"About as good as Judas Iscariot!" exclaimed the hotel keeper with violence. "I'd just as soon put any of my nutty kin in the penitentiary and sooner. I betcher that Harper is going to get in trouble some of these days. There's a lot going on there that won't bear the light. Old skinflint! Never a customer has he sent me. He can't keep any help, either, just because he is such a one to squeeze a dollar until the eagle shrieks. He's always advertising for nurses and servants. I saw an ad only yesterday in a Chicago paper."
"Is that so? Are the nurses trained nurses?"
"Trained nothing! He doesn't give them as much wages as I give old Black Annie who scrubs the halls and porches at my hotel. He just picks up any woman or man who is willing to work for him and puts them in to nurse. He calls himself running a training school for nurses. Don't talk to me about that old Harper!"
As Josie was not talking to him but encouraging him to talk to her she could but smile and continue her questions. She had registered as J. O'Gorman, Dorfield, and had engaged her room for a week.
"
I may have to be away from town on business through the county, but I want to retain my room and get you to look after any mail or telegrams that may come for me," said Josie. She had telegraphed the Higgledy-Piggledies her whereabouts as soon as she was established, and written a long special delivery letter to Mary Louise, telling her as much as was pertinent about her adventures in Atlanta.
"It is a comfort to be registered as my own self and to be wearing my own clothes and hair," she confided to Mary Louise, "but the morrow, I hope, will find me assuming another character."
The morrow did. She applied to the sanitarium for a job as nurse and was taken on, without the formality of asking what experience she had had or even for the credentials which she had been at great pains to get up for herself.
The grounds around the sanitarium were well laid out and quite imposing, with large trees and well-grouped shrubs. The buildings were handsome but gloomy-looking. Dr. Harper was a benevolent-looking old man, with a long white beard and a voice, as Josie afterwards described it, like hot fudge. He always addressed everyone with some endearment such as, "My dear child," "My son," "My dear girl," or "Little one." Josie could hardly believe he was the same one who had written the letter to Chester Hunt, a copy of which she had in her note hook.
"What a lot a long white heard can hide," was her thought after her interview with the seemingly benevolent old gentleman.