One morning he came stumping timidly into the office of the Post and purchased a few papers. These he offered for sale upon the streets with great diffidence. Crip had no difficulty in selling his papers. People stopped and bought readily the wares of this shrinking, weak-voiced youngster. His wooden leg caught the eye of hurrying passersby and the nickels rained into his hand as long as he had any papers left.
One morning Crip failed to call for his papers. The next day he did not appear, nor the next, and one of the newsboys was duly questioned as to his absence.
“Crip’s got de pewmonia,” he said.
The Post Man, albeit weighed down by numerous tribulations of others and his own, when night comes puts on his overcoat and wends his way down the bayou toward the home of Crip.
The air is chilly and full of mist, and great puddles left by the recent rains glimmer and sparkle in the electric lights. No wonder that pneumonia has laid its cold hand upon the frail and weakly Crip, living as he does in the rain-soaked shanty down on the water’s edge. The Post Man goes to inquire if he has had a doctor and if he is supplied with the necessities his condition must require. He walks down the railroad tracks and comes close upon two figures marching with uncertain stateliness in the same direction.
One of them speaks loudly, with oratorical flourish, but with an exaggerated carefulness that proclaims he is in a certain stage of intoxication. His voice is well known in the drawing-rooms and the highest social circles of Houston. His name is—well, let us call him Old Boy, for so do his admiring companions denominate him. There comes hurrying past them the form of a somberly-clad woman.
Intuitively the Post Man thinks she is of the house of Crip and accosts her with interrogatories. He gleans from her gasping brogue that a doctor has seen Crip and that he is very sick, but with proper medicines, nursing and food he will probably recover. She is now hastening to the drug store to buy—with her last dollar, she says—the medicine he must take at once.
“I will stay with him until you return,” says the Post Man, and with a fervent “Hiven bless you, sorr!” she melts away toward the lights of the city.
The house where Crip lives is on a kind of shelf on the bayou side and its approach from above must be made down a set of steep and roughly hewn steps cut into the bank by the deceased architect of the house. At the top of these stairs the two society lights stop.