CONLON, the strong, lay sick unto death with fever. The Water Commissioners sent champagne to express their sympathy. It was an unforced impulse of feeling.

But Conlon knew nothing of it. His lips were white, his cheeks sunken; his eyes glared and wandered; he muttered, and clutched with his big fingers at nothing visible.

The doctor worked all day to force a perspiration. At six o'clock he said: “I'm done. Send for the priest.”

When Kelly and Simon Harding came, Father Ryan and the doctor were going down the steps.

“'Tis a solemn duty ye have, Kelly,” said the priest, “to watch the last moments of a dying man, now made ready for his end.”

“Ah, not Conlon! He'll not give up, not him,” cried Kelly, “the shtrong man wid the will in him!”

“An' what's the sthrength of man in the hands of his Creathor?” said the priest, turning to Harding, oratorically.

“I don' know,” said Harding, calmly. “Do you?”

“'Tis naught!”

Kelly murmured submissively.

“Kind of monarchical institution, ain't it, what Conlon's run up against?” Harding remarked. “Give him a fair show in a caucus, an' he'd win, sure.”

“He'll die if he don't sweat,” said the doctor, wiping his forehead. “It's hot enough.” Conlon lay muttering and glaring at the ceiling. The big knuckles of his hands stood out like rope-knots. His wife nodded to Kelly and Harding, and went out. She was a good-looking woman, large, massive, muscular. Kelly looked after her, rubbing his short nose and blinking his watery eyes. He was small, with stooping shoulders, affectionate eyes, wavering knees. He had followed Conlon, the strong, and served him many years. Admiration of Conlon was a strenuous business in which to be engaged.

“Ah!” he said, “his wife ten year, an' me his inchimate friend.”

It was ten by the clock. The subsiding noise of the city came up over housetops and vacant lots. The windows of the sickroom looked off the verge of a bluff; one saw the lights of the little city below, the lights of the stars above, and the hot black night between.

Kelly and Harding sat down by a window, facing each other. The lamplight was dim. A screen shaded it from the bed, where Conlon muttered and cried out faintly, intermittently, as though in conversation with some one who was present only to himself. His voice was like the ghost or shadow of a voice, not a whisper, but strained of all resonance. One might fancy him standing on the bank of the deadly river and talking across to some one beyond the fog, and fancy that the voices would so creep through the fog stealthily, not leaping distances like earthly sounds, but struggling slowly through nameless obstruction.

Kelly rubbed his hands before the fire.

“I was his inchimate friend.”

Harding said: “Are you going to talk like a blanked idiot all night, or leave off maybe about twelve?”

“I know ye for a hard man, too, Simmy,” said Kelly, pathetically; “an' 'tis the nathur of men, for an Irishman is betther for blow-in' off his shteam, be it the wrath or the sorrow of him, an' the Yankee is betther for bottlin' it up.”

“Uses it for driving his engine mostly.”

“So. But Conlon—”

“Conlon,” said Harding slowly, “that's so. He had steam to drive with, and steam to blow with, and plenty left over to toot his whistle and scald his fingers and ache in his belly. Expanding that there figure, he carried suction after him like the 1:40 express, he did.”

“'Tis thrue.” Kelly leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I mind me when I first saw him I hadn't seen him before, unless so be when he was puttin' the wather-main through the sand-hills up the river an' bossin' a gang o' men with a fog-horn voice till they didn't own their souls, an' they didn't have any, what's more, the dirty Polocks. But he come into me shop one day, an' did I want the job o' plumbin' the court-house?

“'Have ye the court-house in your pocket?' says I, jokin'.

“'I have,' says he, onexpected, 'an' any plumbin' that's done for the court-house is done in the prisint risidence of the same.'

“An' I looks up, an' 'O me God!' I says to meself, ''tis a man!' wid the black eyebrows of him, an' the shoulders an' the legs of him. An' he took me into the shwale of his wake from that day to this. But I niver thought to see him die.”

