I didn’t know what to say, but I guess I looked it.

“William,” she said, with a glitter of her gold specs.

“Ma’am,” said I.

“Those boys aren’t getting proper con-sideration,” she said.  “If it was dogs,” she said, “they couldn’t be treated worse.  William, I’m going to see what one old woman can do.”

“You ought to ask Captain Howard first,” I said.  “You don’t belong to the Army Medical Corps.”

“It’s them that let Benny die,” she said, with her eyes snapping, “and, as for asking, they’d say ‘No,’ for they don’t allow any women except at the base hospitals.”

I knew this for a fack, but I’d rather she’d find it out from the captain than from me.  I didn’t want to seem to make trouble for her.  So, while I was wondering what to do about it, she headed right in, leaving me with the valise and the umberella, and a kind of qualmy feeling that the old lady might strike a snag.

I didn’t have no chance to come back till along sundown, but, my stars I even in that time there had been a change.  Benny’s mother had been getting in her deadly work, and the orderlies were bursting mad, not that any of them dared say anything outright or show it except in their faces, which were that long; for, you see, the contract surgeon had taken her side, and had backed her up.  But they moved around like mules with their ears down, powerful unwilling, and yet scared to say a word.  The hospital had been made a new place, with another tent up that had been laid away and forgotten (you wouldn’t think it possible, but it was), and the sick and wounded had been sorted over and washed and made comfortable; and, where before there was no room to turn around, you could walk through wide lanes and wonder what had become of the crowd.  She had peeked into the cooking, too, and had found out more things going wrong in five hours than the contract surgeon had in five months.  Blest if there wasn’t a court-martial laying for every one of the orderlies if they said “boo!” for the swine had been making away scandalous with butter and chocolate and beef—­tea and canned table peaches and sparrow-grass and sardines, and all the like of that, belly-robbing the boys right and left perfectly awful.

It was a mighty good account of the contract surgeon that he took it all so well, and was willing to admit how badly he had been done.  But he was a splendid young fellow, named Marcus, and what the old lady said, went!  He was right sorry he couldn’t put her on the strength of the battery, but the regulations kept women nurses at the base-hospitals, and anyway (for we broke everything them days, and there wasn’t enough red-tape left to play cat-and-my-cradle with) Captain Howard hated the sight of a petticoat, and was dead set against women anywheres.  I don’t know what they had ever done to him, but I’m just saying it for a fack.  But, however it was, Marcus said the old lady had to be kept out of sight, or else the captain would surely send her to the rear under arrest.