He caught his breath and stumbled. In the room below Barrington stirred.
"Quiet, Don!" warned Kenny, sensing the tears of heartbreak that quivered on his lashes. He read the boy's hot heart with a renewed shock of understanding; they were namelessly akin.
Cold sunlight lay upon the cluster of shacks. The wind that bore the rumble of the quarry upward was sharp and gusty and laden with stinging particles of grit. A group of Italian women, chattering and gesticulating in, apparently, unheeded unison, lingered near the shack where Brian lay, agonizingly conscious of nerve and body, irritably weary of the inevitable doctor at his bedside. Kenny charged them with a look of indignation and shooed them to retreat in maledictory Italian.
Kenny caught her hands, protesting, praising, thanking in a breath, and Don, regarding them with a look of frank and bitter comprehension, moved off toward the window with all a boy's disgust. In the span of a day he had learned and suffered over-much. Grogan's world of drills and noise down there was heartless and insistent. . . . It went on and on, puffing, drilling, sorting rattling stone. Up here in the shack was the lunacy of heart-things apart from him. The thought filled him with jealous anger. And upstairs-- He wheeled and glared, fighting down the agony in his throat. Kenny was moving toward the stairway.
"Mr. O'Neill," barked Don, "Dr. Barrington particularly said you--you were not to go up there. He said that Brian's got to have the--the quiet kind around--"
Joan's quick stare of reproach brought the color to his face.
"I--I beg your pardon, Mr. O'Neill," he blurted. "He said--he said he must have quiet."
"It's all right," said Kenny ruefully. "Quite all right. You've been up?" he added quietly.
Don dug his toe into the floor and a hot flush suffused his forehead.
"To tell you the truth," he said with some annoyance, "Doctor Barrington wouldn't let me in. He seems to be able to manage a good many things at once."
"We must find still another cot," said Joan, pouring coffee at the stove.
So in the dark hours of nervous unrestraint that marked for Don and Kenny that lagging period of terror and suspense, Joan stepped to the helm and steered. And there was need of steering.