K Part 61

"Aren't you going to give me some of that?"

"What for?"

"I--I want some clothes."

The very drunk have the intuition sometimes of savages or brute beasts.

"You lie."

"I want it for Johnny Rosenfeld."

He thrust it back into his pocket, but his hand retained its grasp of it.

"That's it," he complained. "Don't lemme be happy for a minute! Throw it all up to me!"

"You give me that for the Rosenfeld boy, and I'll go out with you."

"If I give you all that, I won't have any money to go out with!"

But his eyes were wavering. She could see victory.

"Take off enough for the evening."

But he drew himself up.

"I'm no piker," he said largely. "Whole hog or nothing. Take it."

He held it out to her, and from another pocket produced the eighty dollars, in crushed and wrinkled notes.

"It's my lucky day," he said thickly. "Plenty more where this came from.

Do anything for you. Give it to the little devil. I--" He yawned. "G.o.d, this place is hot!"

His head dropped back on his chair; he propped his sagging legs on a stool. She knew him--knew that he would sleep almost all night.

She would have to make up something to tell the other girls; but no matter--she could attend to that later.

She had never had a thousand dollars in her hands before. It seemed smaller than that amount. Perhaps he had lied to her. She paused, in pinning on her hat, to count the bills. It was all there.

CHAPTER XXVII

K. spent all of the evening of that day with Wilson. He was not to go for Joe until eleven o'clock. The injured man's vitality was standing him in good stead. He had asked for Sidney and she was at his bedside.

Dr. Ed had gone.

"I'm going, Max. The office is full, they tell me," he said, bending over the bed. "I'll come in later, and if they'll make me a shakedown, I'll stay with you to-night."

The answer was faint, broken but distinct. "Get some sleep...I've been a poor stick...try to do better--" His roving eyes fell on the dog collar on the stand. He smiled, "Good old Bob!" he said, and put his hand over Dr. Ed's, as it lay on the bed.

K. found Sidney in the room, not sitting, but standing by the window.

The sick man was dozing. One shaded light burned in a far corner. She turned slowly and met his eyes. It seemed to K. that she looked at him as if she had never really seen him before, and he was right.

Readjustments are always difficult.

Sidney was trying to reconcile the K. she had known so well with this new K., no longer obscure, although still shabby, whose height had suddenly become presence, whose quiet was the quiet of infinite power.

She was suddenly shy of him, as he stood looking down at her. He saw the gleam of her engagement ring on her finger. It seemed almost defiant. As though she had meant by wearing it to emphasize her belief in her lover.

They did not speak beyond their greeting, until he had gone over the record. Then:--

"We can't talk here. I want to talk to you, K."

He led the way into the corridor. It was very dim. Far away was the night nurse's desk, with its lamp, its annunciator, its pile of records.

The pa.s.sage floor reflected the light on glistening boards.

"I have been thinking until I am almost crazy, K. And now I know how it happened. It was Joe."

"The princ.i.p.al thing is, not how it happened, but that he is going to get well, Sidney."

She stood looking down, twisting her ring around her finger.

"Is Joe in any danger?"

"We are going to get him away to-night. He wants to go to Cuba. He'll get off safely, I think."

"WE are going to get him away! YOU are, you mean. You shoulder all our troubles, K., as if they were your own."

"I?" He was genuinely surprised. "Oh, I see. You mean--but my part in getting Joe off is practically nothing. As a matter of fact, Schwitter has put up the money. My total capital in the world, after paying the taxicab to-day, is seven dollars."

"The taxicab?"

"By Jove, I was forgetting! Best news you ever heard of! Tillie married and has a baby--all in twenty-four hours! Boy--they named it Le Moyne.

Squalled like a maniac when the water went on its head. I--I took Mrs.

McKee out in a hired machine. That's what happened to my capital." He grinned sheepishly. "She said she would have to go in her toque. I had awful qualms. I thought it was a wrapper."

"You, of course," she said. "You find Max and save him--don't look like that! You did, didn't you? And you get Joe away, borrowing money to send him. And as if that isn't enough, when you ought to have been getting some sleep, you are out taking a friend to Tillie, and being G.o.dfather to the baby."

He looked uncomfortable, almost guilty.

"I had a day off. I--"

"When I look back and remember how all these months I've been talking about service, and you said nothing at all, and all the time you were living what I preached--I'm so ashamed, K."

He would not allow that. It distressed him. She saw that, and tried to smile.

"When does Joe go?"

"To-night. I'm to take him across the country to the railroad. I was wondering--"