Nathan went at once to the “house across the flats.” The baby was much in evidence, or its lungs were. Nathan thought it sounded like the Victrola when the needle ran off and played one horrible sound over and over.
The child looked like a worm and was hideously homely. Mrs. Richards refused to let him take it. He could see Milly “sometime to-morrow.”
He went back to the shop. Six men had “walked out cold” because Johnathan had seized upon his enforced absence to insist they load a freight car his way and in the defiance of a method Nathan and the men had spent months in perfecting.
“Huh! Father, are you?” sniffed Johnathan. “And the milk isn’t wiped off your own chin yet. A father! Fiddlesticks!”
Five years of this, incredible as it may seem, and now the box-shop had gone the way of all flesh.
Nathan slept in the dark, old Caleb and myself the only sincere friends he had on earth.
Oh, Mediocrity! What crimes against youth may be committed in thy name!
V
The evening following Nathan’s release from custody, my mother met me as I entered our home, the hour about seven-thirty.
“Nathan’s ill,” she declared. “I met the Doctor’s wife at the missionary meeting this afternoon and she told me. He ate something last night that disagreed with him and had a bad case of acute indigestion along toward morning. But the Doctor says what really ails Nat is a general nervous breakdown and collapse. You’d better go over. If there’s anything I can do, let me know. I’ll keep your supper in the fireless cooker.”