Poor Man's Rock

by Bertrand W. Sinclair

Her dusky cloud of hair was as of old; her wide, dark eyes still mirrored faithfully every shift of feeling, and her incomparable creamy skin was more beautiful than ever. Moving, she had lost none of her lithe grace. And though she had met him as if it had been only yesterday they parted, still there was a difference which somehow eluded him. He could feel it, but it was not to be defined. It struck him for the first time that many who had never seen a battlefield, never heard a screaming shell, nor shuddered at the agony of a dressing station, might still have suffered by and of and through the reactions of war.

They drank their tea and ate a slice of toast in silence. MacRae's comrades in France had called him "Silent" John, because of his lapses into concentrated thought, his habit of a close mouth when he was hurt or troubled or uncertain. One of the things for which he had liked Dolly Ferrara had been her possession of the same trait, uncommon in a girl. She could sit on the cliffs or lie with him in a rowboat lifting and falling in the Gulf swell, staring at the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls, dreaming and keeping her dreams shyly to herself,—as he did. They did not always need words for understanding. And so they did not talk now for the sake of talking, pour out words lest silence bring embarrassment. Dolly sat resting her chin in one hand, looking at him impersonally, yet critically, he felt. He smoked a cigarette and held his peace until the labored breathing of the sick man changed to disjointed, muttering, incoherent fragments of speech.

Dolly went to him at once. MacRae lingered to divest himself of the brown overalls so that he stood forth in his uniform, the R.A.F. uniform with the two black wings joined to a circle on his left breast and below that the multicolored ribbon of a decoration. Then he went in to his father.

Donald MacRae was far gone. His son needed no M.D. to tell him that. He burned with a high fever which had consumed his flesh and strength in its furnace. His eyes gleamed unnaturally, with no light of recognition for either his son or Dolly Ferrara. And there was a peculiar tinge to the old man's lips that chilled young MacRae, the mark of the Spanish flu in its deadliest manifestation. It made him ache to see that gray head shift from side to side, to listen to the incoherent babble, to mark the feeble shiftings of the nervous hands.

For a terrible half hour he endured the sight of his father struggling for breath, being racked by spasms of coughing. Then the reaction came and the sick man slept,—not a healthy, restful sleep; it was more like the dying stupor of exhaustion. Young MacRae knew that.

He knew with disturbing certainty that without skilled treatment—perhaps even in spite of that—his father's life was a matter of hours. Again he and Dolly Ferrara tiptoed out to the room where the fire glowed on the hearth. MacRae sat thinking. Dusk was coming on, the long twilight shortened by the overcast sky. MacRae glowered at the fire. The girl watched him expectantly.

"I have an idea," he said at last. "It's worth trying."

He opened his bag and, taking out the wedge-shaped cap of the birdmen, set it on his head and went out. He took the same path he had followed home. On top of the cliff he stopped to look down on Squitty Cove. In a camp or two ashore the supper fires of the rowboat trollers were burning. Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one close upon the heels of another.