“You see, Polly,” said the little doctor, coming out at last from his perplexity, and standing up quite straight, “that poor woman is badly burned, her hands are, and she can’t take care of the baby, that’s plain. And there isn’t anybody else to do it but that bad boy.”
“Oh, he can’t do anything,” declared Polly, vehemently. “Oh, don’t make the baby stay with him!” And quite overcome with pity, she knelt down by the old box.
“Ah—goo!” exclaimed the baby, deserting the charms of the old corn-cob for a breathing-space, Phronsie turning back from the little doctor to get down by Polly’s side.
“O dear me!—poor little thing!” breathed Polly; “nobody to take care of you except a bad boy and a cross old cat, and she’s run away, too.”
“Ah—goo!” said the baby, as if it were the pleasantest thing in the world to be left under such conditions.
“Oh, we can’t ever leave her,” said Polly, turning back, one hand on the edge of the box, to look up in the little doctor’s face, and her brow wrinkled in perplexity.
“No, of course not,” said Doctor Fisher, just as decidedly, and his face cleared as he saw that Polly would help him out. “It will only be for two days, you know, until Mrs. Granniss’s sister gets here. I’m going to write to her to come. Well, I shall take the baby up to Badgertown Centre with me, and find a place for her somewhere.”
And Doctor Fisher having quite made up his mind to do this, the next thing was to carry it out; so he skipped off, told the sick woman, sitting up in a big chair with her poor hands swathed in big bandages, all about it, and dashed out again before she had gotten out half her grateful thanks; picked up the baby out of its big box, packed all the children into the old gig, and away the gig rattled at Dobbin’s heels down the hill to Badgertown.
“I’m going to send Miss Punderson to look after her, till the sister gets here,” Doctor Fisher pointed his thumb at the poor little cottage and old shed almost walking away from it, they had left behind, “but she wouldn’t come if there was a baby in the house. Goodness me! she doesn’t know any more about ’em than an old cat.”
This made Polly remember about the cross, yellow cat at Mrs. Granniss’s house. So she leaned around the baby in her lap, and said anxiously, “Phronsie has got such a dreadful scratch.”