“I know you is, an’ you goin’ to be hot! Jus’ you leave them blankets alone an’ go to sleep.”
After a long while Wayne opened his eyes again. He had been sleeping hours, he thought. He felt horribly uncomfortable and wondered what time it was. Then his gaze fell on June hunched up near the stove with Sam on his knees, and sighed. If June was still awake it couldn’t be late, after all. Presently he fell again into a restless, troubled sleep. In the corner June nodded, roused himself, looked at the recumbent form on the seat, reached across and tucked a corner of a gray blanket in and settled back in his corner. The firelight, finding its way through cracks and crevices in the stove, made streaks and splotches of light on the wall and ceiling, and one ray fell fairly on June’s face. Perhaps it was that ray of light that did the business, for presently his eyelids slowly closed——
Somewhere, afar off, a clock struck three.
[CHAPTER VIII]
WAYNE LOSES A JOB AND FINDS ONE
Wayne had the grippe, although as neither he nor June had ever had any experience of that complaint neither of them named it that. For four days he was a pretty sick boy, with fever and aches and inflamed eyes, and June was far more worried than he allowed the other to see. June had a mortal fear of “pneumony,” and there was scarcely an hour when he was at home when Wayne wasn’t required to assure him that his chest wasn’t sore and that it didn’t hurt him to breathe. Two of the four nights June got almost no sleep, only dozing for a few minutes at a time as he sat huddled in the corner by the stove. The first day of the illness he stayed at home, after walking to the nearest telephone and explaining his absence from duty to the Union Hotel. After that he took himself off each morning only because Wayne insisted, and was far from happy until he had got back again. He invested in three different varieties of patent medicine and administered them alternately in heroic doses, and one of Wayne’s chief interests was the attempt to decide which of the three was the nastiest. It was a difficult question to decide, for the last one taken always seemed the worst. June also attempted the concoction of some “yarb tea” such as he had so often seen his mother make, but while it smelled the place up in a most satisfactory manner, June was never quite certain that it contained all it should have, and distrusted it accordingly. There was one day, the second of the attack, when Wayne was in such agony with an aching head and body that June was all for finding a doctor and haling him posthaste to “Carhurst.” Wayne, however, refused to listen to the plan, declaring that he would be all right tomorrow. “Besides,” he added weakly, “you couldn’t get a doctor to come away out here, anyhow.”
“Say I couldn’? Reckon if I tell a doctor man I got to have him and show him the money right in my fist, he goin’ to come where I say!” declared June sturdily. “Jus’ you let me fetch one, please, sir, Mas’ Wayne.”
But Wayne insisted on waiting a little longer, and June rubbed the lame and achy spots and doubled the doses and, sure enough, after a most wretched night, Wayne felt better in the morning. The nights were always the worst, for, while he slept for an hour now and then during the day, at night he was always wakeful. Illness always seems worse at night, anyway, and there was no exception in Wayne’s case. Poor June was driven nearly to his wits’ end some nights. Wayne was not, I fear, a very patient patient. He had never been as sick before in all his life and he resented it now forcibly and seemed inclined to hold June in some way accountable for it. But that was only when he had really begun to get better, and June was so thankful for his recovery that he bore the other’s crankiness quite cheerfully.
All things come to an end, and one day—it happened to be a Sunday—Wayne got up for the first time and ate some real food. June had been trying to entice him with soup and gruel and similar things which Wayne unkindly termed “hog-wash” for two days with little success, but today Wayne consumed a lamb chop and two slices of toast and a cup of tea with gusto. And after it he went to sleep again and awoke in the afternoon quite himself, save for an astonishing wabbliness in his legs. The next day he was out on the “front porch” in the warm sunlight when June departed to town, and still later he walked around some, to Sam’s vociferous delight, and cooked some lunch for himself and discovered a returning interest in the garden. And the next day he reported to Mr. Callahan for work again and was curtly informed that his place had been given to someone else.