“That's so. You been his heeler straight through. I don't know but I like your saying so. But I don't see the how. Why, look here; when I bid for the old water contract he comes and offers to sell it to me, sort of personal asset. I don't know how. By the unbroke faces of the other Water Commissioners he didn't use his pile-driving fist to persuade 'em, and what I paid him was no more'n comfortable for himself. How'd he fetch it? How'd he do those things? Why, look here, Kelly, ain't he bullied you? Ain't you done dirty jobs for him, and small thanks?”

“I have that.”

Kelly's hands trembled. He was bowed down and thoughtful, but not angry. “Suppose I ask you what for?”

“Suppose ye do. Suppose I don' know. Maybe he was born to be king over me. Maybe he wasn't. But I know he was a mastherful man, an' he's dyin' here, an' me blood's sour an' me bones sad wid thinkin' of it. Don' throuble me, Simmy.”

Harding leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, where the lamp made a nebulous circle of light.

“Why, that's so,” he said at last, in conclusion of some unmentioned train of thought. “Why, I got a pup at home, and his affection ain't measured by the bones he's had, nor the licks he's had, not either of 'em.”

Kelly was deep in a reverie.

“Nor it ain't measured by my virtues. Look here, now; I don' see what his measure is.”

“Hey?” Kelly roused himself.

“Oh, I was just thinking.”

Harding thought he had known other men who had had in some degree a magnetic power that seemed to consist in mere stormy energy of initiative. They were like strong drink to weaker men. It was more physical than mental. Conlon was to Kelly a stimulant, then an appetite. And Conlon was a bad lot. Fellows that had heeled for him were mostly either wrecked or dead now. Why, there was a chap named Patterson that used to be decent till he struck Conlon, when he went pretty low; and Nora Reimer drowned herself on account of Patterson, when he got himself shot in a row at some shanty up the railroad. The last had seemed a good enough riddance. But Nora went off her head and jumped in the new reservoir. Harding remembered it the more from being one of the Water Company. They had had to empty the reservoir, which was expensive. And there were others. A black, blustering sort of beast, Conlon. He had more steam than was natural. Harding wondered vaguely at Kelly, who was spelling out the doctor's directions from a piece of paper.

“A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle. 'Tis no tin-course dinner wid the champagne an' entries he's givin' Conlon the night. Hey? A powdher an' five dhrops from the short bottle.”

Harding's mind wandered on among memories of the little city below, an intricate, irregular history, full of incidents, stories that were never finished or dribbled off anywhere, black spots that he knew of in white lives, white spots in dark lives. He did not happen to know any white spots on Conlon.

“Course if a man ain't in politics for his health he ain't in it for the health of the community, either, and that's all right. And if he opens the morning by clumping Mrs. Conlon on the head, why, she clumps him back more or less, and that's all right.” Then, if he went down-town and lied here and there ingeniously in the way of business, and came home at night pretty drunk, but no more than was popular with his constituency, why, Conlon's life was some cluttered, but never dull. Still, Harding's own ways being quieter and less cluttered, he felt that if Conlon were going off naturally now, it was not, on the whole, a bad idea. It would conduce to quietness. It would perhaps be a pity if anything interfered.

The clock in a distant steeple struck twelve, a dull, unechoing sound.

“Simmy,” said Kelly, pointing with his thumb, “what do he be sayin', talkin'—talkin' like one end of a tiliphone?”

They both turned toward the bed and listened.

“Telephone! Likely there's a party at the other end, then. Where's the other end?”

“I don' know,” whispered Kelly. “But I have this in me head, for ye know, when the priest has done his last, 'tis sure he's dhropped his man at the front door of wherever he's goin', wid a letther of inthroduction in his hatband. An' while the man was waitin' for the same to be read an' him certified a thrue corpse, if he had a kettleful of boilin' impatience in himself like Tom Conlon, wouldn't he be passin' the time o' day through the keyhole wid his friends be-yant?”

“'Tain't a telephone, then? It's a keyhole, hey?”

“Tiliphone or keyhole, he'd be talkin' through it, Conlon would, do ye mind?”

