“Company? Good Lord, not the parson!”
“No, me. If you are willing to sign for two, I could bring my supper up with yours.”
“And not eat alone! By Jehoshaphat! Give me that slip quick.”
They had not only a good supper, they had a noisy one. The coal magnate roared over Sheila’s descriptions of some of the bath treatments and their victims. In the midst of one particularly noisy explosion he suddenly stopped and looked accusingly at her. “Why don’t you stop me? Don’t you know doctor’s orders? Had ’em dinged into my head until I could say ’em backwards: no exertion, no excitement, avoid all undue movement, keep quiet. Darn it all! As if I won’t have to keep quiet long enough! Well—why don’t you repeat those fool orders and keep me quiet?”
Sheila looked at him with a pair of steady gray eyes. “Do you know, Mr. Brandle, it isn’t a half-bad way to go out of this world—to go laughing.”
The mammoth man beamed. He looked for all the world like the full moon suddenly grown beatific. “And I’d just about made up my mind that I’d never find a blamed soul who would feel that way about it. Shake again, boss.”
After the baseball news and a fair start in the thriller, he indulged further in past grievances. “Hadn’t any more’n settled it for sure I was done for than the parson came and the nurse took to looking mournful. Lord Almighty! ain’t it bad enough to be carted off in a hearse once without folks putting you in beforehand? That’s not my notion of dying. I lived pleasant and cheerful, and by the Lord Harry, I don’t see why I can’t die that way! And look-a-here, boss, I don’t want any of that repenting stuff. I don’t need no puling parson to tell me I’m a sinner. Any idiot couldn’t look at me without guessing that much. Say!” He leaned forward with sudden earnestness. “Take a good look at me yourself. See any halo or angel trappings about me?”
Sheila laughed. “I’m afraid not. What you really ought to have—what I miss about you—is the pipe, and the bowl, and the fiddlers three.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Don’t you remember? It’s an old nursery rhyme; probably you heard it hundreds of times when you were a little boy: