High Country Nurse
Smiley, Virginia K.
Lovely young Cass Fleming wanted nothing more than to be a good nurse. But suddenly her work at City Hospital, the suffering of small helpless children and kind elderly people, seemed too much for her. To make matters worse, her fiance, Dr. Dan Driscoll, could not understand her feelings. Could she marry a man who was that cold-hearted? Cass decided she needed to get away from it all -- to sort out her bruised and mixed-up emotions. The remote Navajo Reservation, where her Aunt Norma taught school, seemed the perfect refuge. But "getting away" wasn't quite that easy. There were the Navajo people whom she quickly learned to love, and who needed her help. And there was the tall, self-assured young flyer, Sandy Russell, whose playful mockery suddenly turned into something much more serious. Cass realized there was no escape from life and its decisions ... and the most important decision of all still lay in wait for her.

She had come to this remote area of Arizona to visit her aunt, Norma Fleming, a teacher on the Navajo Reservation and to decide whether she really wanted to be a nurse. Those last few months at City Hospital in Phoenix had been almost her undoing. Watching small, helpless children die, and then the last lingering illness of Hattie Martin, who had touched her too deeply. Dan Driscoll, the young doctor to whom she was engaged, had not even tried to understand her feelings.

Here in the desert wasteland -- the butte country -- she would sort out her thoughts -- no only about continuing as a nurse, but about her engagement to Dan…

What Cass -- short for Cassandra -- Fleming had not counted on was her instant love and sympathy for the Navajo's, especially pathetic little Daisie Bucking Horse, so starved of learning. But the first person Cass met as she drove across the desert to her aunt's trailer home was cocky Sandy Russell, who flew a Mercy Flight plane, and who thought very little of a girl who set out on a long desert with a soft spare and a leaking Thermos…
