Dr. Quibbly was a gray-bearded man with keen eyes but palsied hands. He had plainly been wrecked by misfortune or some disease; but he had been left with all his mental powers unimpaired.
He took hold of the distraught Peters in a capable manner; and Tom, who remained to help nurse the patient, declared to Ruth and Helen that he never hoped to see a doctor who knew his business better than Dr. Quibbly knew it.
“He had Peters quiet in half an hour. No harmful drug, either. Told me everything he used. Says rest, and milk and eggs to build up the stomach, is all the chap needs. Min’s with him now and I’m going to sleep in my blanket outside the door to-night, so if she needs anybody I’ll be within call.”
It had been rather an exciting experience for the girls and they remained in their rooms for the rest of the day. The hotel proprietor offered to take them around at night and “show them the sights”; but as that meant visiting the two saloons and gambling halls, Miss Cullam refused for the party, rather tartly.
“No offence meant, Ma’am,” said the hotel man, Mr. Bennett. “But most of the tenderfeet that come here hanker to ‘go slumming,’ as they call it. They want to see these here miners at their amusements, as well as at their daily occupations.”
“I’d rather see them at church,” Miss Cullam told him frankly. “I think they need it.”
“Good glory, Ma’am!” exclaimed the man. “We git that, too—once a month. What more kin you expect?”
“I suppose,” Miss Cullam said to her girls, “that a perfectly straight-laced New England old maid could not be set down in a more inappropriate place than a mining camp.”
The speech gave Ruth a suggestion for a scene in the picture play of “The Forty-Niners,” and she would have been delighted to have the Ardmore teacher play a part in that scene.
“However,” she said to Helen, whispering it over in bed that night, “it will be funny. I know Mr. Hammond will bring plenty of costumes of the period of forty-nine, for he wants women in the show. And there will be some character actress who can take the part of an unsophisticated blue stocking from the Hub, who arrives at the camp in the midst of the miner’s revelry.”