One morning some three weeks later Stacey received a night letter from Omaha. It was addressed “Honorable Stacey Carroll” and read:

“My husband Jim is awfully sick with flu and I am afraid he is going to die. He keeps asking for you though he is out of his head and does not know what he says. Please, Captain Carroll, come if you can because then he might get well. Gertrude Burnham.”

Stacey wasted no time. He sent a telegram to say that he was starting immediately, telephoned for a lower berth on the evening train, and pulled a suitcase from a closet. But in the midst of his neat methodical packing he suddenly paused and gazed abstractedly away. It had occurred to him that perhaps if Burnham could see him as he had been in France the sick man might be more likely to recognize him and might even—who could tell?—draw a little strength from the old revived relationship of command and protectiveness. Stacey took out the things he had already packed, chose a larger bag, and put in his uniform at the bottom.

He arrived in Omaha early the next morning, drove to a hotel, unpacked his bag, put on his uniform, and took a taxi to Burnham’s address.

The taxi stopped in front of a small dilapidated wooden house in a shabby quarter surprisingly near the centre of town. Stacey descended and paid the chauffeur.

But before he had time to reach the door of the house it opened and a woman hurried out to meet him. She was thin, haggard, dishevelled, though not slovenly, with a worn face and worn eyes about which strayed limp locks of black hair, but there were faded traces of fineness in her. Stacey remembered that Burnham had always spoken of his wife with pride. She had, he often said, had a high-school education.

“Oh, Captain Carroll,” she cried, “it’s awful good of you to come, sir! I knew I oughtn’t to’ve asked you, but I didn’t know what to do!”

“Of course you ought,” Stacey returned briefly, shaking her hand.

“And you wore your uniform, too,” she added, with a pale half-smile. “That was just right. I wouldn’t have thought you’d have thought of that.”

They entered the house, in which the Burnhams occupied one-half of the second floor. Three small children, shabby and not very clean, with frightened faces, were waiting for them just inside, and stared at Stacey.

“I keep them looking better than this, Captain Carroll, when everything’s all right,” Mrs. Burnham explained apologetically, and they all climbed the stairs in silence.

As they went, Stacey reflected swiftly on a number of things,—that what life did to Burnham was very like what it did to Phil, and that a lot of criminal rubbish was being talked about the prosperous workingman. Why, thought Stacey, even his father, who was a kindly man, declared bitterly that workmen were buying silk shirts to-day and denounced them as profiteers! Well, suppose a man did earn six dollars a day for manual labor, suppose he even earned it regularly for six days in every week (which he didn’t), how much was that a year? Let’s see. Eighteen hundred and some dollars, on which, with the price of everything gone wild, he was supposed to raise a family and live in luxury. What rot! Stacey himself, who lived at home, had a car that his father had given him, and cared little for luxuries, felt pinched with two hundred dollars a month. Oh, damn money!

They reached the top of the stairs and paused before a door through which came a strange murmuring voice.

“Jim won’t know you, sir,—not now,” said Mrs. Burnham, “but if you’d be willing just to sit there a while, maybe—”

“Of course,” said Stacey. “You have a good doctor?”

“Yes, sir. At least, I guess he’s good. They don’t any of them seem much help. He’ll be here at ten o’clock.”

They went in, Stacey and Mrs. Burnham; the children were left outside the door. Burnham, flushed with fever, lay tossing and muttering on a narrow bed. Stacey looked down at him and lifted his hot hand, but there was no recognition in the man’s eyes.

“I’ll sit here,” said Stacey after a moment, drawing up a chair beside the bed.

The woman silently took another chair, and they remained so for an hour and a half, neither of them speaking, she rising at regular intervals to press a spoonful of medicine between her husband’s teeth, until the doctor arrived.

He was brusque, had keen eyes, and appeared competent. Stacey drew him aside at the conclusion of the visit.

“Any chance?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “fifty-fifty. He’s as likely to recover as not. Splendid physique! There’s nothing much I can do except to give stimulants in case of sudden collapse. We don’t know anything about flu really, you know, and this pneumonia that follows on flu. I’ve seen hundreds die of it—I was in France, too,—and hundreds get well,—both without any reason. Served under you?”

“My first sergeant. Good man,—no better! Do your best for him.”

“It’s a strong bond, isn’t it?”

Stacey nodded. “Oughtn’t he to have a nurse?”

“It would be a great deal better. He’d have more of a chance.”

“Then send one around, will you please? At my expense, of course.”

“All right,” said the doctor, shook hands with Stacey, and departed.

The conversation had taken place in the hallway outside the door. When Stacey reËntered the sick room Mrs. Burnham gazed at him wistfully.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Jim’s got a good chance. The doctor’s going to send a nurse.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she opened her mouth as though to speak, but closed it again, with only a strangled: “Thanks,” and turned her head away. After a time she got up.

