“I’ll have to be. But our lunch is ready; and, by my beans and bacon, I must have something to eat first! There! I didn’t mean to swear. It was a sort of slip of the tongue.”
“I am free to admit that it isn’t polite to swear, Captain. But you didn’t take the name of God in vain; so you are forgiven. You will grant that swearing, even by beans and bacon, is a bad habit, though. Don’t set a bad example before the children, to say nothing of the rest of us,” she added, laughing.
They found the patient in a high fever.
“It is his impatience that does it,” said Mrs. Benson. “He fumes like a madman sometimes.”
Mrs. McAlpin deftly unbound, dressed, and rebandaged the unfortunate limb.
“We’re doing nicely,” she said, when her work was finished. “You mustn’t fret yourself into a fever again. A sick man should be as serene as a May morning.”
“How in the name o’ Melchizedek and the Twelve Apostles is a man going to keep cool when the thermometer is raging in the nineties, and one’s self-elected nurse is scolding like a sitting hen? If she’d ride in the other wagon and leave you to do the nursing, I’d stand a chance to recover.”
“Mamma is getting on famously,” laughed the Little Doctor. “You are so amiable and sweet-tempered yourself that I can’t see why she doesn’t fall down before your injured foot and worship you. I feel almost tempted to try it myself. You don’t think she is enduring all this for fun, do you?”
“I suppose I haven’t been acting the angel; but it was because I wanted the society of my doctor.”
“You allude to Mrs. McAlpin, of course,” said the Captain, smiling.