CHAPTER VIII
Did You Have at Pleasant Trip?
Home at Last—Too much Tropics—The Hold-up—Explaining about It at Home, per Telephone, at the Hospital, at the Office—The Time of My Life—An Exhausting Office Hour—Easier to Stay at Home—A Formulated Answer—Its Nauseating Repetition—Talking It over with Another Victim.
I arrived at home late in the afternoon tired out mentally by six weeks of discomfort and change of habits, and weakened physically by bodily inactivity and continuous tropical heat. Even the enjoyment of the medical meetings was associated with loss of sleep and overwork of the digestive organs, and did nothing to rest the mind or invigorate the body. I was in that excitable state of mind that usually accompanies an impoverished state of blood in active people. And when my wife asked me if I had had a pleasant trip I had to go into considerable unpleasant detail to enable her to ask me why I went.
By the time I had divested myself of the dust and dilapidation of travel, my son, who was as large as I, but not as old, came home and startled me with the information that he had been held up by two footpads at eleven o’clock the night before on the corner of Drexel Boulevard and Forty-sixth Street.
“How dared you?” I exclaimed. “And within half a block of home. How did you do it?”
“Oh, it was easy enough. I ran up against the muzzle of a pistol and they did the rest.”
“But you should not have done it—you are too young. I am two and a half times as old as you, and I haven’t done it yet. I never ran up to two footpads on a deserted boulevard at 11 P. M. One should always reserve such experiences for the future. Don’t you know that it’s dangerous to get frightened in that way?”
“Oh, I wasn’t frightened. They were frightened. They were in such haste to run away that they only took my carfare and pocketbook.”
“So they took your carfare, your last nickel. It was a mean trick. They ought to have been shot.”