His little boy had been cut with the
mower-knives, and he implored the doctor to come at once.
The doctor sat at his desk, just drunk enough to be
ugly-tempered, and curtly told Mr. Robertson to go straight
to perdition, and as the poor man, wild with excitement,
begged him to come and offered him money, he yawned
nonchalantly, and with some slight variations repeated
the injunction.
Mary hearing the conversation came in hurriedly.
"Mary, my dear," the doctor said, "please leave us. This
gentleman is quite forgetting himself and his language
is shocking." Mary did not even look at her father. She
was packing his little satchel with all that would be
needed.
"Now pick him up and take him," she said firmly to big
John. "He'll be all right when he sees your little boy,
never mind what he says now."
Big John seized the doctor and bore him struggling and
protesting to the wagon.
The doctor made an effort to get out.
"Put him down in the bottom with this under his
head"--handing Big John a cushion--"and put your feet on
him," Mary commanded.
Big John did as she bid him, none too gently, for he
could still hear his little boy's cries and see that
cruel jagged wound.
"Oh, don't hurt him," she cried piteously, and ran sobbing
into the house. Upstairs, in what had been her mother's
room, she pressed her face against her mother's kimono
that still hung behind the door. "I am not crying for
you to come back, mother," she sobbed bitterly, "I am
just crying for your little girl.
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