“Uncle Barclay, sweetheart. But—oh, God!—he’s gone now.” (Norris’s love had been the truer, deeper affection; she’d known it for some time.) “Run along back to beddy, darling. Mother will come up presently.”
She had a feeling of suffocation as the boy hugged her impetuously and padded softly upstairs. As she listened to his careful progress another sound, a faint rustling from behind the table made her heart stop beating for a second. With trembling limbs she leaned across the table and looked. The dead man lay in a slightly different position; there was a barely perceptible movement of the chest. She reached breathlessly for the telephone.
“Give me Bryant 9702, please!... Yes! Doctor Marvin’s house! Quickly!”
MOSES COMES TO BURNING BUSH
By W. T. Larned
Melting snow in the spring and cloud-bursting rains in the fall poured their floods from the foothills, through the arroyo, and were licked up and lost in the arid lands below. The Mormons came, dammed the outlet in the ridge—and, lo! there was a lake. Thus Burning Bush, Cortez County, New Mexico, was created, on the edge of green alfalfa fields. And because there was coal the railroad ran a spur to collect it; and because there was a railroad cowmen came in with their beeves and sheepmen with their mutton and wool.
In the terms of a now-discarded census classification, the “souls” composing Cortez County’s population were officially designated as “white men, Mormons, and Mexicans.” Also, there were Indians, who could not vote and did not count. Finally, there was Ah Sin.
Ah Sin was no common coolie. He had been, indeed, the prize pupil at the Chinese mission on the Coast. He could speak and read English, do sums with his head in American arithmetic, and recite whole passages from the Bible. With a cash capital accumulated in ten years of dogged domestic service, he had come to Burning Bush and opened a general store. It was the only one in town, and it paid.
Ah Sin—smiling, courteous, honest—worked fifteen hours a day, and put his profits in the bank. In time he would go back to China a rich man. Then Moses came.
That Moses should come to Burning Bush was inevitable. Burning Bush had begun to boom. The odour of its prosperity had been wafted afar, and the nostrils of the Israelite knew it.