Then Jastrow the Granite Jaw began to whimper, half-moans engendered by weakness. "Put me out of my misery. Shoot!"
"Jas—Jas—ain't that just an awful way for you to talk? Ain't that just terrible to say to your poor old Big Tent?"
She smoothed out his pillow, and drew out his cot on ready casters, closer toward the open door.
"See, Jas—honest, can you ever get enough of how beautiful it is? When I was a kid on my pap's farm out there, eighty miles beyond the ridge, instead of playing with the kids that used to torment me because I was a heavy, I just used to lay out evenings like this on a hay-rack or something and look and look and look. There's something about this soft kind of scenery that a person that's born in it never gets tired of. Why, I've exhibited out in California right under the nose of the highest kind of mountains; but gimme the little scenery every time."
"I'm a lump—that's what I am. Nine months of laying. I'm a lump—on a woman, too."
"Why, Jas, Teenie's proud to have you on—on her. 'Ain't we got plans for each other after—you get well? Why, half the time I'm just in heaven over that. That's why, honey, if only you won't let yourself get setbacks! That's all the doctor says is between you and getting well. That's all that keeps you down, Jas, you scaring me and making me go against the doctor's orders. Last week your eating that steak—that drink you stole—ain't you ashamed to have got out of bed that way and broke the lock? You—you mustn't ever again, Jas, make me go against the doctor."
"I gets crazy. Crazy with laying."
"Just think, Jas; here I've drew out my last six hundred, ready to make first payment down on the place and us all ready to begin to farm it. Ain't that worth holding yourself in for? It wouldn't be right, Jas; it would be something terrible if we had to break into that six hundred for medicine and doctors. I don't know what to make of you, honey, all those months so quiet and behaved on your back, and, now that you're getting well, the—the old liquor-thirst setting in. We never will get our start that way, Jas. We got plans, if you don't hinder your poor Teenie. The doctor told me, honey—honest, he did—one of them spells—from liquor could—could take you off just like that. Even getting well the way you are!"
"I'm a lump; that's what I am."
"You ain't, Jas; you're just everything in the world."