“I’ll go down and cook some dinner,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, sir, if it isn’t much, won’t you? I haven’t had time to—”

“No,” he broke in, “you’re too tired to cook. Please go out and get some lunch for yourself and the children if you know of some delicatessen place,—and for me, too.” And he drew out his purse.

But at this her face colored. “No sir,” she said, with just a hint of resentment, “I couldn’t.”

He thrust a five-dollar bill upon her. “Do as I tell you,” he said imperiously. “This is no time for silly pride. Go on, and mind you get good things and plenty of them.”

She cowered beneath his sternness and went meekly. And Stacey reflected grimly that pride was a decorative handsome emotion that flourished ornamentally, a highly esteemed orchid, in luxury. It couldn’t grow well in poverty, came up sickly and scrawny,—the soil was too weak.

Half an hour later he heard her climb the stairs again and move quietly about the next room. Presently she returned to the bedroom.

“Will you go in there now, sir?” she said. “Everything’s ready for you. Here’s your change—two dollars and sixty-four cents.”

“No, no, please!” he replied. “Keep it for to-morrow.”

He wanted to insist on her eating first, but thought best not to try, so he went, without comment, through the door she indicated into another bedroom—the only other, he supposed,—that obviously also served as dining-room and parlor. Dishes were disposed neatly on a table, with sandwiches, Bologna sausage, eggs, coffee, and doughnuts.

He sat down, then looked up, listening, with a smile, and suddenly rose, crossed the room, and flung open another door. The kitchenette. And there, as he had thought, were the three children, sitting, very terrified at his discovery of them, close together on a small bench.

“Hello,” he said, “you’re out here, are you? Well, come on! Let’s eat together. Only I think we’d better do it in this room or your mother will hear us.”

“She said we was to wait and not make a noise,” observed the oldest girl in a small voice.

“Well, we won’t wait,” Stacey remarked. “There are doughnuts, you know. You come on in with me,” he said to the girl who had spoken, “on your tip-toes, and help fix the plates.”

She obeyed timidly.

“First we’ll fix one for your mother,” he whispered, and she nodded, her lips pressed together.

He and the three children ate gravely in the kitchenette. Then Stacey rose. “I’ll go back to your father now,” he said, “and send your mother out.”

“Your plate is ready for you, Mrs. Burnham. And the children have eaten,” he announced in a triumphant whisper.

She gasped, then suddenly her mouth curved prettily into a smile—the first he had seen her give. Stacey sat down again by the bedside.

Burnham seemed a little calmer now, and his incoherent muttering had ceased, but he looked very exhausted, and Stacey was relieved when about one o’clock the nurse arrived.

The three of them sat there silently all the hot afternoon, with only short intervals of release when Stacey stretched his legs in the hall or Mrs. Burnham went out to keep an eye on the children. There was no change in the sick man. The nurse said that the crisis would probably be reached next day.

At six o’clock Stacey left the house, asking the nurse to telephone him in case of a serious change. He walked back to his hotel.

He was abstracted, an isolated personality, growing more isolated with every month that passed in his life; so that now he saw little of his surroundings and glanced but carelessly both at the depressing quarter from which he had set out and at the prosperous business section he presently entered. He merely thought, idly, that the city seemed a characterless place, like all other middle-western cities. And the imposing court-house, of white marble, that he passed shortly before reaching his hotel, did not impress him. It did, indeed, occur to him once that there was a certain tensity in the air, like that which characterizes a city in boom times, but the observation, purely involuntary, did not particularly interest him. It interested him not at all when later, glancing through the front page of a local paper, he learned the cause of the tensity—trouble with the negroes, “Another Dastardly Assault!”

Early the next morning he was back at Burnham’s house. The man seemed worse, Stacey thought with a touch of real sadness,—more feverish, more restless. There was no capacity for smiling, even faintly, left in Mrs. Burnham. The nurse, cool, professional, would express no opinion; and the doctor, too, when he came, was noncommittal.

“Before to-night there ought to be a decision one way or the other,” he said to Stacey. “I’ll come again at four. Call me up earlier if necessary.”

There was nothing to do but wait, and Stacey again settled himself in a chair near the foot of the bed.

The crisis came early in the afternoon. Burnham tossed and kicked furiously, and his incoherent muttering grew louder. Suddenly he raised himself on the palms of his hands into a half-sitting posture and stared directly at Stacey—or not really at him, through him.

“By God, Captain!” he cried wildly, in a high unnatural voice, “you’ve got nerve! Might’ve been shot ... shot ... shot! What hell you care? You wouldn’t do it!” He panted. “Not you, Captain! Said I’d follow you to hell. Nerve ... nerve ... nerve....” His voice trailed away to silence, while the nurse leaned over him, pressing his shoulders down firmly.

