Flip's "Islands of Providence"

by Annie F. Johnston

There was no clock in the room, and he had no watch, but the engine-house bell in the next block clanged the alarm regularly.

The responsibility of giving himself his own medicine kept him from dropping asleep as he longed to do. He would doze for a few minutes and start up, fearing that he had let the time go by, or that he had taken a double dose, or that he had confused directions. Was it two pink ones or two white ones, or one hour or two hours? He said it over and over with every variation possible. The confusion was maddening.

The pain in his lungs grew worse. He was burning with thirst, but there was no more water in the glass. He looked round the room with feverish, aching eyes, that suddenly filled with hot tears. If he could only be back in his own room at home, with Aunt Eunice to care for him, and Flip to make him comfortable, how good it would seem! He was tasting to the dregs the misery of being ill, all alone among strangers.

Toward evening the woman who kept the lodging-house sent a little coloured boy up to ask if he wanted anything. A pitcher of water was all that Alec asked for. That being supplied, the boy shut the door and clattered down the hall, whistling. The night seemed endless. Hour after hour he started up shuddering, as the bell's loud clang awakened him, not knowing what it was that startled him. In his feverish hallucinations he thought he was continually breaking through the ice into a sea of burning water. He kept clutching at the pillows, thinking they were islands that he was for ever drifting past and could never reach.

When morning came at last, and the doctor made his second visit, he found Alec delirious and the medicine still on the chair beside the bed. With one glance round the cheerless room, he shrugged his shoulders and went out for help.

When Alec next noticed his surroundings with eyes that were once more clear and rational, he saw that the dingy little grate had been opened and a bright fire was burning in it. The clothing he had left on the floor in a heap had been put away. The window shade no longer hung askew. He looked round half-expecting to see his Aunt Eunice or Flip, and wondered if he had been so ill that some one had sent for them. Then his glance fell on a grizzled old man with a wooden leg, dozing in a rocking-chair by the fire.

"Old Jimmy Scott!" Alec said to himself after a moment's puzzled scrutiny, in which he racked his brain to recall where he had seen the face before. Finally he remembered. One of the boys had pointed him out as an old soldier who had taken to nursing when he could no longer fight. He held no diploma from any training-school for nurses, he was uncouth and rough in many ways, but his varied experiences had made him a valuable assistant to the doctor, whom he called his general, and obeyed with military exactness.

As Alec stirred on his pillow, the old soldier looked up, and then hobbled over to the bed as quietly as his wooden leg would allow. He bent over him, felt his pulse, and then said, cheerfully, "All right, buddy, guess it's time now for rations." Taking a covered cup from the hob on the grate, he deftly put a spoonful of hot beef tea to Alec's lips.

"You had a pretty close call, young man," he said, in response to Alec's attempt to question him. "A leetle more and it would have been double pneumonia. But you're about out of the woods now. We'll soon have you on your feet." Giving his patient a few more spoonfuls, he drew the covers gently in place, saying, "Now don't you talk any more. Turn over and go to sleep."

Weak, yet thrilled with a delightful sense of comfort and freedom from pain, Alec obeyed unquestioningly. True, a thought did trail teasingly across his mind for a moment, a dim wonder as to where the money was to come from to pay for the expensive luxuries of nurse and doctor and medicines and fire, but it faded presently, and instead his Aunt Eunice's old song took its place: