“Quarantine——”
Nevin nodded. “There’s extra attention to a ship like this—they’ll have to see that running wound of yours for instance——”
“Not if you don’t report it——”
The Doctor’s lower jaw reached down, and to the right, finding the walnut. “You wouldn’t even read Duke Fallows’ story before you wrote yours. A man can’t lie in his own work——”
“You’ve been so good,” Morning said huskily. “I begin to expect miracles——”
“You can get messages—telegrams, letters—ashore.... And then it may only take a couple of hours. There isn’t any contagion here that I know of.”
Morning first read Fallows’ letter to Noyes, editor Western States. It told of the story accompanying—but more of the bearer. Laughing, loving-hearted, eloquent—Fallows was all through it, and fine gifts of the man’s thinking. There was suggestion to Noyes to use Morning’s story and get it across simultaneously in New York. “The boy has never yet, so far as I can see, found time to arrange a decent payment for his work. Please observe that unless some one, equally as capable, gets into Port Arthur, Morning’s story will be the biggest feature of the war in a newspaper way. I’m going on to Europe on the Ploughman story. Let Morning do the big battle—I’ll begin to crackle later.”
And then Morning read the story.... His voice trailed up finally from the shadows of lower berth. “It’s good,” he said to the Doctor after midnight.
“It’s dam’ good. It’s better than mine.... He was alive with it—I mean with the Ploughman. It’s the way he did it. He tried to get it across before we separated. He told me from every angle—told Lowenkampf—told them all at the station at Yentai. None of us could see.... He was crazed about it—that we couldn’t see. We were all choked with blood and death that night. He said Kuropatkin and the others would see that the Ploughman was right—if they had a sense of humor. Such density to humor, he called the sin against the Holy Ghost——”
After they had talked many minutes, Morning broke the seal to his own letter and learned why he had been barred from the earlier Japanese armies.