"And still it seems such a short while ago that Doctor Gordon took a liking to him, when he was a raw medical student," I said thoughtfully, my mind going back to the day I first saw Alfred Morgan, big, broad and bronzed, with his hair too long and his sleeves too short. There have been many days since then; days of a delightful comradeship when I was in the city. I would look after him with sisterly authority, bidding him wear his rubbers on rainy mornings, or give me his gloves to mend whenever I happened to be spending the day at the Gordons' and we sat down for a quiet chat after luncheon. Ann Lisbeth and Doctor Gordon still live so close to the Claybornes that we are like one big family when I am with them. Alfred soon began to tell me that I was his best friend, but he never called me the "guiding star of his existence." He tried to teach me the bones of the face, instead, and explained the barbarism of corsets.
When he was out in practice the first year, but still lived with the Gordons, because Doctor Gordon would not let him go, I used to drive around with him to see his patients, sitting out in the runabout, which he had bought at half-price because it was a last year's model, and reading a magazine while he went in to make his calls. Often these calls were made in crowded little factory settlements, where the whirr of the cotton-mills sounded through the long periods of waiting; and the houses were built so close on the street that I could hear the click of the lock as he unfastened his instrument case.
"I admit that Alfred's career generates thrills up and down the backbones of his admiring friends," I said after the pause which had been filled in by my busy thoughts. She was still writing her initials over the back of her tablet. "Who knows this better than I? Haven't I been a mother to the boy ever since that time I read surgical anatomy to him when he had tonsillitis? One of the most dramatic moments of my life was the night I stabbed—"
I caught myself, but not in time, for Cousin Eunice had looked up from her book with a horrified stare. "What?" she demanded.
"Oh, it was only that detestable Burke's automobile tire," I had to explain then, but I had kept the occurrence a secret hitherto, and I was not keen on telling it now.
"It was during the year of Alfred's internship and you remember that Burke was always doing him an ill turn? One drippy night that fall when I was in Doctor Gordon's car in front of the hospital and they didn't see me, I overheard Burke and another intern plotting to beat Alfred out of a surgical case that was coming in on the train that night and belonged, by rights, to him. They had arranged to hurry on over to the station first, in Burke's new car that his fond mamma had given him, but when they went back into the house to get their raincoats I was out of that machine like a Nemesis and had stuck my hat-pin into the two tires on Burke's car which were most in the shadow; so, when they started off, they had gone only about a block and were down in the mud swearing—when Alfred dashed grandly by on the ambulance."
"You little tiger!"
"Burke ought to have had the hat-pin stuck in him," I added savagely.
"Aren't we still barbarians—at heart?" she demanded, throwing her tablet aside and straightening up so suddenly that I knew her thoughts had already strayed away from my recital. "Now, that's the way I have always felt about Appleton since he's been governor. Lots of times when I have been helping Rufe write those violent attacks against him I would almost choke with rage. I actually wanted to kill him."
"You helped Rufe?" I asked with envy. "He admitted that you had sense enough to?"