ondered 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!"