Six months passed, and then another six came near to their end. Mrs. Smith renewed the lease of the farm back among the New England hills for another year, and wrote to a neighbor’s wife to see that her woolen clothes and furs were aired and then packed away with a fresh supply of camphor to keep the moths out of them.
In this year’s time Mrs. Smith had picked up a wonderful smattering of the Spanish and Tagalog languages for a woman who had lived the life she had before she came to the East. The reason for this, so her companions said, was her being “just possessed to talk with those native prisoners who are brought wounded to the hospital.” The other nurses liked her. She not only was willing to take the cases they liked least—the natives—but asked for them.
And sometime in the course of their hospital experience, all Mrs. Smith’s native patients—if they did not die before they got able to talk coherently—had to go through the same catechism:
Was there a white man among the people from whom they had come; a white man who had come there from the American army?
Was he a tall young man with light hair and a smooth face?
Did he have a three-cornered white scar on one side of his chin, where a steer had hooked him when he was a boy?
Did he look like this picture? (A photograph was shown the patient)
From no one, though, did she get the answer that her heart craved. Some of the prisoners knew white men that had come among the Tagalog natives, but no one knew a man who answered to this description.
One day a native prisoner who had been brought in more than a week before, terribly wounded, opened his eyes to consciousness for the first time, after days and nights of stupor. He was one of these who naturally fell, now, to “Mrs. Smith’s lot,” as the surgeons called them. As soon as the nurse’s watchful eyes saw the change in the man she came to him and bent over his cot.
“Water, please,” he murmured