"Why don't we go home, dad?" he asked anxiously on the third day. "I could get you there as easy as anything."
"I'm not well enough."
"You don't seem very sick to me. You don't have any pain and you can eat all right."
"It isn't that kind of bein' sick. It's—" he sought for a name—"it's like nervous prostration."
More nearly than he knew he had named his malady. In his own words, he was all in; and he was all in to the end of the letter of the term. Of that moral force which is most of what any man has to live upon some experience had drained him. He had spent his gift of vitality. All in was precisely the phrase to apply to him. He had cashed the last cent of whatever he had inherited or saved in the way of inner strength, and now he could not go on.
"What's the good of it anyhow?" he asked of Tom in the night. "There's nothin' to it, not when you come to think of it. You run after something as if you couldn't live without it; and then when you get it you curse your God that you ever run."
Tom shuddered in his bed, but he was used to doing that. There was hardly a night when he was not wakened by a nightmare. If it was not by a nightmare, it was by the soft complaining voice.
"Are you awake, Tom?"
"Yes, dad. Can I get you anything?"