“And how’s the First?” The colonel put this question in a whisper, as if he feared the answer. The doctor did not know. Then the silence again, and the colonel’s labored breathing, and the ticking of the nurse’s little gold watch.
“What district do you live in, Doctor?” the colonel asked later.
“I?” replied the medical man in some surprise.
“Yes.”
“I—why, I don’t know,” he said.
The colonel faintly smiled. “Where do you live, then?”
“In Drexel Boulevard.”
“That’s the Fifth,” the colonel said. “Warren carried that.”
“Did he?” The doctor looked as if he were ashamed. “We mustn’t talk any more just now.”
Foerder remained until evening, pacing the anteroom, his hands behind him, his lips twitching in his involuntary smile. Now and then he took a turn in the long, dark, softly carpeted hall, to smoke a cigarette. At times some politician would come with a scared face and inquire about the colonel, and the doctor always demanded news of the battle, before he answered the questions. The reports brought by the politicians were not encouraging, and they hurried outside again. Their visits, as the afternoon waned, became fewer. Even Mosely and Garwood had been glad of the exciting excuse offered by the First District convention in Italia Hall down Clark Street to escape from the shadowed headquarters. At six o’clock no one had been there for an hour, save some sympathetic bell-boys and porters from down-stairs, and Carroll, of course—he came every half-hour from the convention, disheveled, bathed in perspiration, his eyes burning with excitement and suspense. Foerder would not allow him to see the colonel, who lay behind the white door, his eyes half closed, too weak any longer to whisper.