CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JOHNNY'S DILEMMA
"Well, thank heavens she's gone! Perhaps a person can have a minute or two of peace and comfort on this ranch now. I don't know when I have ever disliked a person so much. I don't see how you stood her. For my part, that creature would make me sick, just having her around!" As a final venting of her animosity, Mary V made faces at the car that carried the nurse hack to town.
Johnny looked at Mary V, looked after the nurse, and looked at Mary V again. He had thought the nurse a very nice nurse, with a quiet kind of efficiency that soothed a fellow without any fuss or frills. It was queer Mary V did not like her, but then—
"I know I've been a darned nuisance," he apologized so meekly that he did not sound in the least like Johnny Jewel. "But I'm getting well fast. I'll be able to beat it in a few days now."
"Why, for gracious sake? Haven't we—er—made you comfortable?"
"Sure, you have. Only you shouldn't have put yourselves out, this way. I ought to have gone to a hospital or some place." Johnny looked so distressed that Mary V could have cried. Only she was afraid that would distress him still more, and the doctor had said he must not be worried about anything.
"It wasn't any trouble. You are being absolutely silly, so I guess you are getting well, all right. I—I didn't see any sense of having that nurse in the first place. Because I can take temperature and count pulse and everything. I've really been crazy for a chance to practice nursing on somebody. And then when I had the chance, they wouldn't let me do a thing."
Johnny grinned, which was rather pathetic—he was so thin and so white. "Why didn't you practice on the greasers?" he taunted her. "Bill says you sure made some dandy work for the hospitals."
"Well, I couldn't help that. I didn't have any way of tying them, or anything, and—"