“How about it?” he went on more briskly. “How about it? Do I win?”
And at my continued silence he chuckled, lying back again on the pillow.
“I can see that I win,” he said. He pulled the sheet up over his shoulders, and stuffed the pillow more comfortably under his head. “Now that I know what the trouble is, I can go to sleep all right,” said this amazing man. He laughed softly. “I’m no nervous woman,” he went on with a touch of swagger. “Turn out the light, will you?”
He closed his eyes with the utmost unconcern.
“The whispers won’t bother me now that I know what they are,” he said casually as I moved toward the door.
Still feeling shaken, I walked slowly along the corridor. What could the man mean?
Resolving at length to take a lesson from my patient’s sang-froid, I tried to shrug the matter away as a fancy on his part, and proceeded to take care of Sonny’s needs, applying the hot-water bottle to his throat and the camphorated oil to his feet in the coolest fashion until Sonny remonstrated with a hoarse giggle.
By three o’clock things had quieted down all over the wing. The patients were either asleep or resting and the windows dark with the blackest hour of the night. Maida was sitting at the chart desk, her white-capped head bent over Eleven’s chart, and I had gone into Sonny’s room to make sure he was all right. The whole place was as quiet and hushed as a city of the dead.
I took my thermometer and shook it vigorously. And in the very act of placing it between Sonny’s lips, I lost hold on it, dropped it and whirled facing the door. For without any warning at all a scream was rising from somewhere in the wing.
It rose and swelled to the very old roofs, choked horribly at its height and ceased.