Cherry Ames 02 Senior Nurse by Helen Wells Read Free Book Online

old friend and mentor, Dr. Joseph Fortune.
    Dr. Fortune had brought the Ames twins into the world, and had been their friend and neighbor all their lives. His selfless devotion to medical research in his little home laboratory in Hilton—in the teeth of poverty and loneliness and lack of recognition, in those days—
    had inspired Cherry to be a nurse. Cherry had tried to pay him back in her own way. After Mrs. Fortune had died, while Cherry was still in high school, Cherry had kept an eye on impractical Dr. Joe and on his house and on his madcap daughter, Midge. Dr. Joe’s present recognition, and his presence here at Spencer, was due to Cherry—and a nightmarish episode in her first year at the nursing school.
    Cherry blew into Dr. Joe’s small cluttered laboratory, red-cheeked and out of breath. “Why aren’t there more hours in the day, Dr. Joe?” she asked in greeting.
    Dr. Joe lifted his head from the microscope a full minute after her remark. He brushed the boyish shock of gray hair out of his eye. “What’s on your mind, Cherry?” When she shook her head, he said gently,
    “Oh, yes, there is. I’m not as absent-minded as you think I am. I noticed, for instance, that you filed my notes on quinine substitutes in the wrong drawer,” he 48
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    smiled at her over a row of test tubes, “and you forgot to bring me the drugs I requisitioned for tomorrow’s experiment.”
    Cherry pressed her hands against her tingling face.
    “I’m sorry. If you’ll give me your authorization, I’ll get the drugs right away. I’m not much help to you, am I, Dr. Joe?”
    “We-ell, I really need a technical assistant. But I’m going to keep you on for company. After all, if your mother has Midge, then I ought to have her daughter in exchange. That’s only fair, isn’t it?” He pottered around the long laboratory sink. “About the assistant——” Dr. Joe fumbled in the pocket of his crumpled laboratory coat. Cherry waited for him to finish his remark.
    He took some notes out of his pocket, searched for a pencil, sat down on a stool, and absorbedly started to write. Cherry was used to this.
    In two or three minutes, he looked up again and grinned sheepishly. “Where were we?”
    “About a technician for you,” Cherry prompted.
    Dr. Fortune rose from the stool and seated himself slowly in the one comfortable chair. “He looks old,” Cherry thought, “and tired. It’s no wonder, the way he drives himself with this research.” Aloud she said,
    “Couldn’t you take a little vacation, Dr. Joe? Perhaps around Thanksgiving? Midge will have vacation from high school that week end.”

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    “Vacation! With our hospitals desperately under-staffed? Does malaria, or the other tropical diseases, take a vacation? Do our soldiers in the Pacific get vaca-tions from danger and infection?” Then he said less sternly, “I think I’ve found the man I want.”
    “Who is it?” Cherry asked.
    “He came to me voluntarily because he, too, is interested in research for developing quinine substitutes. He says he’s not a specialist in it, but he knows the field like a specialist.” Dr. Fortune tamped down the tobacco in his pipe, thinking aloud as he often did with Cherry.
    “This staff man can give me only a little of his crowded time. A technician could give me his full time—if there were a technician to spare in wartime!” He talked a little further about the man’s abilities and the technical aspects of the research.
    Cherry found it difficult to understand and she in voluntarily glanced down at her watch. There was not much time to get Dr. Joe his supplies before the main laboratory in Spencer was locked for the day. She rose.
    Where did time go? She ought to spend some time with her probie, she wanted to have time for Lex——
    “Would you stop in at the office,” Dr. Joe was saying,
    “and ask them to have Dr. Upham come in and see