“HE’S in a bad way with pneumonia,” Paddock explained as he met Wayne at the door. “He crept in here this morning before daylight with a high fever and I put him to bed and got a nurse for him. He’s been out of his head this afternoon and he has asked for you repeatedly. It is kind of you to come. Miss Morley came to help with the cooking class and she’s with him now, to relieve the nurse for an hour. Will you come up?”
Joe lay on Paddock’s own bed. The room was darkened and out of the shadows Jean rose to meet them.
“He’s asleep now, but he has been asking for you. He said he had something he wanted to say to you.”
“I will wait,” said Wayne.
He talked with Paddock a few minutes in the hall; there was little question of Joe’s recovery, Paddock said, but both lungs were affected and his temperature soared high. There were many sick in the town, and many unemployed required help. Paddock’s smile had never been so sad but he wore the air of a man of affairs and the joy of his work was in his dark, homely face.
“Make yourself at home. If you can stay a little while it would please the boy, if he should know you.”
The sick man’s harsh breathing alone disturbed the quiet of the room. Wayne sat near the door, and it was some time before the figure on the bed and Jean’s outline beyond, her hand resting lightly on the sick man’s wrist, became clear to him. The ticking of a watch on the table at Jean’s side reached Wayne fitfully; and once when she bent down to see the time her head was caught in the lamp’s glow, and the purity of her profile and her sweet, womanly solicitude touched him. He thought of her rather than of the stricken man who lay between them.
Not since those dark days long ago when his mother lay ill in her familiar chamber had he looked upon sickness. He recalled those days now—the shielded lamp, the gloom, the silence, the waiting. And then he recurred to his interview with Joe in the garage. That had been a day of events, surely! And much had happened since. He experienced a pang of guilt at his neglect of Joe, who had made the long and toilsome journey to Ironstead to find refuge with Paddock. Life, clearly, was a mixed business, an ill-rehearsed play, where no one knew his lines and where the exits and entrances were all haphazard.
The sick man stirred and tossed restlessly. Jean was at once alert, bending over him anxiously. Abruptly he began to speak, the words harsh and indistinct, breaking from him in little moans; but the sense of what he said as Wayne caught it was this:
“He can’t have you, Jean. He’s my friend, but he can’t take you away from me.... He saw your picture in my room, but he doesn’t know about us.... Don’t you be scared; I’m not goin’ to hurt you. I won’t follow you any more.... I want to go back to the hills where we came from, Jean. I want to see Golden Bridge and the place where we played when we were kids. I want to see the men with black faces comin’ out of the ground.... He’s the best friend I ever had but he can’t have you.... You go on and draw pictures of the breaker boys and the dirty Dago babies. I’ll keep away from you.... Don’t you call strikes on me, Mr. Umpire! I tell you my left arm’s all right. I’m pitchin’ the game of my life; over the plate, every one of ’em. All right, give him his base: you’re rotten, you’re rotten, I say.”