“Not so sure about the Cornfields!” cried Morton. “Of course it would take money. That provided, think of the wires you could pull. Here are a half-dozen railroads, with their claws and teeth in the country and their tails in town. Each of them, don't y' know, as part of its equipment, owns a little herd of rustic members. You could step on the railroad tail with the feet of your fifty city departments, and torture it into giving you its hayseed marionettes for this scheme of a new State. Pon my word! old chap, it could be brought about; it could, really!”
“I fear,” said I banteringly, “that after all you are no better than a harebrained theorist. I confess that your plans are too grand for my commonplace powers of execution. I shall have to plod on with those moss-grown methods which have served us in the past.”
It would seem as though I had had Death to be my neighbor from the beginning, for his black shadow was in constant play about me. One day he would take a victim from out my very arms; again he would grimly step between me and another as we sat in talk. Nor did doctors do much good or any; and I have thought that all I shall ask, when my own time comes, is a nurse to lift me in and out of bed, and for the rest of it, why! let me die.
It was Anne to leave me now, and her death befell like lightning from an open sky. Anne was never of your robust women; I should not have said, however, that she was frail, since she was always about, taking the whole weight of the house to herself, and, as I found when she was gone, furnishing the major portion of its cheerfulness. That was what misled me, doubtless; a brave smile shone ever on her face like sunlight, and served to put me off from any thought of sickness for her.
It was her heart, they said; but no such slowness in striking as when Big Kennedy died. Anne had been abroad for a walk in the early cool of the evening. When she returned, and without removing her street gear, she sank into a chair in the hall.
“What ails ye, mem?” asked the old Galway wife that had been nurse to Blossom, and who undid the door to Anne; “what's the matter of your pale face?”
“An' then,” cried the crone, when she gave me the sorry tale of it, “she answered wit' a sob. An' next her poor head fell back on the chair, and she was by.”
Both young Van Flange and I were away from the house at the time of it; he about his business, which kept him often, and long, into the night; and I in the smothering midst of my politics. When I was brought home, they had laid Anne's body on her bed. At the foot on a rug crouched the old nurse, rocking herself forward and back, wailing like a banshee. Blossom, whose cheek was whitened with the horror of our loss, crept to my side and stood close, clutching my hand as in those old terror-ridden baby days when unseen demons glowered from the room-comers. It was no good sight for Blossom, and I led her away, the old Galway crone at the bed's foot keening her barbarous mourning after us far down the hall.
Blossom was all that remained with me now. And yet, she would be enough, I thought, as I held her, child-fashion, in my arms that night to comfort her, if only I might keep her happy.
Young Van Flange worked at his trade of stocks like a horse. He was into it early and late, sometimes staying from home all night. I took pride to think how much more wisely than Morton I had judged the boy.