Mrs. Trescott came several times a day to inquire as to Mr. Elkins’s welfare; but Josie not at all. Antonia’s carriage stopped often at the door; and somebody stood always at the telephone, answering the stream of questions. But when, on that third evening, it became known that the last “battle in the west” had gone against us, that all our great Round Table was dissolved, and that Jim’s was a sinking and not a rising sun, public interest suddenly fell off. And the poor fellow whose word but yesterday might have stood against the world, now lay there fighting for very life, and few so poor to do him reverence. I had been so proud of his splendid and dominant strength that this, I think, was the thing that brought the bitterness of failure most keenly home to me. I could not feel satisfied with Josie. There were good reasons why she might have refused to choose between Jim and the man who had ruined him, while there was danger of her choice itself becoming the occasion of war between them. But that was over now, and Cornish was victorious. Gradually the fear grew upon me that we had rated Josie’s womanhood higher than she herself held it, and that Cornish was to win her also. He had that magnetism which so attracted her as a girl, but that I had believed incapable of holding her as a woman. And now he had wealth, and Jim was poor, and the whole world stood with its back to us, and Josie held aloof. I was afraid he would speak of it, every time he tried to talk.
That night when the evening papers came out with all their plenitude of bad news (for we had pleased Watson by dying on the evening papers’ time), it was a dark moment for us. Jim lay silent and unmoving, as if all his ebullient energy had gone forever. The physician omitted the dressing of his wound, because, he said, he feared the patient was not strong enough to bear it: and this, as well as the strange semi-stupor of the sufferer, frightened me. Jim had said little, and most of his words had been of the trivial things of the sick-room. Only once did he refer to the great affairs in which we had been for so long engrossed.
“What day is this?” he asked.
“Friday,” said I, “the twenty-first.”
“By this time,” said he feebly, “we must be pretty well shot to rags.”
“Never mind about that,” said I, holding his hands in mine. “Never mind, Jim!”
“Some of those gophers,” said he, after a while, “used to learn to ... rub their noses ... in the dirt ... and always stick their heads up—outside the snare!”
“Yes,” said I, “I remember. Go to sleep, old man!”
I thought him delirious, and he knew and resented it; being evidently convinced that he had just made a wise remark. It touched me to hear him, even in his extremity, return to those boyhood days when we trapped and hunted and fished together. He saw my pitying look.
“I’m all right,” said he; but he said no more.