"You can't be there, Mac." He did not need to tell her. She knew; he knew that she knew. "Somebody else—anybody else."
"No!" came the hot negative, although the blood drained completely from the chief nurse's face, leaving it as white as the immaculate uniform she wore. Her eyes were black, burning holes. "It's my job, Lacy, in more ways than one. Do you think that I would ever let anyone else work on him?" she finished passionately.
"You'll have to," he declared. "I didn't want to tell you this, but he's a ghastly mess. Altogether too much so for any woman, to say nothing of one who loves him." This, from a surgeon of Lacy's long and wide experience, was an unthinkable statement. Nevertheless:
"All the more reason why I've got to do it. No matter what shape he's in, I'll let no one else work on my Kim."
"I say no. That's an order—official!"
"Damn such orders!" she flamed. "There's nothing back of it—you know that as well as I do!"
"See here, young woman—"
"Do you think that you can get away with ordering me not to perform the very duties I have taken an oath to do?" she stormed. "And even if it were not my job, I'd come in and work on him if I had to get a torch and cut the ship apart, plate by plate, to do it! The only way you can keep me out of that operating room, Lacy, is to have about ten of your men put me into a strait jacket—and if you do that I'll have you kicked out of the service bodily. You know that I could and that I would!"
"QX, MacDougall, you win." She had him there. This girl could and would do exactly that. "But if you faint, I swear that I'll make you wish—"
"You know me better than that, doctor." She was cold now as a woman of marble. "If he dies, I'll die, too, right then. But if he lives, I'll stand by as long as I can do a single thing, however small, to help."