THE STEADFAST HEART
for? Right there. Lines and lines of it…. You did it—and Angus didn’t stop you. He wasn’t there. He….” Dave lay, propped against a stone, twisting and writhing and struggling in delirium, his head pillowed on the greasy overalls of Jake Schwartz. Doc Knipe knelt by his side striving to force a sedative between his lips—a fantastic figure of a physician in his customary warm weather costume of shirt-sleeves and a high silk hat. “Typhoid,” he snapped. “Should ’a’ been in bed a week ago, the dum fool…. Now he’s in for it…. Here, you, hang onto him while I fix something to quiet him.”
Doc Knipe prepared his hypodermic. “Jerk up his sleeve,” he rasped…. “There, guess that’ll keep him still a bit. Now what’re we goin’ to do with him? Can’t lay here on the floor a couple months.” The doctor’s tone was, as always, belligerent. He seemed to take illness as a personal affront. “He’s goin’ to need nussin’ and care, but where ’n tunket he’s goin’ to git it, I don’t know. A man that hain’t got gumption enough to git married ain’t got any business to git sick.” From choice, perhaps from policy, the doctor spoke the language of his people.
Craig thought of the little room upstairs, dark, uncomfortable, a poor place to be well in and a
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