"All right boys, come along and name yer drinks."
Tom had a very indistinct memory of what followed. He remembered having a handful of silver, and of trying to put it in his pocket.
Once when the boys were standing in front of the bar at his invitation he noticed a miserable, hungry looking man, who drank greedily. It was Skinner. Then someone took him by the arm and said something about his having enough, and Tom felt himself being led across a floor that rose and fell strangely, to a black lounge that tried to slide away from him and then came back suddenly and hit him.
The wind raged and howled with increasing violence around the granary where Arthur lay tossing upon his hard bed. It seized the door and rattled it in wanton playfulness, as if to deceive the sick man with the hope that a friend's hand was on the latch, and then raced blustering and screaming down to the meadows below. The fanning mill and piles of grain bags made fantastic shadows on the wall in the lantern's dim light, and seemed to his distorted fancy like dark and terrible spectres waiting to spring upon him.
Pearl knelt down beside him, tenderly bathing his burning face.
"Why do you do all this for me, Pearl?" he asked slowly, his voice coming thick and painfully.
She changed the cloth on his head before replying.
"Oh, I keep thinkin' it might be Teddy or Jimmy or maybe wee Danny," she replied gently, "and besides, there's Thursa."
The young man opened his eyes and smiled bravely.
"Yes, there's Thursa," he said simply.