Pete flushed. "Would you mind writin' it for me? I ain't no reg'lar, professional writer. Pop Annersley learned me some—but I reckon Jim could read your writin' better."
"Of course I'll write the letter, if you want me to. If you'll just tell me what you wish to say I'll take it down on this pad and copy it in my room."
"Can't you write it here? Mebby we might want to change somethin'."
"Well, if you'll eat your dinner—" And Doris went for pen and paper. When she returned she found that Pete had stacked the dishes in a perilous pyramid on the floor, that the bed-tray might serve as a table on which to write.
He watched her curiously as she unscrewed the cap of her fountain pen and dated the letter.
"Jim Bailey, Concho—that's over in Arizona," he said, then he hesitated. "I reckon I got to tell you the whole thing first and mebby you kin put it down after I git through." Doris saw him eying the pen intently. "You didn't fetch the ink," he said suddenly.
Doris laughed as she explained the fountain pen to him. Then she listened while he told her what to say.
The letter written, Doris went to her room. Pete lay thinking of her pleasant gray eyes and the way that she smiled understandingly and nodded—"When most folks," he soliloquized, "would say something or ask you what you was drivin' at."
To him she was an altogether wonderful person, so quietly cheerful, natural, and unobtrusively competent… Then, through some queer trick of memory, Boca's face was visioned to him and his thoughts were of the desert, of men and horses and a far sky-line. "I got to get out of here," he told himself sleepily. And he wondered if he would ever see Doris Gray again after he left the hospital.