“And be happy here! How can she be?”
“She’s discovering Sabinsport in Serbia,” said Dick.
“She can have all the money I have,” said Reuben Cowder.
“You couldn’t do better with it,” said Dick.
Week by week the two men followed the work of the intrepid group. Nancy was exultant over so many things! The redemption of a forsaken church on a hillside turned into a perfectly good sanitarium for convalescents. “It has no windows left, so we do have air. The only way you get it in Serbia.”
The wonderful help they were getting from the wounded who were able to get about—Austrian and Serbian—who built them incinerators, mended leaking roofs, brought wood for their fireplaces, scrubbed and cooked and even sewed. “We have a class in mattress making—such a funny, funny class. There’s a poor one-legged Austrian with a cough which will carry him off soon, once an upholsterer in Vienna. He has taught us all here to make strong, comfortable mattresses. I went myself to Nish and brought all the ticking and needles and thread I could find.”
The feat over which Nancy crowed most, to which she was always coming back, was the Water Works. She always capitalized the words: “You can imagine, Father dear, how we’ve been handicapped for water. After our first week we never gave our patients a drink that had not been boiled at the house. We hired a stout peasant woman—there were no men to be had—to carry it—two buckets full on an ox-yoke! She followed us from place to place. We did our best to make the sick understand how dangerous it was to drink the dreadful water used in Valievo. We didn’t succeed very well, though some of them would do almost anything to please us. When we took over the old church we were put to it for water at first. It had to be carried for nearly a mile. Then, oh, Happy Day, Dr. Helen and I made up our minds there must be water above us somewhere and we’d find it and pipe it down. We found a perfectly good, bubbling spring, grown about with willows. We paid the owner of the land his price for the water and I, Father, I, your spoiled, useless daughter, stood over three crippled Serbians while they cleaned and walled that spring and I, I taught them how to make a trough of boards to bring it to the house. At least I began by making myself a joint of the wooden trough we used to see at home and when they understood they made something far better. Now it flows, cold and sweet and clear into the sanitarium. I’m just crazy over it.”
Nothing stirred Dick or alarmed Reuben Cowder more than the long fight with typhus, which began late in the year in Serbia—and lasted through the winter. It was not at first realized that the peculiar form of the disease which ravaged the country was carried by body lice, but where it was known, the war on the pests which the unit had always waged took on a fury and an ingenuity worthy of the enemy. It was war, war, war. The girls shaved, sulphurized and burned from morning until night. They isolated the incoming, they so frightened their patients by their horror at a single beastie that it came to be a shame and a crime to be caught with one. And they conquered. And with the conquest typhus slowly retired from every spot in which they ruled. Nancy was jubilant.
“We’ve met the enemy and they are ours. We have a new National Anthem and we sing it daily. Don’t tell it to the Sabinsport Woman’s Club. It would swoon with shock—but, oh Father, if you’d seen what we have seen—if you had known the cause and if you had labored and sweat day and night for weeks to remove that cause, you would understand why we sing what we do. The words came to us from the Berry unit over the mountain where they, too, have fought and won—indeed from them we learned the danger and the way to meet it. Now take our National Anthem straight, Father:
“There are no lice on us,