bationer's
life, such as occasionally scrubbing porches or borrowing a half
dollar or being suspected of stealing the eggs from the henhouse.
But _that_ Johnny Fraser had been a wicked, smiling imp, much given
to sitting in the sun.

Here lay another Johnny Fraser, a quiet one, who might never again
feel the warm earth through his worthless clothes on his worthless
young body. A Johnny of closed eyes and slow, noisy breathing.

"Why, Johnny!" said the Probationer, in a strangled voice.

The Senior Surgical Interne was interested.

"Know him?" he said.

"He is a boy from home." She was still staring at this quiet,
un-impudent figure.

The Senior Surgical Interne eyed her with an eye that was only
partially professional. Then he went to the medicine closet and
poured a bit of aromatic ammonia into a glass.

"Sit down and drink this," he said, in a very masculine voice. He
liked to feel that he could do something for her. Indeed, there was
something almost proprietary in the way he took her pulse.

Some time after the early hospital supper that evening Twenty-two,
having oiled his chair with some olive oil from his tray, made a
clandestine trip through the twilight of the corridor back of the
elevator shaft. To avoid scandal he pretended interest in other
wards, but he gravitated, as a needle to the pole, to H. And there
he found the Probationer, looking rather strained, and mothering a
quiet figure on a bed.

He was a trifle puzzled at her distress, for she made no secret of
Johnny's status in the community. What he did not grasp was that
Johnny Fraser was a link between this new and rather terrible world
of the hospital and home. It was not Johnny alone, it was Johnny
scrubbing a home porch and doing it badly, it was Johnny in her
father's old clothes, it was Johnny fishing for catfish in the
creek, or lending his pole to one of the little brothers whose
pictures were on her table in the dormitory.

Twenty-two felt a certain depression. He reflected rather grimly
that he had been ten days missing and that no one had apparently
given a hang whether he turned up or not.

"Is he going to live?" he inquired. He could see that the ward nurse
had an eye on him, and was preparing for retreat.

"O yes," said Jane Brown. "I think so now. The _interne_ says they
have had a message from Doctor Willie. He is coming." There was a
beautiful confidence in her tone.

Things moved very fast with the Probationer for the