The Story of a Doctor's Telephone Part 11

"Not before supper time, probably."

The man whistled, then looked at his wife and the two girls.

"Well, Sally," he said, "I guess we'd better git out and wait fur 'im."

"W'y, Pa, it'll be dark long before we git home, if we do."

"I can't help that. I'm not agoin' to drive eight miles tomorry or next day nuther."

"If ye'd 'a started two hour ago like I wanted ye to do, maybe Doc'd 'a been here and we c'd 'a been purty nigh home by this time."

"Shet up! I told ye I wasn't done tradin' then."

"It don't take _me_ all day to trade a few aigs for a jug o' m'la.s.ses an' a plug o' terbacker."

For answer the head of the house told his family to "jist roll out now."

They rolled out and in a few minutes they had all rolled in. Mrs. Parkin made a heroic effort not to look inhospitable which made Mary's heroic effort not to look amused still more heroic.

When at last the afternoon was drawing to a close Mary went out into the yard to rest. She wished John would come. Hark! There is the ring of horses' hoofs down the quiet road. But these are white horses, John's are bays. She turns her head and looks into the west. Out in the meadow a giant oak-tree stands between her and the setting sun. Its upper branches are outlined against the grey cloud which belts the entire western horizon, while its lower branches are sharply etched against the yellow sky beneath the grey.

What a calm, beautiful sky it was!

She thought of some lines she had read more than once that morning ... a bit from George Eliot's Journal:

"How lovely to look into that brilliant distance and see the s.h.i.+p on the horizon seeming to sail away from the cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have always that sort of feeling when I look at sunset. It always seems to me that there in the west lies a land of light and warmth and love."

A carriage was now coming down the road at great speed. Mary saw it was her husband and went in to put on her things. In a few minutes more she was in the buggy and they were bound for home. It was almost ten o'clock when they got there. The trip had been so hard on the horses that all the spirit was taken out of them. The doctor, too, was exceedingly tired. "Forty-two miles is a long trip to make in an afternoon," he said.

"I hope Jack and Maggie are not up so late."

"It would be just like them to sit up till we came."

The buggy stopped; the door flew open and Jack and Maggie stood framed in the doorway with the leaping yellow firelight for a background.

CHAPTER V.

Once in a while sympathy for a fellow mortal kept the doctor's wife an interested listener at the 'phone. Going, one morning, to speak to a friend about some little matter she heard her husband say:

"What is it, doctor?" A physician in a little town some ten or twelve miles distant, who had called Dr. Blank in consultation a few days before, was calling him.

"I think our patient is doing very well, but her heart keeps getting a little faster."

"How fast is it now?"

"About 120."

"But the disease is pretty well advanced now--that doesn't mean as much as it would earlier. But you might push a little on the brandy, or the strychnine--how much brandy have you given her since I saw her?"

"I have given her four ounces."

"Four ounces!"

"Yes."

"Four ounces in three days? I think you must mean four drachms."

"_Yes._ It _is_ drachms. Four ounces _would_ be fixing things up. I've been giving her digitalis; what do you think about that?"

"That's all right, but I think that strychnine would be a little better."

"Would you give her any aromatic spirits of ammonia?"

"Does she rattle?"

"A little."

"Then you might give her a little of that. And keep the room open and stick right to her and she ought to get along. Don't give her much to eat."

"Is milk all right?"

"Yes. You bet it is."

"All right then, doctor, I believe that's all. Good-bye."

On another occasion, Mary caught this fragment:

"She's so everlastin' sore that she just hollers and yells every time I go near her. Would you give her any more morphine?"

"Morphine's a thing you can't monkey with you know, Doctor. You want to be mighty careful about that."

"Yes. I know. How long will that morphine last?"

"That depends on how you use it. It won't last long if you use too much and neither will she."

"I mean how long will it last in the system?"

"O! Why, three or four hours."

"Well, I think she don't need no more medicine."

Mary smiled at the double negative and when she laughingly spoke of it that night her husband a.s.sured her that that doctor's singleness of purpose more than offset his doubleness of negative. That he was a fine fellow and a good physician just the same.

One morning in March just as the doctor arose from the breakfast table he was called to the 'phone.