I will do what I can, Mrs. Smith" he said, "to help you find your
boy. I fear I cannot give you any hope, though, and if he should be
found I cannot promise you anything as to his future."

"Thank you," said the woman. "That is all I can ask."

And so it came about that Mrs. Hannah Smith was enrolled as a nurse,
and assigned to duty as near the front in the island of Luzon as any
nurse could go.

Six months passed, and then another six came near to their
end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New
England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor's wife to see
that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with
a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.

In this year's time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering
of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived
the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this,
so her companions said, was her being "just possessed to talk with
those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital." The
other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases
they liked least--the natives--but asked for them.

And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all
Mrs. Smith's native patients--if they did not die before they got
able to talk coherently--had to go through the same catechism:

Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come;
a white man who had come there from the American army?

Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?

Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin,
where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?

Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)

From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some
of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog
natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.

One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week
before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the
first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who
naturally fell, now, to "Mrs. Smith's lot," as the surgeons called
them. As soon as the nurse's watchful eyes saw the change in the man
she came to him and bent over his cot.

"Water, please," he murmured

The woman brought the water, her two natures struggling to decide
what she should do after she had given it