“These mountains, I do not know them. We are strangers in this country.”
“I’ll find out about a place where you can get her in,” he volunteered. “I’ll bring you the information in the morning—names and addresses and everything. Somebody’ll have to go up there with her—you, I guess—and get her settled. She’s in no shape to be travelling alone. Then you can leave her there and [67] arrange to send up so much a week to pay for her keep and the treatment and all. Oh, yes—and until we get her away from here you’ll have to lay off from your work and stay with her, or else hire somebody to stay with her. She mustn’t be left alone for long at a time—she’s too sick for that. Something might happen. Understand?”
“And all this—it will cost much money perhaps?”
The cripple misread the note in her voice as she asked him this. This flat now, it was infinitely cleaner than the abodes of nine-tenths of those among whom he was called to minister. To his man’s eyes the furnishings, considering the neighbourhood, appeared almost luxurious. That bed yonder against the wall was very much whiter and looked very much softer than the one upon which he slept. And the woman herself was well clad. He had no patience with these scrimping, stingy foreigners—thank God he was himself native-born—these cheap, penurious aliens who would haggle over pennies when a life was the stake. And there was no patience in his uplifted, rumbling voice as he answered her:
“Say, you don’t want your sister to be a pauper patient, do you? If you do, just say so and I’ll notify the department and they’ll put her in a charity institution. She’d last just about a week there. Is that your idea?—if it is, say so!”
[68]
“No, no, no,” she said, “not charity—not for my sister.”
“I thought as much,” he said, a little mollified. “All right then, I’ll write a letter to the sanitarium people; they ought to make you a special rate. Oh, it’ll cost you twenty-five dollars a week maybe—say, at the outside, thirty dollars a week. And that’ll be cheap enough, figuring in the food she’ll have to have and the care and the nursing and all. Then, of course, there’ll be your railroad tickets on top of that. You’d better have some ready money on hand so we can get her shipped out of here before it’s too—Well, before many days anyhow.”
She nodded.
“I shall have the money,” she promised.
“All right,” he said; “then you’d better hand me two dollars now. That’s the price of my call. I don’t figure on charging you for making the blood test. And the information about the sanitarium and the letter I’m going to write—I’ll throw all that in too.”