Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/143

 with chills and fever, the pulse beating in his ears, his brain swimming, his mind numb with exhaustion and staggering in the whirl of delirium.

There was the small trickle of blood forming in a pool on the linoleum of the vestibule floor, and he stared at it dully, wondering what she would say when he told her that he had killed his cousin. . . . His father, on the bench, put on a black "mortar-board" solemnly, and having condemned him to death, borrowed a match from the grinning jury and struck a light for his pipe. . . . From the barred window of his prison, he saw his mother in her invalid chair, with little Mary in her arms and Frankie at her side, going to the execution, his father wheeling her, a picnic-basket at her feet; and she looked up at him with a face of grief that set him screaming and sobbing frantically and beating on the floor with his fists. Someone knocked on the door of his cell, and called "Donnie? Donnie?" in Nannie's voice. There was a light in the doorway. He sat up in bed and saw Mrs. Stewart, his boarding-house mistress, with a lamp in her hand, all in white, a shawl over her shoulders, standing at the foot of the bed. He said weakly, "I'm sick."

The rest was a hurry of women in the room—someone taking off his shoes, a steaming glass at his lips, a mustard plaster on his chest—and in the wan light of the morning a man with a black beard saying: "Nothing much yet. A touch of pneumonia, perhaps. Bring me a glass of water. . . . One of these every half-hour for the next four hours. Two of the others