“Not on your sweet life, we won’t miss it!” exulted Arnon, scrambling into the taxi with his pets. “We’ve got to catch it. You see, I—I want my chums to—to meet Mother; just as soon as they can. They’re dead sure to like her.”
HUMAN-INTEREST STUFF
HAPPINESS, to Jeff Titus, had become a fine art. It had become so when he married Eve Wallace, a little wisp of a city girl who had come to the Kentucky mountain hinterland to cure a set of weak lungs—and who had not only wedded but well-nigh civilised the lanky young mountaineer.
Happiness had remained a fine art for Jeff, up there on his bare hillside farm, with Eve. It had remained so, for the most part, ever since his wedding. And now, in a single breath, happiness had taken a place among the lost arts.
The “single breath” had been supplied by a sour east wind which had smitten Eve as she stood in the shack dooryard waiting for her husband’s home-coming. She was thinly clad, and she was in a perspiration from working in her flower garden. Her lungs were still weak. The east wind did the rest. By night she had a heavy cold. The third morning, pneumonia flung out its flaming red No Surrender signal on each of her fever-scorched cheeks.
And life, to Jeff Titus, all at once became a horror.
A frightened anguish gripped him by the throat and shook him to the bewildered soul; as he crouched night after night beside the slab bed where tossed and muttered the delirious little wisp of a woman who was at once his mate and his saint.