“I was to ask,” piped Jimmie, belatedly remembering—“I was to ask if there’s a Mrs. Sessions in the nurse corps. If there is, please—”
“Me?” suggested a pleasant voice from the foremost wagon of nurses which had stopped during the colloquy.
The officer and Jimmie looked to see, peering out from under the canvas cover, a rosy-cheeked, delicate-skinned, smiling little old lady—a sweet and silvery-voiced little old lady—with sleek white hair shining under the edge of her nurse’s cap.
“Eh?” snapped the officer.
“I know Captain Dadd, and I’m going to help him,” said the old lady in nurse’s uniform, sweetly but decisively, starting to climb out of the wagon. “Especially since he’s bothered to ask for me.”
While the newly appointed officer stared in wrathy silence, wondering just what the military regulations for volunteer army surgeons said about the proper method of coercing nurse-ladies almost old enough to be one’s mother, the old lady climbed briskly down from the wagon, one trim foot, in a neat slipper with a coquettish silver buckle, on the wheel hub.
She seized Jimmie’s arm, patted Napoleon on the head, and started trotting off without another look back, while the surgeon wheeled, shouted “Forward!” and moved off.
“Do you know, my dear, I fancy you must be Jimmie Brinton,” laughed the old lady, panting a little with the fast walk into which she had led Jimmie.
“Yessum,” wondered Jimmie, looking up adoringly at the rosy-cheeked old lady.
Somehow she seemed to mean to him gingerbread cookies—and long stories and sleepy Sunday afternoons when the hammock swung among June roses—and a motherly breast on which to whisper out his griefs and disillusions.