Thursday the Sixth
On Tuesday morning we had our first snow of the season, or, rather, before the season. It wasn’t much of a snow-storm, but Dinkie was greatly worked up at the sight of it and I finally put on his little reefer and his waders and let him go out in it. But the weather had moderated, the snow turned to slush, and when I rescued Dinkie from rolling in what looked to him like a world of ice-cream he was a very wet boy.
On Tuesday night Dinkie, usually so sturdy and strong, woke up with a tight little chest-cough that rather frightened me. I went over to his crib and covered him up. But when he wakened me again, a couple of hours later, the cough had grown tighter. It turned into a sort of sharp bark. And this time I found Dinkie hot and feverish. So I got busy, rubbing his chest with sweet oil and turpentine until the skin was pink and giving him a sip or two of cherry pectoral which I still had on the upper shelf of the cupboard.
When morning came he was no better. He seemed in a stupor, rousing only to bark into his pillow. I called Dinky-Dunk in, before he left in the pouring rain for Casa Grande, and he said, almost indifferently, “Yes, the boy’s got a cold all right.” But that was all.
When breakfast was over I tried Dinkie with hot gruel, but he declined it. He refused to eat, in fact, and remembering what Peter had once said about my first-born being pantophagous, I began to suspect that I had a very sick boy on my hands.
At noon, when he seemed no better, I made a mild mustard-plaster and put it on the upper part of his little chest. I let it burn there until he began to cry with the discomfort of it. Then I tucked a double fold of soft flannel above his thorax.
As night came on he was more flushed and feverish than ever, and I wished to heaven that I’d a clinic thermometer in the house. For by this time I was more than worried: I was panicky. Yet Duncan, when he came in, and got out of his oil-skins, didn’t seem very sympathetic. He flatly refused to share my fears. The child, he acknowledged, had a croupy little chest-cold, but all he wanted was keeping warm and as much water as he could drink. Nature, he largely protested, would attend to a case like that.
I was ready to turn on him like a she-tiger, but I held myself in, though it took an effort. I saw Duncan go off to bed, dog-tired, of course, but I felt that to go to sleep, under the circumstances, would be criminal. Dinkie, in the meantime, was waking every now and then and barking like a baby-coyote. I could have stood it, I suppose, if that old Bobs of ours hadn’t started howling outside, in long-drawn and dreary howls of unutterable woe. I remembered about a dog always howling that way when somebody was going to die in the house. And I concluded, with an icy heart, that it was the death-howl. I tried to count Dinkie’s pulse, but it was so rapid and I was so nervous that I lost track of the beats. So I decided to call Dinky-Dunk.
He came in to us kind of sleepy-eyed and with his hair rumpled up, and asked, without thinking, what I wanted.