Page. Is he in now?"
"Yes," she told him gravely. "Come in, please."
He stepped across the threshold, his eyes trained to quick observation
of details taking in at a glance all there was to be seen. The room
showed all signs of a fresh unpacking, the one table and two chairs
piled high with odds and ends. For the most part the miscellany
consisted of big, fat books, bundles of towels and fresh white napkins,
rubber-stoppered bottles of varicolored contents, and black leather
cases, no doubt containing a surgeon's instruments. Through an open
door giving entrance to the adjoining room he noted further signs of
unpacking with a marked difference in the character of the litter; the
girl stepped quickly to this door, shutting out the vision of a
helter-skelter of feminine apparel.
"It is your hand?" she asked, as in most thoroughly matter of fact
fashion she put out her own for it. "Let me see it."
But for a moment he bestowed upon her merely a slow look of question.
"You don't mean that you are Dr. Page?" he asked. Then, believing that
he understood: "You're the nurse?"
"Is a physician's life in San Juan likely to be so filled with his
duties that he must bring a nurse with him?" she countered. "Yes, I am
Dr. Page."
He noted that she was as defiant about the matter as the Kid had been
about the killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas; plainly she had foreseen
that the type of man-animal inhabiting this out-of-the-way corner of
the world would be likely to wonder at her hardihood and, perhaps, to
jeer.
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