"GOD HELP POOR FOOL."
"I asked the colonel how he felt about the prosecution of the man who shot him," said Miss White, "and he said, 'I've not decided yet, but God help the poor fool under any circumstances!' and the tone he used was one of kindly sympathy and sincerity, and without one trace of malice or sarcasm.
"He seemed kindly interested in everything that any one said to him. Miss Elvine Kucko, one of our nurses, shook hands with him when he was about to go and said she was sorry the shooting had happened in our city. The colonel consoled her by saying it might have happened anywhere. I broke in with a remark to the effect that he would have felt even worse had it been perpetrated by a Milwaukeean, and that we were glad it was a New Yorker who did the deed.
"'You cruel little woman!' the patient ejaculated, and I remembered then that New York was the ex-President's state."
When he was ready to go, Miss White offered him a sealed envelope and told him his cuff buttons, shirt studs and collar buttons were in it.
"No, you can't do that with me," he said, "I want to see! I don't intend to get down to Chicago without the flat button for the back of my collar."
Miss White joined him in a laugh as she pulled open the envelope and counted each one separately into his hand. That flat bone button that he treasured hid itself under one of the others and he had to have a second count before he was satisfied that he was not going to be inconvenienced by its loss when he should next care to wear a collar.
Doctors and nurses questioned the ex-President's coat being warm enough, but he assured them that the coat was one he had worn in the Spanish-American war, that it was of military make and would keep him warm enough in a steam-heated Pullman.
When the bandages were being strapped on the colonel's chest to keep the dressing in place, one of the doctors, Fred Stratton, a young giant, didn't put one fold as Miss White thought it ought to be. She ordered it put right, and the colonel began to laugh, which isn't to be wondered at when one remembers that Miss White is a tiny, wee bit of fluffy humanity who doesn't look a bit like what one would expect, the superintendent of a big hospital and looked a pigmy beside the big doctor.