"Here, let me hold it fer you," he said a minute later, when Garwood had picked up his overcoat, heavy with its soaking in the rain. Down in Chris Steisfloss's saloon as they stood at the bar, and just as Garwood was ordering a drink, Rankin pushed him aside and said: "No, you wait. Now Chris," he went on, addressing the stolid man in the white apron, "you take a whisky glass an' fill it with beer, mostly foam--same as all your beers--an' then put a spoonful o' that quinine on the foam." The man did as Rankin bade him, and when the white powder was floating on the sparkling foam, Rankin gave it to Garwood and said: "Now you swallow that, quick; you can't taste it. Then you can have your whisky." XVI When Garwood turned into the gate of his home that night a weird feeling of detachment came over him. As he looked around the familiar yard every black bush, every tree tossing its thinned boughs hopelessly in the wind that blew the rain in sheets against the front of the house, seemed to belong to some past toward which he yearned, as an exiled identity. Half way to the low stoop, the light in the sitting room moved, the shadow of the drenched syringa bush under the window wheeled across the yard, and then the light disappeared, leaving the window black. He knew his mother had heard his step, for in another moment the hall transom leaped bright, the door opened, a great golden beam streamed out on the walk and he saw his mother's gaunt figure standing in the doorway. She held the lamp over her head and bent forward, shading her old eyes to peer out into the darkness, and in another instant he was beside her, and she was slamming the door behind him, shutting out the rain and the night. "My, you're drenched to the skin, Jerome!" she exclaimed. "Run right up and change your clothes!" "Whew!" he said, "what a night!" He whisked out his handkerchief and wiped his face, wet with the rain and moist with perspiration, for the whisky and the rapid walk had heated him. "And how hoarse you are!" the mother said, wheeling his big body about and pushing him toward the stairs. "You've got your death of cold! Haven't you been doing anything for it?" "I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago." "Yes, I smelt it on your breath, Jerome," his mother said rather severely. She was "temperance," as she would have put it. Garwood risked an uneasy laugh. He had never been able, grown man that he was, to overcome what he considered a boyish fear of his mother's knowing he drank. "But don't stand there!" the mother said. "Go right upstairs and take those wet duds off this minute! Have you had any supper?" "No; is supper over?" he replied. "Yes, I just got the table cleared and the dishes washed. But I'll get you something, by the time you're into dry clothes." "Oh, don't bother to get anything, mother," he said. She gave the lamp to her son, and as he went up the stairs he heard her raking up the coals in the kitchen stove.