Todd rejoiced, even in his own disappointment.
“But see here, Thaine, me child, I also have a bit of news that may interest you plumb through. My surgeon isn’t equal to the Philippines either, nor the Ephesians, nor Colossians, and he’s going back to some fort in the mountains. Who do you s’pose will take his place? Now, who?”
“How should I know? Seeing I’ve got to get this regiment off, I have to leave the hospital corps to you. Who is it?” Thaine asked.
“Dr. Horace Carey, M.D.!” Todd replied.
“You don’t mean it!” Thaine gasped.
“Yes, he does, Thaine.” It was Horace Carey who spoke, as he entered the hospital quarter, and, as everywhere else, the same engaging smile and magnetic charm of personality filled the place.
Thaine turned and gathered him in close embrace.
“Oh, Dr. Carey, are you really going?” He whistled, and shouted, and executed jigs in his joy. “Why do you go? Can you leave Kansas? You and me both? Oh, hurry home, Todd, and show Governor Leedy how to run things without us.” And much more to like effect.
“I’ve a notion I’m the right man to go,” Horace Carey answered. “I had experience in the late Civil War, which 308 seems trifling to you fellows at the Presidio. I rode the Plains for some years more when rattlesnakes and Indian arrows—poisoned at that—and cholera and mountain fever called for a surgeon’s aid. I have diplomas and things from the best schools in the East. I have also some good military friends in authority to back me in getting a surgeon’s place in the army—and, lastly, I haven’t a soul to miss me, nor home to leave dreary, if I get between you and the enemy; nobody but Boanerges Peeperville to care personally, and Mrs. Aydelot, as the only other aristocrat in the Grass River Valley, has promised to give him a home. He has always adored Virginia, Thaine, since he could remember anything.”
Thaine Aydelot was only twenty-one, with little need hitherto for experience in reading human nature. Moreover, he was alert in every tingling nerve with the anticipation of an ocean voyage and of strange new sights and daring deeds half a world away. Yet something in Dr. Carey’s strong face seemed to imply a deeper purpose than his words suggested. A faint sense of the nobility of the man gripped him and grew upon him, and never in the years that followed was separate from the memory of the doctor he had loved from babyhood.