“Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?”
“No! Dr. Arrowsmith.”
“Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you went right near his place. You yoost turn back one mile and turn to the right by the brick schoolhouse, and it’s about forty rods up the road—the house with a cement silo. Somebody sick by Henry’s?”
“Yuh—yuh—girl’s got croup—thanks—”
“Yoost keep to the right. You can’t miss it.”
Probably no one who has listened to the dire “you can’t miss it” has ever failed to miss it.
Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping-block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the schoolhouse instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surprising fall of silence, cows were to be heard feeding, and a white horse, startled in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at him. He had to arouse the house with wild squawkings of his horn, and an irate farmer who bellowed, “Who’s there? I’ve got a shotgun!” sent him back to the country road.
It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when he rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep, against the lamplight, a stooped man who called, “The Doctor? This is Novak.”
He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white plastered walls and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a straight chair, a chromo of St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring shininess of the apartment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A heavy-shouldered woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet red face, Novak urged:
“Don’t cry now; he’s here!” And to Martin: “The little one is pretty bad but we done all we could for her. Last night and to-night we steam her throat, and we put her here in our own bedroom!”