Annaliese Fry, MD

Johnny Fry is deeply in love with his wife and has to figure a way to fit his life into her's. This is a story of how he does that. She is a newly graduated doctor who purchases the practice of a retiring doctor in the small California town of San Diego in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century. He had practiced there for forty years and asked her "will you take care of my people?" She does. His people were the Mexicans of San Diego.

Accepting the idea that the most important things in his life were his wife's patients took some doing but he manages it fairly well. Because he is willing to be the 'tail on her kite, ' as he says, he is free to do things on his own, within reason of course, just so he always comes home. One of these things is a trip across the Sonoran Desert, still a wild and dangerous place in the early 1890's.

With his friends Wash, Wash's wife, Woman, Handy, and Jinx, the cat, he leaves home on a two month long adventure that includes a couple scraps with Apaches, a man with a grudge and an injury that causes two days to disappear.

While he's gone his wife has to deal with a potential epidemic, the loss of a friend and regaining a friend she thought she'd lost. Finally she sends a telegram asking him to come home.