone in a hitherto unmarked career. Twenty-two, who had always
been a man, was by way of becoming a person.
He explained about publishing it. He used to run a typewriter in
college, and the convalescents could mimeograph it and sell it.
There was a mimeographing machine in the office.
The Senior Surgical Interne came in just then. Refusing to marry him
had had much the effect of smacking a puppy. He came back, a trifle
timid, but friendly. So he came in just then, and elected himself to
the advertising and circulation department, and gave the Probationer
the society end, although it was not his paper or his idea, and sat
down at once at the table and started a limerick, commencing:
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