Amnesiacs -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Trials -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Take a brisk walk" after the all-night vigil, "take a brisk walk" that
late August day with its breathless depths of dusty overgrowth, its
sultry world of tapestried leaf hangings. The thing made the youthful
ones smile. Dunce looked after the retreating form, firm and crisp
in its white uniform, murmuring--"A brisk walk--at ninety-two in the
shade."
"She kids herself along pretty well, doesn't she?" demanded the
invalid; then as his weak voice went into a squeak,--"Say, how long I
got to hang here like a dry worm on the end of a fish-hook? Oh, Sard,
when does this rotten weakness end? Say, why don't you get me some dog
poison and put me out of my misery?"
There was a haunted look in the boy's eyes that tried to smile
listlessly as he pawed over his mail. "Letter from Bumpy Dodge asking
about college. Well, I guess I don't get back to college---- No, Bumpy,
old sport, I guess I do a turn in jail, what?" He looked questioningly
at his sister. "Nothing from Minga, I suppose? Well, I don't blame her;
I did get her into a mess, the newspaper rot and all. I wonder," said
Dunstan soberly, "what I was thinking of," he looked at Sard curiously,
"I wonder if I thought at all. I don't believe I did think--I just
felt, and feeling isn't the whole show, I guess. Well, Minga and I
certainly gummed the game." The figure lying trussed in a bower of
splints and bandages was silent a moment. "Gimme a cigarette, Sardine,"
then, at her denying look, "Why, haven't they lifted the ban yet? Say,
when does this surgeon Sunday-school end, anyway? You'd think those
tinkering old 'Docs' were women the way they go on. Why, in the war
they gave the chaps cigarettes in their very coffins, and me with just
a cracked rib and a little allegro adrumata medulla medusa Madonna
crackiosis--can't have a smoke."
It was not the old Dunce so much as his determined imitation of the
Dunce that had been. A young chap of nineteen cannot go through the
experience of having a man of his own age shot to death across his
knees without some changes which, in spite of modern science, we
will assume are more than chemical. With the sinking down of Terence
O'Brien's fair, curly head, his gasping, his blood sprinkled over the
car in its crazy speed, the crash, their own capture, and in his own
mortal pain seeing the fugitive lying beside him, blood pouring out
of his mouth, his eyes closing on the warm summer sunset--with this
picture, Dunstan's inner youth closed. His boy's body, badly cracked
and shaken, could be mended, made almost perfect again, but his soul
with the one great wound in it now stood up and commanded strong meat
for its sustenance. Under the law! Dunstan must now stand face to face
with law!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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