"I noticed it first about a year ago, but thought nothing much about it," she answered.
"And never showed it to nobody?" he said, reprovingly.
"I let a peddler, who had stuff to sell, see it awhile back." There was a touch of shame in Jane's face. "He said his medicine would make it slough off, but—"
"Slough nothing! That trifling skunk!" Evans cried. "Why, he's the biggest fake unhung! He sold that same stuff over the mountain to bald-headed men to make hair grow. Huh, I say! they talk about handling me by law, and kicking me out of the country on account of my knowledge and skill, and let chaps like him scour the country from end to end for its last cent. What the devil gets into you women? Here you've let this thing go on sinking its fangs deeper and deeper in your breast, and only fertilizing it by the treatment he was giving you. Are you hankering for a change of air? Thar was Mrs. Telworthy, that let her liver run on till she was as yaller as a pumpkin with jaundice before she'd come to me. I give 'er two bottles of my purifier, and she could eat a barbecued ox in a month."
"What do you think I ought to do about this?" asked Jane; and Virginia, with strange qualms at heart, thought that her mother had put it that way to avoid asking if the worst was really to be faced.
Evans stroked his bushy beard wisely. "Do about it?" he repeated, as he went back to his chair, leaving the patient to button her dress with stiff, fumbling fingers. "I mought put you on a course of my blood purifier and wait developments, and, Sister Hemingway, if I was like the regular run of doctors, with their own discoveries on the market, I'd do it in the interest of science, but I'm not going to take the resk on my shoulders. A man who gives domestic remedies like mine is on safe ground when he's treating ordinary diseases, but I reckon a medical board would decide that this was a case for a good, steady knife. Now, I reckon you'd better get on the train and take a run down to Atlanta and put yourself under Dr. Putnam, who is noted far and wide as the best cancer expert in the land."
"Then—then that's what it is?" faltered Mrs. Hemingway.
"Oh yes, that's what you've got, all right enough," said Evans, "and the thing now is to uproot it."
"How—how much would it be likely to cost?" the widow asked, her troubled glance on Virginia's horror-stricken face.
"That depends," mused Evans. "I've sent Putnam a number of cases, and he would, I think, make you a special widow-rate, being as you and me live so nigh each other. At a rough guess, I'd say that everything—board and room and nurse, treatment, medicines, and attention—would set you back a hundred dollars."