American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
I liked to a-jumped loose when he said that, but he twisted my coat
collar and dug his thumbs into my neck and I seen they wasn't no use
pulling back. If a guy that's knocking around mixes up with one of the
solid citizens the magistrate's going to give him the worst of it on
principle. I ain't no hobo and never was, and never traveled much with
none of them professional bums, but there has been times I had hard work
making some people believe it. I seen I couldn't jerk away and I seen I
couldn't fight and so I went along. He rung the door bell, and I says:
“Smallpox ain't no inducement to me, doc.”
“No?” says he. And the door opened, and in we went. The girl that opened
it, she drew back when she seen me.
“Tell Professor Booth that Dr. Wilkins wants to see him,” says the doc,
not letting loose of me.
And we stood there saying nothing till the per-fessor come in, which he
did slow and absent-minded. When he seen me he stopped and took off a
pair of thick glasses that was split in two like a mended show case, so
he could see me better, and he says:
“What is that you have there, Dr. Wilkins?”
“A guest for you,” says Dr. Wilkins, grinning all over himself. “I
caught him leaving the house, and you being under quarantine and me
being secretary to the board of health, I'll have to ask you to keep him
here until we can get Miss Margery on her feet again,” he says. Or they
was words to that effect, as the lawyers asks you.
“Dear me,” says Perfessor Booth, kind o' helplesslike.
And he put his glasses on and took them off again, and come up close and
looked at me like I was one of them amphimissourian specimens in a free
museum. “Dear me,” he says, looking worrieder and worrieder all the
time. And then he went to the foot of the stairs and pipes out in a
voice that was so flat-chested and bleached-out it would a-looked just
like him if you could a-saw it--“Estelle,” he says, “O Estelle!”
I thinks the perfessor is one of them folks that can maybe do a lot
of high-class thinking, but has got to have some one tell 'em what the
answer is. But I doped him out wrong as I seen later on.
Estelle, she come down stairs looking like she was the perfessor's big
brother. I found out later she was his old maid sister. She wasn't no
spring chicken, Estelle wasn't, and they was a continuous grin on her
face. I figgered it must of froze there years and years ago. They was
a kid about ten or eleven years old come along down with her, that had
hair down to its shoulders and didn't look like it knowed whether it was
a girl or a boy. Miss Estelle, she looks me over in a way that makes me
shiver, while the doctor and the per-fessor jaws about whose fault it is
the smallpox sign ain't been hung out. And when she was done listening
she says to the perfessor: “You had better go back to your laboratory.”
And the perfessor he went along out, and the doctor with him.
“What are you going to do with him, Aunt Estelle?” the kid asks her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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