“Belonged to an old collie of ours,” he said heavily. “Milkman ran over him and killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the driver with his own whip.”
“Poor old Bobby Burns!” he said. “We'd raised him from a pup. Got him in a grape-basket.”
Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ultimately wretched.
For the present, at least, K.'s revealed identity was safe. Hospitals keep their secrets well. And it is doubtful if the Street would have been greatly concerned even had it known. It had never heard of Edwardes, of the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes operation. Its medical knowledge comprised the two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner. When, as would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson's injury, it would be more concerned with his chances of recovery than with the manner of it. That was as it should be.
But Joe's affair with Sidney had been the talk of the neighborhood. If the boy disappeared, a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people had seen him at Schwitter's and would know him again.
At first it seemed as if the boy had frustrated him. He had not been home all night. Christine, waylaying K. in the little hall, told him that. “Mrs. Drummond was here,” she said. “She is almost frantic. She says Joe has not been home all night. She says he looks up to you, and she thought if you could find him and would talk to him--”
“Joe was with me last night. We had supper at the White Springs Hotel. Tell Mrs. Drummond he was in good spirits, and that she's not to worry. I feel sure she will hear from him to-day. Something went wrong with his car, perhaps, after he left me.”
He bathed and shaved hurriedly. Katie brought his coffee to his room, and he drank it standing. He was working out a theory about the boy. Beyond Schwitter's the highroad stretched, broad and inviting, across the State. Either he would have gone that way, his little car eating up the miles all that night, or--K. would not formulate his fear of what might have happened, even to himself.