Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/49

 hand that had smitten him upon the ear but yesterday.

Malachi Judson needed not to have the doctor's verdict told to him. He knew within himself; hence this expression now of gray despair.

George, awed by this look growing upon his father's face, slipped out to join his mother bowed in the semi-darkness and facing all at once a world of semi-darkness. The doctors had gone away. Mrs. Flannigan watched the patient within.

"Ma!" the boy asked, crowding close and whispering, while he buried his face in her ginghamed arm. "What's—what's the matter with Pa?"

The boy knew, of course, that his father had fallen from the scaffold on which he worked; he had heard the men reciting that; but this question probed deeper. He felt a shudder shake the wiry and toil-hardened, but to him always soft and tender, frame against which he leaned.

"It's—it's Pa's back!" answered the mother, her voice a broken whisper, her words vague and indefinite as if she somehow lessened the calamity by not defining it.

But the boy's mind was intent to know the worst—the worst that all this gloom on every