“All right,” answered the little man, with a weary sigh, as he picked up his green carpet-bag and bade me good morning. Meantime Maitland had discovered that I had been bitten by a young scorpion.
“That ain’t anything,” said Martin Luther. “I get bit every night, and I feel better for it. Moll would have cut your foot off if I hadn’t come.”
“Is he attached to the hospital?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied Martin Luther, with a chuckle, “he works for me in the carpenter shop. He used to be a doctor, but he cut a feller’s toe off in Cuba with one of them old rusty knives, and blood poison set in and the feller died, so the medical society won’t let him doctor any more. He made a mighty good carpenter, but the poor old devil has wheels. Maitland, if you call that old guy again when any one is sick or hurt, I’ll have you fired.”
“He cured me of that evil eye that the girl gave me that time, an’ he’s the best doctor in the world,” said Maitland.
One morning it was announced that a new official had arrived to dwell in one of the three real cottages on the hill. It was a short distance from the line of tents. A barbed wire was the dividing line between the tent ground and the aristocratic residential section. The residents of both sections kept well within their respective bounds. The wife of the official must have caught a glimpse of me in the distance on the day of her arrival, for she wrote a note that night to Martin Luther, which read something like this:
“Sir—You will please send to my house to-morrow morning the woman who lives in the tent beside yours. I have not been used to black servants, and I can’t bear to have them wait upon me. I will give her fifty cents, gold, a day, and her meals, and she can have a room on my back veranda. I shall need her at six o’clock in the morning. I hope her character is good.”
This was kept from me, but a consultation was held, and one of the tent dwellers, who had been a lawyer in the days before the Spanish-American War, dictated a pungent letter to the wife of the official, which enlightened her as to the respective classes to which both she and I belonged. She was told in part that the woman in the tent was a graduate of Wellesley College, and had never been obliged to even wait upon herself.
The official and his lady were invited to come to my tent and to size me up and see for themselves whether the woman in the tent was the sort of a person who would make a fancy laundress or not.
On the morning following Mrs. Official paid me a visit, and not only sized me up to her heart’s content, but asked me questions until I thought myself on a witness stand on trial for my life. Then, after offering to buy from me, at her own price, the pretty furnishings in the tent, she departed, and I have never seen her since.