"Didn't de medicine de doctah giv' yo' do yo' any good, Lucian?"
"Oh, that bitter t'ing? Good wha'! Oi feel like Oi could cut off this bleddy old han'—"
"It still hurtin' yo, Lucian?"
"Cuttin' me like a knife."
After they came and got him, Gerald began to feel things ever so much more keenly. His vision, too, grew less dim. But a pallor fell on things. In the morning he went to the cesspool to whistle to the canary while the Cholo girl washed it. But as he approached she fled in terror screaming "No, no, don't touch—go 'way—yo' no good—no clean—me no like yo' no mo'." The little boy, the seven o'clock one, refused to let him come near him. "No, no," he also cried, "me mama no like—" None of the old gang, who'd been willing to elude or defy the pacos and foregather down in the alley came any more. And he didn't go to the shop, either. It was so dark and silent over there. Only Baldy looked on—all the other men, one by one, had gone to other places to work. Dust grew high, thick. Spiders spun webs on the very frame of the door.
But he went oftener to the Sixth Street Mission, he and Sarah. The folks there weren't fickle,—firm, solid, lasting. His mother had become one of them. He was one of them now. He'd go on Thursday evenings to prayer meetings. The evenings were long and hot. He would go to sleep in the midst of some drowsy exhaustless prayer. All would be silent. Hours of silence to God. Then they'd rise, slowly, back-crackingly, and he'd be left kneeling, snoring. He would be immune to pinches, nudges, murmurs. They'd be useless, he would be fast asleep. His mother'd pinch him, quietly, but he'd be as stiff as a log till the service was over.
All in black—veil, hat, gloves, shoes, dress.
At Sixth and Bolivar they took one of those modest subdued coaches, not adorned by any wig-powdered Jamaican Pretty Socks, and bade the driver take them to the city hospital.