OW you feelin', son?"
"Thirsty, dad."
The answer came without a particle of expression in a weary little voice.
"But doc says ye mustn't drink often, son," answered the man, gently. "I dastn't let ye drink yet. Now shet your eyes an' see if ye can't ketch a little nap."
The man who was bending over the bed laid his hand gently on the sick child's forehead. The child did not move or reply. Its face was worn and shrunken to its little bones; its great blue eyes protruded in a way that made one feel that sleep never visited them, and that, nevertheless, they saw nothing.
"Well, Jim," had said a friend, cheeringly, who had come up to see how Landers's child was getting along, and whose attention was at once fixed by those eyes, "I guess 'tain't so bad. They ain't a tear 'ithin five feet of him."
"No, nur a smile either," Landers had answered, hopelessly.
And now Landers sat down and gazed on the apathetic face, as he had been wont to do of late, with mournful fascination.
"Yes, it's bad, bad," he murmured. "He's goin' the same way his pore ma did, the very same way."
To be sure, the doctor had not given up hope, which was kind of him, as he never expected to be paid for his services. Not that there was a more honest man in the town than Landers. But the mill had been closed now for two months on account of hard times, and there was no present prospect of its being reopened. Most of Landers's savings had gone to meet the expenses caused by his wife's illness. She, too, had had typhoid fever; she had died two weeks before, and had been buried with little ostentation. Landers was an undemonstrative, earnest sort of a man, and, moreover, had the serious condition of his only child to think about. He was obliged, perhaps, to neglect the dead for the living.
For the last week he and the child had been subsisting on credit, which, Landers could not help feeling, was only another name for charity. The child had been failing under the régime of economy which Landers tried to introduce. And the doctor now said that it could pull through only if it had good nursing and the proper things to eat. The proper things to eat! Landers inquired what they were, and his heart sank as the delicacies were named over. Once more he went through that unproductive, harsh reasoning to which he had hardened himself. All the money came from the mill; now that the mill was closed people must soon begin to buy altogether on credit, but the stores could not go on indefinitely selling on credit. The end was near.
With this ruthless fact confronting him, he had gone out, day after day, in search of work, while, in the meantime, a neighbor, Mrs. Lennan, watched over the child. Each day his search had been equally vain; he knew beforehand that it would be. Men were standing idle on the corners and growing riotous through lack of food and work. Yet on this afternoon, when Mrs. Lennan came up to sit with the child, he went out as usual.
He made his ordinary unsuccessful round. As he was passing a group of
idlers, who were sitting in front of the grocery, one of the men, who had a newspaper, called out to him.
"I'd like to git into somethin' like this, wouldn't you, Landers?" said the man. Landers took the newspaper and read, in a half-hearted way, how somebody somewhere with a little trouble, though without risk, had saved a railroad train from being wrecked, and had received on the spot a purse of over a hundred dollars.
"No train ever come near bein' wrecked roun' here," said the man, complainingly. "Queer how some fellers git all the luck."
"Luck ain't fur me," said Landers, quietly. "The only way I could ever git anything was by work. I can't git nothin' there now."
He walked away when the men began to discuss the advantages of socialism. He knew that they meant nothing practical, and that they were merely amusing themselves. He could not amuse himself; his whole mind was constantly with his child. As he walked home, looking idly down at the puffs of dust that shot out from beneath his feet, he felt utterly discouraged.
"I guess we both of us might's well jus' lay on our backs till our noses is covered," he said, despairingly.
Then, suddenly, when he reached the foot of the stairway that led up between two walls to the sick-room, he smote his thigh, and exclaimed:
"I won't give up. I'm a-goin' up to argue this thing out with God."