“What do you mean?” says I, suddenly struck by the fact that he was acting unusually downcast.
“Prepare yourself for some bad news, kid.”
“Have we lost the thirty-two dollars, too?” I squeaked.
“Worse than that.”
He wasn’t joking. I saw that plainly enough. In fact, he seemed to be downright worried. I never had seen him that way before. So I got worried, too. But to all of my eager questions he shook his head. He’d tell me the tale of woe in the morning, he said.
During the night the hall light outside of our bedroom was switched on, and sitting up in bed, blinking, I saw Doc Leland waddle past the door, jiggling something in a glass. He had been called to the house, I learned, to see Mother, who, having gotten a pain in her stomach in the middle of the night, had hysterically jumped to the conclusion that she, too, had been poisoned. But all she had was a touch of indigestion.
Hearing me talking with Dad in the hall, Doc waddled out of the sick room to inquire how my stomach pains were. I was all right, I said.
Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling went the ’phone in the lower hall.
“It’s for you, Doc,” Dad presently called up the stairs.
“Yes,” Doc wheezed into the machine when he got to it. “This is Leland. What’s that? Who? Oh!... Old Mr. Weckler. Yes, I’ll be right over. Now, don’t let yourself get flustered, Miz Clayton. Jest keep cool an’ do the best you can for him till I get there. You won’t have to wait many seconds.”