III
Juno had been delirious since the day she was stricken. Her mutterings had been disjointed and unintelligible, but that night, while Mother Camp and the New Englander sat at her bedside, she said again:
“Don't let him come.”
“She ain't said that for three days now,” said Mother Camp. “Whut d' you s'pose she means?” The husband shook his head.
Next morning the nurse for whom St. Hilda had sent arrived from the Bluegrass, and the New Englander started down Little Clover to the settlement school to consult the doctor and see St. Hilda. It was a brilliant, drenched June day, and never, he believed, had his eyes rested on such a glory of green and gold. Already he had been heralded in the swift way common in the hills, and all who saw him coming knew who he was. He was Juno's man, and the people straightway called him—Jim. When he stood on St. Hilda's porch her words and her drawn, anxious face went straight to his heart. There was nobody like Juno, and without Juno she did not know how she could get along. Her own little sufferers were in tents about her, and there was only one nurse for them. Juno, said the doctor, might be unconscious for a long time, and her nurse must be with her night and day: so who would take Juno's place throughout the hills she did not know. At once the New Englander, who knew a good deal about medicine and something of typhoid, found himself offering to do all he could. Then and there the Mission teacher gave him a list of patients, and then and there, with a thermometer in his pocket and a medicine-case in his hand, he started on his first round. The people were very shy with him at first. In a few days he was promoted to Doctor Jim, and soon he was plain “Doc” to all. By every mouth that opened he found Juno's name blessed, and many were the tales of what she had done. She had saved wild Jay Dawn's little girl and Lum Chapman's firstborn. She had brought old Aunt Sis Stidham back from the shadow of the grave, and had turned that tart, irreverent old person's erring feet back into the way of the Lord.
Night and day, and through wind and storm, she had travelled the hills, healing the sick and laying out and helping to bury the dead. Apparently there was not a man, woman, or child in Happy Valley who did not love her or have some reason to be grateful, and when in the open-air meetinghouse Parson Small told of her work and prayed that her life be spared, there were fervent “Amens,” or tears and sobs, from all. Doctor Jim soon found himself getting deeply interested in the people, and when he contrasted the lives of those whom the influence of the Mission school had not yet reached with the folks in Happy Valley he began to realize the amazing good that St. Hilda was doing in the hills. What a place he was earning for himself he was yet to learn, but through some mystification an inkling came. To be sure, everybody spoke to him as though he were a fixture in the land. He could pass no door that somebody did not ask him to come in and rest a spell, or stay all night. He never went by the mill that Aunt Jane did not have a glass of buttermilk for him and Uncle Jerry did not try to entice him in for a talk. Several times the little judge of Happy Valley had ridden down to ask after Juno and to talk with him. Pleasant Trouble waved his crutch from a hillside and shouted himself at Doctor Jim's disposal for any purpose whatever. But one sunset he had stopped at Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop just as a big, black-haired fellow, with a pistol buckled around him, was reeling away. The men greeted him rather solemnly, and he felt that they wanted to say something to him, but no one spoke. He saw Jay Dawn nod curtly to Pleasant Trouble, who got briskly up and walked up the road with him until they were in sight of Juno's home. For three days thereafter Pleasant was waiting for him at the shop and walked the same space with him. The next day Jay Dawn spoke with some embarrassment to him:
“Have you got a gun?”
“No.” Jay handed forth one.
“Oh, no!” said Doctor Jim.