Stacey had started at the words. They were spoken, he knew, in delirium, not to him but to a shadow vanished eleven months since, but Stacey understood them. Burnham knew, then, did he, about that Argonne attack? Good! Probably no other kind of approbation from any source would have touched Stacey, even faintly. This, for an instant, made him thrill with a fierce proud happiness. The next moment there was nothing left in his consciousness but concern for his friend.

But Burnham lay quiet now, his color less vivid, his breath coming and going easily, and the nurse looked at Stacey and Mrs. Burnham with a smile.

“I think he’ll get along all right now,” she said pleasantly.

Stacey wiped his forehead, and Mrs. Burnham, collapsing into a chair, laid her head on a table and wept softly.

“Fine!” said the doctor, when he came. “He’ll get well now. Just a question of time.”

The next morning, when Mrs. Burnham opened the door to Stacey, he observed that she was wearing a clean dress and had done her hair quite prettily.

“Then Jim’s a lot better, isn’t he?” he asked, with a smile.

She flushed. “Yes,” she said. “He slept right through the night. Only woke up once for just a minute, then went back to sleep again. Oh, I’m so glad, Captain Carroll!” Her eyes filled. “And so grateful to you, sir!”

“Oh, please!” said Stacey, embarrassed.

Late in the morning Burnham opened his eyes slowly and let them wander curiously about the room. They rested on Stacey, and a puzzled expression came into them, then, after a moment, recognition, and the man tried to raise his hand in salute.

“Where’s the devil, sir?” he asked, in a thin voice. Then he smiled. “Funny!” he said. “I thought I was in hell.” And he began to laugh weakly.

“Shut up, Burnham!” Stacey commanded sternly, “and lie still!”

“Oh, all right, Captain, all right!” Burnham returned, still laughing, and went to sleep again at once.

Stacey was rather tired in the evenings now from sitting so monotonously still all day. He resented the excitement that he felt throbbing in the streets and the nervous buzz of the groups through which he had to elbow his way in the hotel lobby. His one recreation consisted in changing to civilian clothes for dinner; for he always wore his uniform when he went to the Burnhams’. It happened that the regiment in which he had commanded a battalion had been recruited from this part of the country, so that there were perhaps twenty-five of his men living right here in Omaha, among them a first lieutenant whom he had sincerely liked. And, ignorant though he was and knew himself to be of these men’s real personalities, he was bound to each of them—worst as well as best—by a closer bond than that which held him to Philip Blair or to Marian or to Mrs. Latimer. He would have given lavishly of his money or his time—nonsense! of something real! his freedom or his strength!—to any of these men who needed it; and not in the least from a sense of duty,—inevitably, as a matter of course. Yet he had no companionable desire to see them. He made no attempt to look them up. He spent his evenings in bed, reading “War and Peace,” which in former days he had not cared for but now found singularly satisfying—more satisfying than any book by his old idol, Dostoieffsky.

Burnham’s recovery was extraordinary. On the third day after the crisis the doctor refused jovially to waste more time in visiting him—the nurse had been dismissed the day before—and told him to eat, talk and do as he pleased, short of getting up.

“I think,” observed Stacey that afternoon, “that I’ll pull out to-night on the midnight. You’re as fit as ever, Burnham.”

He was, indeed, restless and anxious to go. Here, sitting near Burnham, chatting casually of trivial things, he was strangely at peace; but an increasing turmoil that he felt in the city each evening exasperated him.

The man looked at him wistfully, then across at his wife. “Gerty,” he said, “you go out with the kids for a little while, will you? I got to talk to the Captain.”

She obeyed, but her face had flushed and her eyes were resentful.

“Now you’ve done it!” said Stacey cheerfully. “Fat lot of popularity I’ll have with Gertrude from now on!”

Burnham laughed. “Funny thing, ain’t it, Captain?” he observed. “They can’t seem to get onto it at all, women can’t. They go and get jealous, like Gerty now.”

“Can’t get onto what?”

“Why, this—this here what-do-you-call-it.”

“Relationship?”

“Uh-huh, I guess that’s the word. It ain’t got a thing to do with them.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why they don’t like it,” he concluded.

“Philosopher!” said Stacey. “Analyzing the female heart. You’ll be writing for the magazines next.”

“Sure!” Burnham grinned, then frowned. “All the same, I don’t get onto it very well myself,” he continued. “Now you’d think that I ought to be feeling all upset with gratitude to you, the way Gerty is, and worried about you wasting so much of your time and money. Well, I don’t feel that way at all. Damned if I do! I just feel friendly and pleasant and—natural-like. And of course some day I’m going to pay you back the money you spent on the nurse ’n’ doctor, but it don’t seem important, somehow, like it does to Gerty. If it was something you cared about, Captain, I’d get up now, the way I am, and work all day to get it for you, but Christ! you don’t care a damn for money!”

