octor in Oklahoma?"

"I hear about every day! I was with him just long enough for him to
find that I was useful and he's wild to have me there again. I wired
him that I'm ready to go, but that the sick man is nervous about making
the return trip alone. Of course he wants to keep on the good side of
a good patient, so he answered, 'Stay on'."

"Are you able to do anything for your patient? He's still in the
hospital, isn't he?"

"I go there every day and he sends me on errands all over town. I'm
getting to know almost as much about oil as I do about medicine! But
I'm rather tired of playing errand boy."

"You have a chance to see your family."

"And you. But I'm supposed to stay at the hotel, much to Mother's
disgust. I'm doing a little medical inspection among Father's poor
people, though. That whiles away a few hours every day, and of course,
every time I go to the hospital the doctors there tell me about any
interesting new cases, so I'm not 'going stale' entirely."

"As if you could!" exclaimed Gertrude admiringly. "You're just storing
up ideas and information to startle the Oklahoman natives with."

"The 'natives' in Oklahoma are all too young to be startled," laughed
Edward, "but of course I'm stowing away everything new I hear about
methods of treatment and operations and so on to tell Dr. Billings when
I get back. Now let me hear what you've been doing. How are these
kiddies at Rose House?"

"I want you to look them over and talk with the mothers. Dr. Hancock
comes over when we send for him, but all these people are so delicate
that I feel that they ought to have a physician's eye on them all the
time."

"They have you pretty often, don't they?"

"I go over every day either in the morning or the afternoon, and I give
them advice about the babies, and teach them and Moya how to prepare
their food, but they do such strange things that you can't forestall
because you never had the wildest idea that any woman in her senses
would treat a baby so."

Edward laughed.

"Russian and Bulgarian peasant customs, I suppose. I never shall
forget the first time I saw a two-day old negro baby sucking a bit of
fat bacon. I nearly had a chill."

"Didn't the child have a chill?"

"Not the slightest! If they get ahead of you with some pleasing little
trick like that you can console yourself with the thought that
generally there is some basis of old-time experience that has shown it
to be not so harm