Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:
“Your father’s in Baltimore now, isn’t he, son?” he said.
“Yes, sir. He’s at Hopkins. Luke’s up there with him.”
“Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back about his being there,” said the man with the florid face.
“What’s wrong with him?” Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment, after he had absorbed this information. “Ain’t he feeling good?”
The boy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered. His father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem possible or proper for him to say this to these men. He said:
“He’s got some kind of kidney trouble, I think. He goes up there for radium treatments.”
“It’s the same thing John Rankin had,” the florid-faced man glibly interposed at this moment. “Some sort of prostate trouble, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir, that’s it,” the boy said. For some reason he felt a sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid face. The easy, glib and false assurance that his father’s “trouble” was “the same thing John Rankin had” seemed to give the disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.
“I know what it is,” the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his head in a confident manner. "It’s the same thing John Rankin had. A lot of men get it after they’re fifty. John told me he went through agony with it for ten years. Said he used to be up with it a dozen times a night. It got so he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t rest, he couldn’t do anything but walk the floor with it. It got him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking around like a dead man. Then he went up there and had that operation and he’s been a new man ever since. He looks better than he’s looked in twenty years. I was talking to him the other day and he told me he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world. He said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it—the picture of health.
“Well,” he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy, “remember me to your father when you see him. Tell him Frank Candler asked to be remembered to him.”
“Are you and him good friends?” Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after another staring
