Snod rose slowly. “Where are you going? What shall I tell Lil?”
“To scare the guts out of the Kerr women. Tell Lil she’s right.”
Snod left the building by the basement door and started up the service corridor toward the Medicine Clinic. Matt Higgins rolled his overcoat carefully in the crumpled copy of The Morning Call, hid it in a corner of the room and left the building by the main corridor door. Since it was three o’clock and the duty changes were at two and five, he took a chance....
By two-thirty the patients on Ward B had been bedded down for their afternoon nap. Two student nurses were on duty. Miss Kexter was off for the afternoon.
Sally Ferguson lay in her bed, her arms locked above her head, her knees crossed and making a tent of the covers. She was smoking her last cigarette, inhaling slowly and gazing from the window. She had slept all night, a loggy black sleep, and was fatigued and internally trembly. A boredom, a lassitude and a loneliness were descending.
An overpowering desire to see Cub, backed by a hundred residents and internes, if necessary ... just to watch his eyes change and slip over hers ... to see again, even at a distance, the nice way the black hair grew below his white cuffs and over the knuckles of his fingers ... to hear from his own lips that, “Doctor Bear Sterling is doing nicely, thank you” ... instead of having it smirked by prim nurses....
The ash-laden tip fell upon the covers. She flounced them and decided even if his father died, even if The Call was bombed, she had Cub forever and he had her and they both knew it, and life was going to be complete ... yet!
The door to her room breathed gently inward. A man wiggled through and closed it. For a moment he stood entirely silent, then his beady black eyes snapped and his bumpy body relaxed.
The rush of asthmatic air made Sally slide her eyes and gasp:
“Jumbo! Where did you come from?”