"I can not turn back. I will stifle my love for the one who lies there helpless. I will consecrate my life to the customs of his people, that I may leave a legacy to my people—the inheritance which civilization brings."
Mechanically she performed the rest of her duties; nurses had taken the unconscious form away in its swaths of bandages, while she remained to administer to other patients and begin the long siege of love's starvation, until her heart should capitulate and turn to stone.
The day following the operation, Chiquita's first duties were to take Jack's temperature and respiration, and note other conditions. She performed the latter with perfect composure, but when she essayed the counting of those "little blood knocks upon the wrist," her own heart beat so furiously that she was fearful of making an error, and was obliged to ask another nurse to take that record. Afterward, however, she was able to control her feelings, and take Jack's temperature with composure.
Upon the fifth day, when the internes were dressing Jack's wound, it was discovered that another operation would have to be performed. The surgeon had overlooked a portion of the affected tract, and the wound would again have to be reopened and rescarified with a burning white hot electric wire. This discovery was made Saturday, and Jack was at once informed.
Hazel tried to encourage him, but despondency seemed to take possession of him, and all day Sunday, as the church bells clanged their discordant soul-racking peals, he tossed restlessly upon his bed. The terrific winds from the southwest blew their breath to the north in sweltering blasts, and poor humanity had to endure it. Tuesday, Chiquita once more was called upon to watch Jack as he succumbed to the influence of the anesthetic. Once more she counted his heart throbs as the surgeon scraped, burned and annihilated germs, bugs and septic tissue, and once more her heart wildly stampeded in its ecstatic throbbing of love for him whose life she literally held in her own hands, as his hallowed form reposed unconscious on the glass slab.
Oh, what joy to her! what an entrancing, ravishing hour! As she afterwards lived those minutes over and over again, allowing her stony heart to grow tender as the impulse swayed her, she was carried back in vivid memory to the camp on Rock Creek where she first learned of the medicine tepee queen.
The second operation was successful, and although Jack's convalescence was prolonged for months, he was fully cured of an ailment which in days of less scientific skill had invariably resulted fatally.
With the culmination of her hospital education, Chiquita turned her attention to the study of the economics of city life, and investigation of the details relating to her future enterprise.
She found herself domiciled in a rather pretentious establishment in a fashionable and aristocratic neighborhood.
"Yes, Señorita Chiquita, I shall be pleased to have you make your home with my family, as they call themselves, and we are a happy houseful." So spake the little black-eyed proprietor of the "Addington." She was Mrs. Pickett. Pickett was a speculator. The whole atmosphere in and about Pickett reflected the market; if he was on the right side of corn or wheat or provisions one could feel it, hear it, see it in Pickett's handshake, voice and clothes. If, however, he was "bull" on a "bear" movement, the Pickett barometer dropped accordingly.