She did not like to be thought
an over-enthusiastic woman--womanish, unused to the world.

The weather, soon after the arrival of the _Mercy_, took a terrible
mood, and a prolonged drought settled upon Calhoun. The days dawned
lurid and long. The nights fell dewless and deadly. Fatal and
beautiful colors lurked in the swamps, and in the sifting dust, fine
and hard, blown by siroccos across the glare of noon, like sands on
the shores of the Lake of Fire. The pestilence walked in darkness, and
the destruction wasted at midday. Men died, in that little town of a
few thousand souls, at the rate of a score a day--black and white,
poor and rich, clean and foul, saint and sinner. The quarantine laws
tightened. Vessels fled by the harbor mouth under full sail, and
melted like helpless compassion upon the fiery horizon. Trains upon
the Shore Line shot through and thundered past the station; they
crowded on steam; the fireman and his stoker averted their faces as
they whirled by. The world turned her back upon Calhoun, and the dying
town was shut in with her dead. Only, at long intervals, the _Mercy_,
casting anchor far down the channel, sent up by Scip, the weak, black
boatman, the signs of human fellowship--food, physician, purse,
medicine--that spoke from the heart of the North to the heart of the
South, and upheld her in those well-remembered days.

Zerviah Hope, volunteer nurse, became quickly enough a marked man in
Calhoun. He more than verified Doctor Dare's prognosis. Where the
deadliest work was to be done, this man, it was observed, asked to be
sent. Where no one else would go, he went. What no one else would do,
he did. He sought the neglected, and the negroes. He braved the
unclean, and the unburied. With the readiness of all incisive
character acting on emergencies, he stamped himself upon the place and
time. He went to his task as the soldier goes to the front under
raking fire, with gleaming eyes and iron muscles. The fever of the
fight was on him. He seemed to wrestle with disease for his patients,
and to trample death beneath his feet. He glowed over his cures with a
positive physical dilation, and writhed over his dead as if he had
killed them. He seemed built of endurance more than mortal. It was not
known when he slept, scarcely if he ate. His weariness sat upon him
like a halo. He grew thin, refined, radiant. In short, he presented
an example of that rare spectacle which never fails to command
spectators--