"I guess that's all right, an' you're the party," he remarked, "but it ain't signed."
"What do you mean?" said Margaret in alarm. "It certainly bears the health officer's name. I saw it myself."
"Oh, yes, that's all right, but that ain't enough—business is business, you see," he added, with maudlin solemnity. "You've got to sign it yourself, kind of receipt the bill, you see."
He fumbled in his pocket for a pencil, produced the rump thereof, spread the letter upon his knee, and began writing on the back of it. It was like an internal surgical operation, for his tongue protruded as he wrote, marking his progress by a series of serpentine writhings that suggested inward pain.
"There, that'll do," he said, when he emerged. "You sign that."
Margaret took the paper and tried to read what he had written. But, unfamiliar with hieroglyphics, his handiwork was lost upon her.
"I cannot read it," she said presently; "the light is very bad."
"That's so—besides it's too infernal cold to read—I'm awful cold. I wisht that cove in there'd get a move on him, an' get better. He's got a snap. Some one sent him a bottle of milk to-day, too," he concluded, with a solemn wink, the tongue again appearing on the scene to bear internal witness—"but I forgot—I'll read them words to you myself," which he proceeded to do, swaying gently, for the spirit of rhetoric was within him.
"This is it," he began, "'I'm the party what's meant to nurse the man what's got the smallpox, an' I got in because I wanted to'—that's all right, ain't it? Now you sign that, an' if you die, that'll protect me after you're dead. And I'll sign it too, and if I die, it'll protect you after I'm dead, see? And if we both die, it'll protect the officer after we're both dead, see? And if he dies, then we'll all be protected, because we'll all be dead, see? You keep the paper, and I'll keep the pencil, and we'll both keep our job, see? Gee whittaker! Ain't it cold! I wisht they'd send some more milk."
Impatient for a release, Margaret signed the document. After its author had made another picturesque pilgrimage to the gas lamp and back again, the signature was fervently commended, with signs of increasing emotion; he returned the letter to her—and she passed on into the house at which none but love or death would have asked for bed and board.