The last term was at end. Visitors flocked to the old historic town to witness the commencement exercises and hear Chiquita, the Ute's daughter, deliver the valedictory. Her father, the aged Yamanatz, was there with several chiefs in full council robes, and this of itself was sufficient to draw thousands of the curious. Prominent officials, who had watched the progress of yoking the savage red maiden of the forest to her civilized white sister of fashion, occupied front seats on the platform of the edifice wherein the commencement scenes were enacted. Interest in the preliminary features seemed to flag, and only desultory attention greeted the various ones as diplomas were handed out.
Little were the gowned professors and learned LL. D.'s prepared for the tumultuous wave of approbation which greeted Chiquita as she appeared on the platform from a side entrance, clad in her native costume of richly-beaded buckskin, her copper colored face set in a frame of intensely black hair, which reached to her knees in voluminous braids from whose ends dangled the "medicine" of the Utes. Words are feeble to express the transition from darkness to educated light, but there she stood in primeval beauty, uttering her valedictory in language so fascinating that not one syllable was lost.
Bouquets were showered upon her, "bravos" rent the air, and, as she stepped before the dean to receive her sheepskin, with its guarantee that Chiquita was educated, a smile of profound satisfaction played for an instant over her marvelously thoughtful face. Then spying Yamanatz near the platform, she bounded into his arms to receive his blessing, her filial affection superior to her decorous surroundings. Never before in the history of the college had such an outburst of enthusiasm greeted a graduate.
[CHAPTER XV.]
A HOSPITAL AND A BOARDING HOUSE.
Long rows of windows in a massive building gave light to thousands within, who in turn looked out upon the thousands plodding their way to and from toil. It was in one of the hospital zones of the second city in the United States and the building was one of the largest hospitals in the city. Within the memory of the present generation the word "hospital" was fraught with weird and uncanny dark rooms, bloody floors, shrieking victims of accident or disease undergoing the torture of the knife, muffled rumbles of iron-wheeled trucks rolling in new patients or wheeling the lifeless form of the dead to the morgue. Over the door, unseen by mortal man, an ominous inscription, "He who enters here leaves all hope behind."
By the onward, irresistible advance of that flickering flame which penetrates the darkest corner of bigotry and ignorance, science has groped its way beyond the portals of death and snatched many from the very coffin after being prepared for the grave. This is civilization. Even today thousands look askance at the uncompromising brick and stone walls, shuddering as the ambulance gong warns them of its approach, bearing the victim, perchance, of some terrible disaster. To the unsophisticated who visit for the first time one of these institutions a surprise is in store. The awful gloom is penetrated by sunlight. In place of bespattered walls and crimson stained operating table are snow white tiling and glass slabs mounted on iron frames. The sickening offensive odor of the old "slaughter pens" has been relegated to the dark ages, and nothing worse than a whiff of carbolic acid or a possible suspicion of iodoform greets the most sensitive nostrils.
Within such an institution Chiquita found herself face to face with the "medicine" man of the paleface, and her white sister in "medicine" clothes. Arrayed at last in the oriental blue and white striped uniform, white apron with strings crossed at the back and jaunty little white cap, Chiquita began the task of familiarizing herself with the calling which so recently has placed woman in a sphere entirely her own, and made her the subject of hero worship on battlefield and in peaceful home. Faithfully she performed the laborious work of smoothing the rumpled clothing of a fever-racked patient, or adjusting the uncomfortable bandages of another, crushed and maimed. In the operating room she administered anesthetics or assisted with sponge and basin, and at clinics she listened intently to all the specialists, while in other channels she learned the necessary business methods needed for successfully carrying on the expensive undertaking which she proposed to inaugurate for the good of her own people.
The last half of the second year of hospital life had commenced. It was summer, and Jack, with Hazel, was returning from his annual trip to the Blazing-Eye-by-the-Big-Water mine.
Chiquita had enjoyed an afternoon with them, driving about the city, and observed that Jack was not as bright and cheerful as usual.