“The two of yez are jealous.” Patsy lowered his voice to a mock whisper and confided to the chief and Sheila, “They know they’ll have to be buyin’ a good pair o’ shoes an’ throwin’ the odd away, while I’ll be sayin’ enough from the shoes I’ll never have to be buyin’ to keep mysel’ in cigars for the rest o’ my life.”
“But Patsy’s wondtherin’ can ye lay the ghost, miss?” Timothy Brennan, who had lost the “cream of his face,” repeated the question Larry had asked a half-hour before. The rest of the ward tittered expectantly.
“Let me see—” The Irish blood in her steadied the nurse’s hands, while she drew her lips into quizzical solemnity and winked at Culmullen over her shoulder. “I always thought it was restlessness that sent ghosts walking. Maybe these have come back, looking for their boots.”
The titter broke into a roar of delight. “Thrue for ye!” shouted Parley-voo Flynn, pounding the arm of Jamie’s chair with his one fist. “All ye’ve got to do, Patsy, is to be puttin’ your boots beside your chair onct more, an’ them legs will scrooch comfortably into them an’ never haunt ye again. The lass is right, isn’t she, Jamie?”
Eleven pairs of eyes and an odd one shifted apprehensively from the lad who was being dressed to the lad in the wheel-chair, and the eyes all showed varying degrees of trouble, uncertainty, and sorrow. They had a way of searching Jamie out in this fashion many times a day, while he sat very still, with eyes bandaged and lips that never flinched but never broke to a smile.
Larry shook a hairy fist at Parley-voo and answered the question himself:
“Of course she’s right! Isn’t she always? An’ who but a heathen would be doubtin’ the manners of a ghost?”
“Aye, but where will I be gettin’ the boots?” Patsy made a sour grimace. “Me own purty ones had Christian burial somewhere back in that tremendous mud-puddle. Would any gentleman, now, still havin’ two good legs, give me the loan of his boots for one night? Size eleven, if I don’t disremember.”
“That’s Teig’s number. Lend him yours, Teig, like a good lad, or we’ll never be rid o’ them ghosts.” Mat O’Shaughnessy, at the other end of the line, fairly shook with the depth of his wail.
Teig Magee chuckled. He had lost an inch or so of back and was waiting the glad day when they could mend it with an inch or so of shin-bone; in the mean time he was paralyzed. “Say, Docthor, would ye mind reachin’ undther my pillow an’ fetchin’ them out for me? The lads have a way of forgettin’ my hands are temporarily engaged. Thank ye. Ye can have them, Patsy, but ye’ll have to go bail your ghosts won’t up an’ thramp off wi’ them entirely.”