“What do I want to know about the Executive Committee?” grumbled McPhillip angrily, recovering his breath. “I don’t want to hear anything about executive committees or revolutionary organizations, me curse on the lot o’ them. I want to hear about me father an’ mother. What about ’em, Gypo?” Gypo expanded his thick under lip and stared at McPhillip with distended eyes. His eyes seemed to hold an expression of sadness in their dim recesses, but it was hard to say. The face was so crude and strong that the expression that might be termed sadness in another face was mere wonder in his. For the first time he had noticed the pallor of McPhillip’s face, the hectic flush, the fits of coughing, the jerky movements and the evident terror in the eyes that used to be so fearless. “Frankie,” cried Gypo in his deep, slow, passionless voice, “yer sick. Man alive, ye look as if ye were dyin’.” McPhillip started and looked about him hurriedly as if he expected to see death there behind his back waiting to pounce upon him. “Have a bite,” continued Gypo, “’twill warm ye up.” At the same time he himself began to eat again fiercely, like a great strong animal, tackling the solitary meal of its day. The large red hands with just stumps of fingers held the knife and fork so ponderously that those frail instruments seemed to run the danger of being crushed, like some costly thing picked up on the tip of an elephant’s trunk. But McPhillip did not follow the invitation. He looked angrily at the food for several seconds with wrinkled forehead, as if he were trying to remember what it was and what it was for, and then he spoke again. “I know I’m dyin’, Gypo, an’ that’s why I came in. I got the consumption.” Gypo started. He was struck at that moment by an insane and monstrous idea. “I came in to get some money from me mother. An’ I wanted to see her before I die. Good God, it was awful, Gypo, out there on them hills all the winter, with me gun in me hand night an’ day, sleeping in holes on the mountains, with the winds blowin’ about me all night, screechin’ like a pack o’ devils, an’ every blast o’ them winds spoke with a man’s voice, an’ I lyin’ there listenin’ to them. Good God——” Again he began to cough and he had to stop. Gypo was not listening to him. He had not heard a word. A monstrous idea had prowled into his head, like an uncouth beast straying from a wilderness into a civilized place where little children are alone. He did not hear McPhillip’s words or his coughing, although the monstrous idea was in relation to McPhillip. “So I said to mesel’, that I might as well chance me arm be comin’ into town as lyin’ out there, starvin’ to death with the cold an’ hunger an’ this cough. So I came along here to see ye, Gyp, first, so as to get a bead on what’s doin’. Have they got a guard on the house?”