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Gossett was a nurse at the mining company’s hospital. In October 1912 she was cooking a patient’s meal when the gasoline stove burst into flames, leaving her with severe burns on the left arm, shoulder, and breast. Ponzi’s occasional work as a nurse brought him into contact with the hospital staff, and he had grown friendly with a physician, one Dr. Thomas. On a visit to the miners’ camp a few days after Gossett’s accident, the doctor stopped by to share a beer with Ponzi.

“How’s Pearl?” Ponzi asked.

“Her condition is very serious,” Dr. Thomas answered. “Almost desperate. Gangrene is setting in.”

Ponzi asked if anything could be done to help her.

“Skin grafting, perhaps,” the doctor said. “I wanted to try it. But I can’t find anybody who will give up as little as an inch of his skin for her.”

Ponzi did not know Gossett well, but others had told him how caring she was. Hearing the doctor say she might die or, at the minimum, lose her arm, “made my blood sizzle,” Ponzi said. “It did not seem fair that a young girl like Pearl should be permitted to die such a horrible death. That girl had been so kind to her patients that it seemed inconceivable that she should meet with such ingratitude.”

It angered him, Ponzi said, “to think that any person could be so selfish, so cowardly, as to refuse a mere inch of his own skin to save a human life.”

“How many inches of skin do you need altogether?” he asked the doctor.

“Forty or fifty, I guess,” Dr. Thomas said. “But I can’t find even ten in a community of two thousand or more people.”

“You’re all wrong, Doctor,” said Ponzi. “You have found them. I will give all the skin you need.”

“You? You will give the whole of it?”

“Yes, Doctor, I will. When do you want me?” Ponzi asked.

“We cannot put the thing off for very long,” the doctor answered. “But I don’t want to hurry you, either. You might want to prepare for it. Sort of brace up. When can you be ready?”

“I am ready now,” Ponzi said.

Dr. Thomas looked hard at Ponzi, making certain he would not flinch. “Evidently,” Ponzi said later, “what he saw in my eyes decided him.”

“All right, then,” Dr. Thomas said. “Come along.”

That night, doctors removed seventy-two square inches of skin from his thighs. Ponzi spent the next few weeks in the hospital, bandaged from hip to knee. When he had nearly recuperated, Ponzi got another visit from Dr. Thomas. The nurse needed more skin.

“Go as far as you like,” Ponzi answered.

On November 5, another fifty square inches were taken from his back. He spent most of the next three months in the hospital, battling pain and pleurisy. The donations would leave him with broad white patches of scar tissue on his back and legs. Gossett remained scarred as well, but she recovered.

An account of Ponzi’s giving the skin off his back and legs to help a nurse made the local newspaper. Ponzi proudly sent a copy of the clipping to his old boss at the Atlanta prison, A. C. Aderhold, who would keep it tucked away for years. The newspaper story spurred talk among prominent Blocton citizens about recommending Ponzi for a medal and a reward from the Carnegie Hero Fund, established eight years earlier, in 1904, by industrialist Andrew Carnegie to honor acts of civilian heroism. But the effort never got off the ground, and Ponzi received no formal recognition.

By the time he was released from the hospital, other plans were being made to supply the mining camp with water and light. Another opportunity lost, Ponzi returned to the drawing board.

Ponzi left Blocton a few months later, meandering south to Florida, where he moved from town to town painting signs, houses, and anything else that paid. He signed on to paint an iron-hulled freight and passenger steamer named the S.S. Tarpon as it cruised from port to port along the northern Gulf Coast. But he quarreled over pay with the Tarpon’s fierce captain, William Barrows, and Ponzi found himself stranded in Mobile, Alabama. He took up painting again, but when work slowed he looked for jobs in a newspaper’s help wanted ads. One