Harding looked with some interest. Conlon muttered, and stopped, and muttered again. Harding rose and walked to the bed. Kelly followed tremulously.

“Listen, will ye?” said Kelly, suddenly leaning down.

“I don' know,” said Harding, with an instinct of hesitation. “I don' know as it's a square game. Maybe he's talkin' of things that ain't healthy to mention. Maybe he's plugged somebody some time, or broke a bank—ain't any more'n likely. What of it?”

“Listen, will ye?”

“Don' squat on a man when he's down, Kelly.”

“'Sh!”

“Hold Tom's hand. Wait for Tom,” babbled the ghostly voice, a thin, distant sound.

“What'd he say? What'd he say?” Kelly was white and trembling.

Harding stood up and rubbed his chin reflectively. He did not seem to himself to make it out. He brought a chair, sat down, and leaned close to Conlon to study the matter.

“What's the heart-scald, mother?” babbled Conlon. “Where'd ye get it from? Me! Wirra!”

“'Tis spheakin' to ghosteses he is, Simmy, ye take me worrd.”

“Come off! He's harking back when he was a kid.”

Kelly shook his head solemnly.

“He's spheakin' to ghosteses.”

“What's that, mother? Arra! I'm sick, mother. What for? I don' see. Where'm I goin'?'

“You got me,” muttered Harding. “I don' know.”

“Tom'll be good. It's main dark. Hold Tom's hand.”

Kelly was on his knees, saying prayers at terrific speed.

“Hear to him!” he stopped to whisper. “Ghosteses! Ora pro nobis—”

“Tom ain't afraid. Naw, he ain't afraid.”

Harding went back to his window. The air was heavy and motionless, the stars a little dim. He could see the dark line of the river with an occasional glint upon it, and the outline of the hills beyond.

The little city had drawn a robe of innocent obscurity over it. Only a malicious sparkle gleamed here and there. He thought he knew that city inside and out, from end to end. He had lived in it, dealt with it, loved it, cheated it, helped to build it, shared its fortunes. Who knew it better than he? But every now and then it surprised with some hidden detail or some impulse of civic emotion. And Kelly and Conlon, surely he knew them, as men may know men. But he never had thought to see Conlon as to-night. It was odd. But there was some fact in the social constitution, in human nature, at the basis of all the outward oddities of each.

“Maybe when a man's gettin' down to his reckonin' it's needful to show up what he's got at the bottom. Then he begins to peel off layers of himself like an onion, and 'less there ain't anything to him but layers, by and by he comes to something that resembles a sort of aboriginal boy, which is mostly askin' questions and bein' surprised.”

Maybe there was more boyishness in Conlon than in most men. Come to think of it, there was. Conlon's leadership was ever of the maybe-you-think-I-can't-lick-you order; and men followed him, admitting that he could, in admiration and simplicity. You might see the same thing in the public-school yard. Maybe that was the reason. The sins of Conlon were not sophisticated.

The low, irregular murmur from the bed, the heavy heat of the night, made Harding drowsy. Kelly repeating the formula of his prayers, a kind of incantation against ghosts, Conlon with his gaunt face in the shadow and his big hands on the sheet clutching at nothing visible, both faded away, and Harding fell asleep.

He woke with a start. Kelly was dancing about the bed idiotically.

“He's shweatin'!” he gabbled. “He's shweatin'! He'll be well—Conlon.”

It made Harding think of the “pup,” and how he would dance about him, when he went home, in the crude expression of joy. Conlon's face was damp. He muttered no more. They piled the blankets on him till the perspiration stood out in drops. Conlon breathed softly and slept. Kelly babbled gently, “Conlon! Conlon!”

Harding went back to the window and rubbed his eyes sleepily.

“Kind of too bad, after all that trouble to get him peeled.”

The morning was breaking, solemn, noiseless, with lifted banners and wide pageantries, over river and city.

Harding yawned.

“It's one on Father Ryan, anyway. That's a good thing. Blamed old windbag!”

Kelly murmured ecstatically, “Conlon will get well—Conlon!”