I humbly beg your pardon, Madam, and thank you. That charming gesture of impatience was the one thing needful to admonish me that lectures are dull, and that the time has come to write finis. The rest of the story? Cornish—Jim—Josie—Antonia? Oh, this proneness of the business man to talk shop! Left to myself, I should have allowed their history to remain to the end of time, unresolved as to entanglements, and them unhealed as to bruises, bodily and sentimental. And, yet, those were the things which most filled our minds in the dark days after we missed connection with the Pendleton special.
In the first spasm of the crisis I was more concerned for Jim’s safety than with the long-feared monetary cataclysm. That was upon us in such power as to make us helpless; but Jim, wounded and prostrated as he was, his very life in danger, was a concrete subject of anxiety and a comfortingly promising object of care.
“If we can keep this from assuming the character of true pneumonia,” said Dr. Aylesbury, “there’s no reason why he shouldn’t recover.”
He had been unconscious and then delirious from the time when he and I had been picked up there by the railroad-dump, until we were well on our way home on Kittrick’s relief-train. At last he looked about him, and his eyes rested on Corcoran.
“Hello, Jack!” said he weakly; and as his glance took in Ole, he smiled and said: “A hellufa notion, you tank, do you? Ole, where’s Schwartz?”
Ole twisted and squirmed, but found no words.
“We couldn’t find Schwartz,” said Kittrick. “He was so cold, he went right down with the cab.”
“I see,” said Jim. “It was bitter cold!”
He said no more. I wondered at this, and almost blamed him, even in his stricken state, for not feeling the peculiar poignancy of our regret for the loss of Schwartz. And then, his face being turned away, I peeped over to see if he slept, and saw where his tears had dropped silently on the piled-up cushions of his couch.