"There's one good thing about typhoid," she moaned. "It doesn't seem to hurt any, does it? In fact, I think I rather like it. It feels as warm and snug and don't-care as a hot lemonade at bed time. But what?" brightening suddenly, "but what was it you asked me to think about? I feel sort of confused—but it was something, I remember, that I was going to argue with you about."
"It was what I said about marrying me," prompted Guthrie.
"Oh, y-e-s," smiled the Little Psychology Teacher. Hazily for a moment she continued staring at him with her fingers prodded deep into her temples. Then suddenly, like a flower blasted with heat, she wilted down into her chair, groping blindly out with one hand toward the sleeve of his coat.
"Whatever you think best to do about it," she faltered, "I guess you'd better arrange pretty quickly—'cause I think—I'm—going—out."
This is how it happened that Mr. and Mrs. Donas Guthrie and Dr. Andrews stayed behind at the ranch house with Hanlon and Hanlon's Mary, and a piebald pony or two, and a herd of Angora goats, and a pink geranium plant, and the strange intermittent smell of a New England farmhouse which lurked in Hanlon's goods and chattels even after thirty years, and three or four stale, tattered magazines—and typhoid fever.
It was typhoid fever that proved essentially the most incalculable companion of them all. Hanlon's austerity certainly never varied from day to day, nor the inherent sullenness of Hanlon's Mary.
The meager sick-room, stripped to its bare pine skin of every tawdry colored print and fluttering cheese-cloth curtain, faced bluntly toward the west—a vital little laboratory in which the unknown quantity of a woman's endurance and the fallible skill of one man, the stubborn bravery of another, and the quite inestimable will of God were to be fused together in a desperate experiment to precipitate Life rather than Death.
So October waxed into November, and so waxed misgiving into apprehension, and apprehension into actual fear. In any more cheerful situation it would have been at least interesting to have watched the infuriated expletives issue from Andrew's perennially smiling lips.
"Oh, hang not having anything to work with!" he kept reiterating and reiterating. "Hang being shut off like this on a ranch where there aren't anything but sheep and goats and one old stingy cow that Hanlon's Mary guards with her life 'cause the lady's only a school teacher, but a baby is a baby.' Hang Hanlon's Mary! And hang not being altogether able to blame her! And hang not knowing, anyway, just what nanny-goat's milk would do for a typhoid patient! And hang—"
But before the expletives, and through the expletives, and after the expletives, Andrews was all hero, working, watching, experimenting, retrenching, humanly comprehensive, more than humanly vigilant.