“I’m going up to town, Julie. Can I fetch you something? An orange, maybe? Or something from the drug store?”
Julie’s head on the pillow moved a negative. “She says no, thanks,” Steve answered for her, shortly. It was as though both laboured under a strain. The three in the doorway sensed it. Elly shrugged her shoulders, though whether from pique or indifference it was hard to say. Doc still stood puzzled, bewildered. Schultzy half turned away. “S’long’s you’re all right by to-night,” he said cheerfully.
“Says she won’t be,” Doc put in, lowering his voice.
“Won’t be!” repeated Schultzy, almost shrilly. “Why, she ain’t sick, is she! I mean, sick!”
Schultzy sent his voice shrilling from Julie’s little bedroom doorway across the bare stage, up the aisles of the empty auditorium, so that it penetrated the box office at the far end of the boat, where Andy, at the ticket window, was just about to be relieved by Parthy.
“Heh, Cap! Cap! Come here. Julie’s sick. Julie’s too sick to go on. Says she’s too sick to . . .”
“Here,” said Andy, summarily, to Parthy; and left her in charge of business. Down the aisle with the light quick step that was almost a scamper; up the stage at a bound. “Best advance sale we’ve had since we started out. We never played this town before. License was too high. But here it is, not eleven o’clock, and half the house gone already.” He peered into the darkened room.
From its soft fur nest in the old sealskin muff the marmoset poked its tragic mask and whimpered like a sick baby. This morning there was a strange resemblance between the pinched and pathetic face on the pillow and that of the little sombre-eyed monkey.
By now there was quite a little crowd about Julie’s door. Mis’ Means had joined them and could be heard murmuring about mustard plasters and a good hot something or other. Andy entered the little room with the freedom of an old friend. He looked sharply down at the face on the pillow. The keen eyes plunged deep into the tortured eyes that stared piteously up at him. Something he saw there caused him to reach out with one brown paw, none too immaculate, and pat that other slim brown hand clutching the coverlet so tensely. “Why, Jule, what’s—— Say, s’pose you folks clear out and let me and Jule and Steve here talk things over quiet. Nobody ain’t going to get well with this mob scene you’re putting on. Scat!” Andy could distinguish between mental and physical anguish.
They shifted—Doc, Elly, Schultzy, Mis’ Means, Catchem the torpid. Another moment and they would have moved reluctantly away. But Parthy, torn between her duty at the ticket window and her feminine curiosity as to the cause of the commotion at Julie’s door became, suddenly, all woman. Besides—demon statistician that she was—she suddenly had remembered a curious coincidence in connection with this sudden illness of Julie’s. She slammed down the ticket window, banged the box-office door, sailed down the aisle. As she approached Doc was saying for the dozenth time: