Donald Henderson Clarke - Lady Ann

“Now, let’s see those scratches,” Dr. Benham continued, opening his medicine bag.

“Just a minute,” Ann said, going to the pantry and returning with an egg.

She broke the egg and dropped it into the pot. Then she measured out five cups of well water from a pail by the sink and set the pot on the stove. Then she unbuttoned her dress, yellow with white dots, and slipped it over her head.

“He scratched you up good, didn’t he?” Dr. Benham said, spectacles already in place. “Wish you’d told me about this last night. Scratches and bites are better cauterized.”

He applied iodine.

“The tramp died of heart failure,” Dr. Benham said while his deft fingers of a physician touched Ann’s skin.

“He hit his head pretty hard,” Ann volunteered.

Dr. Benham grinned and his head began to shake harder.

“That might have been a contributing cause,” he admitted, “but he really died when his heart stopped beating. You can put on your dress again,” he added.

Ann swam into her dress, and Dr. Benham replaced a bottle and cotton in his bag. Then he pumped water into the basin at the sink. He said, as he washed:

“Now, if you’d cleaned the skin from that tramp’s nails, taken your hair from his fingers, and hadn’t laid him out so nice, nobody’d ever have known what did happen.”

“I’m glad he’s dead,” Ann asserted. “He was an awful man.”

Dr. Benham transferred dripping fingers from the pan to the roller towel on the wall at the left of the door leading into the dining room. Drying his hands, he said:

“I prefer that kind dead myself,” he observed, “but you should remember, Ann, that if your Uncle Clarence wasn’t the Constable and I wasn’t the County Physician, you might have had to go to court.”

“I wouldn’t care,” Ann replied. “I didn’t do anything I shouldn’t do.”

Dr. Benham patted her back.

“I don’t think you did, Annie,” he said. “Give me a kiss.”

She held up her face, and he kissed her cheek and then pinched it.

“You’re a great girl,” he said. “I wonder what’ll happen to you when you grow up.”

Ann’s face crinkled in a smile, revealing a dimple in her left cheek.

“Oh, I know,” she asserted. “I’m going to be married and have eight children.”

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