“Oh, shut up, Burnham!” said Stacey, laughing. “How you do run on!” Nevertheless, the man’s words were pleasant to him, and reËnforced his own strangely peaceful mood.

“Seems sort of noisy out-doors to-day,” Burnham remarked suddenly. “What’s the row, I wonder?”

And, indeed, through the window a dull and sullen murmur, that was like a deep note held steadily in an organ, did enter and penetrate the room.

“Oh,” replied Stacey quickly, “I don’t know! It’s a noisy city.”

Burnham lay silent for a long time. Then he turned his eyes slowly to Stacey. And in them and in his voice when he spoke again was apparent a timidity which his huge bulk and rough unshaven face made somehow touching.

“Captain,” he said hesitantly, “there was something I wanted to say to you, only I don’t know if I’ve got the nerve. We boys was always kind of scared of you, you know,—oh, not because you was a captain!—fat lot of respect we had for captains as captains!—but just because—oh, I dunno! And it’s kind of hard to say anything to you that’s kind of personal, as you might say. All the same, I’ll take a chance.” He rushed on with his words to get it over. “What I want to say is that some of us know all about that attack that—didn’t come off.” He paused apprehensively, but with a sigh of relief.

However, Stacey was as friendly as before. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I know you do. You let that out Wednesday in a lot of wild talk you were spouting.”

“Well, what do you know about that?” Burnham exclaimed. “And me who wouldn’t have told even Gerty! Did any one—”

“No, no, it’s all right! No one else understood. And I’m glad you know.”

“’N’ that’s why I said what I did about going with you to hell or anywhere else. I ain’t the only one, Captain. There’s Morgan and Jones and Petitvalle and Isaacs and all the rest of C Company that knows, who’d fight to go along, too. Oh, it would be a nice little family party!” And Burnham laughed gaily.

Well, Stacey had said to Phil months ago that this was the one exploit of which he was proud, but he had said so haughtily, with his heart full of bitterness. Just now his heart was calm, as though cleansed. He was almost happy. Yet he could hardly have accounted for his state of mind, even had he cared to try. It was not, certainly, that his vanity was flattered. Perhaps it was, in part, that when Stacey had related the episode to Philip Blair his defiance of the machine was first in his thoughts, while now the stress was on the human results of that defiance. Perhaps Burnham’s simple assertion of loyalty released Stacey from his obsessing perception of greed, greed everywhere.

But the noise outside had increased. Rolling waves of sound entered.

“What in hell is going on?” Burnham exclaimed. “Tell me, Captain! You know all right.”

“Well,” said Stacey doubtfully, but thinking it on the whole better not to have the invalid aggravated by unsatisfied curiosity, “there’s been a lot of race trouble here lately. Just now it seems to be mostly about some negro—name of Brown—said to have assaulted a woman. He’s shut up in the court-house jail, I believe. Sounds as though some sort of demonstration—”

But at this moment a scattered crackling sound broke out in the distance. Burnham sat up quickly, and Stacey crossed to the window and looked out.

“Some sort of demonstration?” said Burnham. “Some sort of riot! That’s shooting.”

Stacey nodded, pulled down the window sash, and came back to his chair.

Mrs. Burnham entered the room hurriedly, but, though frightened, she had not forgotten her grievance. “I suppose I can come in now,” she said, “since there’s a war or something going on.”

“Sure!” returned her husband, laughing. “It’s nothing, Gerty.”

Darkness fell while they sat there together, Mrs. Burnham soon ashamed of her pettishness and trying to think up little things she could do for Stacey, Burnham stretching his arms and legs to feel their returning strength, all three chatting about the most casual matters. A lamp sputtered alight in the street and shone in upon them.

Oddly, Stacey thought of that afternoon with Phil and Catherine in New York five years ago. He had the same sense of calm now as then.

But this sea of sound that roared dully in the distance, at times swelling for a moment so that Mrs. Burnham turned her eyes apprehensively to Stacey,—it had been absent then. Had it, though? What else was the war? Stacey thought fancifully.

“Well, I’ve really got to go now,” he remarked, and rose.

Mrs. Burnham tried stammeringly to express her gratitude, but Burnham only gripped Stacey’s hand and smiled.

“May I say good-bye to the children?” asked Stacey, and Mrs. Burnham, too, smiled at this and went in search of them.

“Now look here, Captain!” said her husband anxiously in a low voice as soon as she had left the room, “you won’t get mixed up in that mess in the streets, will you?”

Stacey shook his head. “No, no, I’ll be all right,” he replied reassuringly.

The noise outside continued.