"Jim's sick," said the boy briefly.
"I am sorry. I hope he is not too sick to see me."
"Naw, he'll see you. He wants to." The speaker motioned Alan to follow him to the rear of the store. Together they mounted some narrow stairs, passed through a hallway and into a bedroom, a disorderly, dingy, obviously man-kept affair. On the bed lay a large framed, exceedingly ugly looking man. His flesh was yellow and sagged loosely away from his big bones. The impression he gave was one of huge animal bulk, shriveling away in an unlovely manner, getting ready to disintegrate entirely. The man was sick undoubtedly. Possibly dying. He looked it.
The door shut with a soft click. The two men were alone.
"Hello, Jim." Alan approached the bed. "Bad as this? I am sorry." He spoke with the careless, easy friendliness he could assume when it suited him.
The man grinned, faintly, ironically. The grin did not lessen the ugliness of his face, rather accentuated it.
"It's not so bad," he drawled. "Nothing but death and what's that? I don't suffer much—not now. It's cancer, keeps gnawing away like a rat in the wall. By and by it will get up to my heart and then it's good-by Jim. I shan't care. What's life good for that a chap should cling to it like a barnacle on a rock?"
"We do though," said Alan Massey.
"Oh, yes, we do. It's the way we're made. We are always clinging to something, good or bad. Life, love, home, drink, power, money! Always something we are ready to sell our souls to get or keep. With you and me it was money. You sold your soul to me to keep money and I took it to get money."
He laughed raucously and Alan winced at the sound and cursed the morbid curiosity that had brought him to the bedside of this man who for three years past had held his own future in his dirty hand, or claimed to hold it. Alan Massey had paid, paid high for the privilege of not knowing things he did not wish to know.