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Page 32
"How?" asked Jane, pausing.
"Ram a towel down his throat, or--but don't bother. I'll dose him
with this beef tea and red pepper, and he'll be too busy putting out
the fire to want to sing."
"You wouldn't be so cruel!" said Jane, rather drawing back. The
red-haired person smiled and to Jane it showed that he was actually
ferocious. She ran all the way up for the crackers and down again,
carrying the tin box. There is no doubt that Jane's family would
have promptly swooned had it seen her.
When she came down there was a sort of after-dinner peace reigning.
The convalescent typhoid, having filled up on milk and beef soup,
had floated off to sleep. "The Chocolate Soldier" had given way to
deep-muttered imprecations from the singer's room. Jane made herself
a cup of bouillon and drank it scalding. She was making the second
when the red-haired person came back with an empty cup.
"I forgot to explain," he said, "that beef tea and red pepper's the
treatment for our young friend in there. After a man has been
burning his stomach daily with a quart or so of raw booze----"
"I beg your pardon," said Jane coolly. Booze was not considered good
form on the hill--the word, of course. There was plenty of the
substance.
"Raw booze," repeated the red-haired person. "Nothing short of red
pepper or dynamite is going to act as a substitute. Why, I'll bet
the inside of that chap's stomach is of the general sensitiveness
and consistency of my shoe."
"Indeed!" said Jane, coldly polite. In Jane's circle people did not
discuss the interiors of other people's stomachs. The red-haired
person sat on the table with a cup of bouillon in one hand and a
cracker in the other.
"You know," he said genially, "it's awfully bully of you to come out
and keep me company like this. I never put in such a day. I've given
up fussing with the furnace and got out extra blankets instead. And
I think by night our troubles will be over." He held up the cup and
glanced at Jane, who was looking entrancingly pretty. "To our
troubles being over!" he said, draining the cup, and then found
that he had used the red pepper again by mistake. It took five
minutes and four cups of cold water to enable him to explain what he
meant.
"By our troubles being over," he said finally when he could speak,
"I mean this: There's a train from town at eight to-night, and if
all goes well it will deposit in the village half a dozen nurses, a
cook or two, a furnace man--good Heavens, I wonder if I forgot a
furnace man!"
It seemed, as Jane discovered, that the telephone wires being cut,
he had sent Higgins from the men's ward to the village to send some
telegrams for him.
"I couldn't leave, you see," he explained, "and having some small
reason to believe that I am _persona non grata_ in this vicinity I
sent Higgins."
Jane had always hated the name Higgins. She said afterward that she
felt uneasy from that moment. The red-haired person, who was not
bad-looking, being tall and straight and having a very decent nose,
looked at Jane, and Jane, having been shut away for weeks--Jane
preened a little and was glad she had done her hair.
"You looked better the other way," said the red-haired person,
reading her mind in a most uncanny manner. "Why should a girl with
as pretty hair as yours cover it up with a net, anyhow?"
"You are very disagreeable and--and impertinent," said Jane,
sliding off the table.
"It isn't disagreeable to tell a girl she has pretty hair," the
red-haired person protested--"or impertinent either."
Jane was gathering up the remnants of her temper, scattered by the
events of the day.
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