Indeed, I am enchanted with the place and people, and have made up my mind to stay on a week or ten days after I call myself off the case, and take a vacation which I really owe to myself.
Poor Big Jerry is wonderful—so pathetically patient under his suffering, which is now acute. I am afraid that he cannot last many weeks longer, and, more than once, I have had to give him a hypodermic to deaden his pain. Somehow he reminds me of a huge forest tree that has been struck and shattered by a lightning bolt.
Then there is Judd. Rose says that he has been very, very wicked; but that only adds to his fascination in my eyes, and if he should decide some day to snatch me up and carry me off bodily to a cave, I don't think that I should struggle or scream very hard. However, I'm afraid there is no chance of that, as he apparently doesn't know that I exist.
He puts me in mind of a mountain eagle, with those overhanging brows and piercing, coal-black eyes of his; but I must admit that he is disappointingly tame when he looks at Smiles—as he does most of the time, to my furious jealousy. Alas, the eagle then becomes a sucking dove. She is apparently oblivious to the obvious fact that he is madly in love with her. Poor Judd!
Last, but by no means least, there is Smiles herself. I wish that I could adequately express my thoughts about her, but I can't. However, I no longer wonder how a mountain child like that could have captivated you so, as I did when you first described her to me.
She is adorable. For the life of me I can't understand how a girl, bred in this wilderness, could have such a fine soul and personality—not to speak of her intellect, which daily startles me more. But, of course, she is of cultured stock—she must be—and I have always believed that the forces of heredity are paramount to those of environment. Do I sound like a school-mar'm? Well, that is what I am.
It may surprise you to learn, as much as it does me to realize, that I have turned back to schooldays with an enthusiasm which I never felt when I was going through them, and that I spend more time as a teacher than as a nurse. Smiles simply absorbs education—I never knew anything like it—and I am as confident as she that her dream of going through the "C. H." and becoming a trained nurse, will come to pass. And won't she make a wonderful one? Be warned that when she does go north I intend to dispute with you the right to regard her as a protégé.
I couldn't love her as I do, already, if she were not so completely human, and it amuses me immensely the way she wheedles the natives and keeps them in good humor by using that comical mountain lingo—although she can speak as grammatically as any one, when she wants to. She just smiles at one of them, and says, "Now haint thet jest toe sweet of ye," and they fall down and worship.
Don't be surprised if you hear me say some day, "Wall, doctor, thet air shor' er powerful preety operation, an' I air plumb obleeged ter ye fer thet yo' let me holp ye with hit." I'm catching it, too.
I hope that you will forgive the liberties which I have taken in writing like this, but I had to do it.