Doctor Morgan looked at John Hunter and back to Elizabeth dubiously. He reflected that the same lack of caution which had killed the mare yesterday might kill a man in case of excitement.
“It isn’t necessarily help that she’s going to need. It won’t be so hard to take care of him, if she isn’t worried by a lot of other things. I don’t want another soul to touch that medicine. We’ve got to be mighty careful about that. Heart remedies are poison and as quick as lightning in their action, and we can’t afford to take any chances on that kind of stuff. I’m right glad to put your wife at the helm in this thing; she’s definite and dependable, two things we doctors don’t often find when we need them most.”
Turning to Elizabeth he said:
“It may be rather hard on you, but our main care is to pull this man through the next ten days. If he don’t have some one to look after him right, he may slip through our fingers.”
“Why—I thought you said he was all right,” Elizabeth faltered.
In his efforts to impress the need of care with the medicine, Doctor Morgan had gone over the mark and added to the fears he had started out to allay. Elizabeth was as white as if all the blood in her body had been taken away.
“Now don’t begin to worry till I tell you there’s need, child,” he said half irritably. “All that’s necessary is for you to look after that medicine. Noland ’ll come out all right with you to nurse him. I wouldn’t mind being sick myself, Hunter, with her to hold the spoon,” he said, trying to put a merry face on the matter. “Did it ever occur to you that you were a lucky dog to come into this country and run off with the nicest girl in it the first year you were here?”
As the doctor drove home the next morning, he said to himself:
“I guess I fixed it about that medicine;” then, his mind reverting to the conversation at the gate, he added, “I wasn’t goin’ to tell her about that horse; let him tell her himself. Blamed fool! I think I headed off his issuing orders about that sick-bed too. Poor little girl! Now if she’d only married Noland!”
The old doctor gave a long, low whistle as a sudden thought struck him, but he put it away, and being a busy man thought no more about it for weeks.