"Why?" Mary repeated.
"Doctor's orders," he answered lightly. "High altitude advised. Oh, it's just a notion of mine. You'll have to humor me."
"It's easily arranged," she said. "I'll have Yick make up a bed. You are whimsical, though, Rod. What's back of the notion?"
He laughed it off. An hour later, feeling himself sink into sleep with a delicious, pervasive sensation of contentment, his last conscious reflection was a hope that he would never have to explain what lay back of the notion. He felt Mary's arm resting across him. Surely body and soul could be at peace henceforth.
Well on in the night he wakened with a familiar apprehension tugging at his consciousness. His brain was quite clear. He knew what was happening. It had overtaken him before. The thinking, reasoning part of him, or perhaps the purely intuitive, urged that he rise and fight off a paralyzing numbness that seized his feet, his hands, that crept slowly upward and inward, chilling his flesh. Curious, he thought, to die like that, to stand by and watch himself run down like an unwound clock. He could hear the slow regular breathing of his wife beside him. He could feel the even beat of her heart where her breast pressed against his shoulder. His own heart had stopped,—fluttered and stopped as he awoke. Would it begin again? He lay waiting, feeling that numbness seize his limbs, feeling his breathing grow more difficult.
He remembered what he must do. His will—that strange, detached segment of his being that was cognizant of and superior to his flesh, commanded him to rise at once if he would ever rise again. And by some supreme effort of a body dying if not already dead he twisted himself sidewise, set his feet on the floor, hauled himself erect by a bedpost. Three steps to the door. Three steps from door to staircase. He moved in blind obedience to the will to live, moved with that clear, fantastic conviction of being already on the threshold of death. No pulse, scarcely a breath; speechless. He could not utter a sound. Only motor muscles moving obedient to that imperative will, and that crystalline awareness of what was happening. He had a reluctant shrinking from that picture. To escape all that war could dart at him,—and to die of a cardiac failure on the night of his homecoming. No, by God! Not if he could reach those stairs!
He reached them. Felt with a torpid foot for the top step, held to the balustrade with two unfeeling hands, went down stamp, stamp, heavily, jarringly from step to step. His head swam. He suffocated. But he moved. His mind functioned. His body obeyed his will. All but his heart. That stood still, lay inert in his breast,—until he was within four steps of the bottom. Then it fluttered, feebly at first, tumultuously after a second, so that his breath came in quick gasps and long sobbing sighs.
As he realized with a rush of thankfulness that he had won against long odds, a switch clicked above, light flooded stair and landing, and Mary came hurrying after him.
"What is it, Rod? What's wrong?" she whispered.
He found words to answer while he kept on stamp, stamp, to the bottom. Those dead hands; blood congealed in them. He began to clap them together. He stamped with his feet on the hall floor like a horse in the treadmill.