Chapter 24

JOHNNY'S DILEMMA

"Well, thank heavens she's gone! Perhaps a person can have a minute or two of peace and comfort on this ranch now. I don't know when I have ever disliked a person so much. I don't see how you stood her. For my part, that creature would make me sick, just having her around!" As a final venting of her animosity, Mary V made faces at the car that carried the nurse hack to town.

Johnny looked at Mary V, looked after the nurse, and looked at Mary V again. He had thought the nurse a very nice nurse, with a quiet kind of efficiency that soothed a fellow without any fuss or frills. It was queer Mary V did not like her, but then--

"I know I've been a darned nuisance," he apologized so meekly that he did not sound in the least like Johnny Jewel. "But I'm getting well fast. I'll be able to beat it in a few days now."

"Why, for gracious sake? Haven't we--er--made you comfortable?"

"Sure, you have. Only you shouldn't have put yourselves out, this way. I ought to have gone to a hospital or some place." Johnny looked so distressed that Mary V could have cried. Only she was afraid that would distress him still more, and the doctor had said he must not be worried about anything.

"It wasn't any trouble. You are being absolutely silly, so I guess you are getting well, all right. I--I didn't see any sense of having that nurse in the first place. Because I can take temperature and count pulse and everything. I've really been crazy for a chance to practice nursing on somebody. And then when I had the chance, they wouldn't let me do a thing."

Johnny grinned, which was rather pathetic--he was so thin and so white. "Why didn't you practice on the greasers?" he taunted her. "Bill says you sure made some dandy work for the hospitals."

"Well, I couldn't help that. I didn't have any way of tying them, or anything, and--"

"Brag, girl! For Lord's sake don't apologize; it doesn't come natural to you. What gets me is that I was ripping the atmosphere wide open, trying to rescue you, and all the while you were making a whole sheriff's posse of yourself--and it was you that rescued me. I should think--"

"I did not! I--did Bill tell you the latest, Johnny? You know how dad is--about making people tell things he wants to know, and keeping them right to the point--"

"I know." Johnny's tone was eloquent.

"Well, he got at those Mexicans, and they told everything they knew--and some besides. And who do you think was the real leader of that gang, Johnny? And I know now it was his voice that I couldn't quite recognize over the 'phone. They've arrested him and two or three of his men, and you wouldn't believe a neighbor could be so tricky and mean as that Tucker Bly. Stealing our horses to sell to the Mexicans, if you