For a moment delight leaped from his eyes. He threw out his hand; then he looked at her darkly, his expression altered to one of fear and misgiving.
“All right,” he said finally.
“Well, I’ll pay you later,” said Emma, and every word she spoke cut like a whip, her voice was so shrill with contemptuous anger.
She was a young girl, and had hoped he would not take the money; partly because she didn’t wish to believe that he could be mean enough to take it from her, when he knew that he was the last person the Swede would give it to, had he any longer the power to give.
Her lips shrank away from her teeth in contemptuous, writhing smiles when she thought of it.
She scarcely knew how to array herself for the doctor’s visit. She wanted to impress him with a sense of her fitness to nurse the patient. She had had visions of Jarlsen’s departure in an ambulance for some city hospital, where a uniformed woman would hear his groans and heed them for hire only.
Quarry knew nothing of the doctor’s advent. Emma understood that he would talk about it, and that her enemies would say she must be sure of Jarlsen’s death when she dared let loose a first-class pill-man on him.
Then, besides, the Englishman was unreasonable and iterative, like many Englishmen; and she knew how he would search his mind for ways to tell her that Jarlsen was as good as dead already. “I ought to pay him right away, or he’ll do a little of his fancy talkin’, maybe.”
Black went to the station in a funeral carriage, which was the more imposing as there were but four in Soot City. (Casually—he paid toll on the turnpike for the eight horses that drew these vehicles, and they were always taxed as “pleasure teams.” Again casually—he saw no joke in this, even when the mourners received legacies.) He wore a red tie with his black, professionally sombre clothes, and this he did as he would not imply Jarlsen’s death to the doctor, in case the physician should be standing on the platform and should see him before he could get speech of him. Black employed his imagination in this sort of futile arrangement of improbable circumstance.
On the doctor’s arrival they drove directly to the Buttes. They alighted at the Bridge and saw thence to Emma’s doorway, where Quarry was standing. He looked as though he had had rum in his tea, and as if even that had not reconciled him to existence.