IV
Ten days later he telephoned me while I was at supper to ask if I could come to his room. I said: “What’s up?”
“The old guy’s boy is coming after him,” Sheener said. “He’s got the shakes, waiting. I want you to come and help me take care of him.”
“When’s the boy coming?”
“Gets in at midnight to-night,” said Sheener.
I promised to make haste; and half an hour later I joined him in Sheener’s room. Sheener let me in. Evans himself sat in something like a stupor, on a chair by the bed. He was dressed in a cheap suit of ready-made clothes, to which he lent a certain dignity. His cheeks were shaved clean, his mustache was trimmed, his thin hair was plastered down on his bony skull. The man stared straight before him, trembling and quivering. He did not look toward me when I came in; and Sheener and I sat down by the table and talked together in undertones.
“The boy’s really coming?” I asked.
Sheener said proudly: “I’m telling you.”
“You heard from him?”
“Got a wire the day he got my letter.”
“You’ve told Bum?”
“I told him right away. I had to do it. The old boy was sober by then, and crazy for a shot of booze. That was Monday. He wanted to go out and get pied; but when I told him about his boy, he begun to cry. And he ain’t touched a drop since then.”
“Sure I’d let him. But he wouldn’t. I always told you the class was there. He says to me: ‘I can’t let my boy see me in this state, you know. Have to straighten up a bit. I’ll need new clothes.’”
“I noticed his new suit.”
“Sure,” Sheener agreed. “I bought it for him.”
“Out of his savings?”
“He ain’t been saving much lately.”
“Sheener,” I asked, “how much does he owe you? For money loaned and spent for him.”
Sheener said hotly: “He don’t owe me a cent.”
“I know. But how much have you spent on him?”
“If I hadn’t have give it to him, I’d have blowed it somehow. He needed it.”
I guessed at a hundred dollars, at two hundred. Sheener would not tell me. “I’m telling you, he’s my pal,” he said. “I’m not looking for anything out of this.”
“If this millionaire son of his has any decency, he’ll make it up to you.”
“He don’t know a thing about me,” said Sheener, “except my name. I’ve just wrote as though I knowed the old guy, here in the house, see. Said he was sick, and all.”
“And the boy gets in to-night?”
“Midnight,” said Sheener, and Evans, from his chair, echoed: “Midnight!” Then asked with a certain stiff anxiety: “Do I look all right, Sheener? Look all right to see my boy?”
“Say,” Sheener told him. “You look like the Prince of Wales.” He went across to where the other sat and gripped him by the shoulder. “You look like the king o’ the world.”
Old Evans brushed at his coat anxiously; his fingers picked and twisted; and Sheener sat down on the bed beside him and began to soothe and comfort the man as though he were a child.