"That was what I was thinking over in my mind while Mis' Martin Lacy said good night to us and rushed off to catch her train for the City, hoping she had made us see some light. That was what I was still going over when Mis' Sykes called me to help with the refreshments. And then, just as I started out to the kitchen, the outside door that was part open was pushed in and somebody come in the room. It was Emerel Daniel, in calico and no hat. And as soon as we see her face, everybody stopped talking and stared. She was white as the table-cloth and shaking. "'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'won't one of you come down to the house? Otie's worse--I donno what it is. I donno what to do to take care of him.' "She broke down, poor, nervous little thing, and sort of swallowed her whole throat. And Mis' Toplady and we all rushed right over to her. "'Why, Emerel,' Mis' Toplady says, 'I thought Otie was getting ever so much better. Is it the real typhoid, do you s'pose?' she ask' her. "Emerel looked over to me. 'Isn't it?' she says. And then I spoke right up with all there is to me. "'Yes, sir,' I says, 'it is the real typhoid. And if you want to know what's giving it to him, ladies and gentlemen, ask the common council that's setting over there by the wall. Dr. Heron says that Black Hollow, that's a sink for the whole town, give it to him, and that nothing else did--piled full of diseases right in back of Emerel's house. And if you want to know who's responsible for his dying if he dies,' I says right out, 'look over in the same direction to the men that wouldn't vote to fill in the Black Hollow with sand because they needed the money so bad for paving up half the county swamp.' "It was most as still in the room as when Timothy had said 'prostitute.' All but me. I went right on--nothing could of kept me still then. "'Us ladies,' I says, 'has tried for two years to get the Council to fill in that hole. We've said and said what would happen to some of us, what with our pumps so near the place, and what with flies from it visiting our dinner-table dishes, sociable and continual. What did you say to us? You said women hadn't no idee of town finances. Mebbe we ain't--mebbe we ain't. But we have got some idea of town humanity, if I do say it, that share in it. And this poor little boy has gone to work and proved it.' "With that, Emerel, who had been holding in--her that's afraid even to ask for starch if you forget to give it to her--she broke right down and leaned her head on her arm on the clock shelf:-- "'Oh,' she says, 'all the years I been giving him his victuals and his bath and sewing his clothes up, I never meant it to come to this--for no reason. If Otie dies, I guess he needn't of--that's the worst. He needn't of.'