he’s gone!” she said desperately. “Can’t you understand that?… They can’t save him!… Nothing can save him!… Papa’s a dead man now!”
George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:
“Who went to Baltimore with him?”
“Why, Luke’s up there,” the mother said. “We had a letter from him yesterday—said Mr. Gant looks much better already—eats well, you know, has a good appetite—and Luke says he’s in good spirits. Now—”
“Oh, Mama, for heaven’s sake!” the daughter cried. “What’s the use of talking that way?… He’s not getting any better…. Papa’s a sick man—dying—good God! Can no one ever get that into their heads!” she burst out furiously. “Am I the only one that realizes how sick he is?”
“No, now I was only sayin’,” the mother began hastily—“Well, as I say, then,” she went on, “Luke’s up there with him—and Gene’s on his way there now—he’s goin’to stop off there tomorrow on his way up north to school.”
“Gene!” cried George Pentland in a high, hearty, bantering tone, turning to address the boy directly for the first time. “What’s all this I hear about you, son?” He clasped his muscular hand around the boy’s arm in a friendly but powerful grip. “Ain’t one college enough for you, boy?” he drawled, becoming deliberately ungrammatical and speaking good-naturedly but with a trace of the mockery which the wastrel and ne’er-do-well sometimes feels towards people who have had the energy and application required for steady or concentrated effort. “Are you one of those fellers who needs two or three colleges to hold him down?”
The boy flushed, grinned uncertainly, and said nothing.
“Why, son,” drawled George in his hearty, friendly and yet bantering tone, in which a note of malice was evident, “you’ll be gettin’so educated an’high-brow here before long that you won’t be able to talk to the rest of us at all…. You’ll be floatin’around there so far up in the clouds that you won’t even see a roughneck like me, much less talk to him”—As he went on with this kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish scholar.
“—Where’s he goin’to this time, Aunt Eliza?” he said, turning to her questioningly, but still holding the boy’s arm in his strong grip “Where’s he headin’for now?”
