26
P.tfRTIS.tfN REVIEW
dark for me to see. I waited, idly wondering, never dreaming that it was
my name being shouted into the heavy, heat-laden air.
"Dan!" the voice cried. "Dan! Oh. Dan!"
"Who's there? Laurie?"
"Yes. Dan?" It was a question now. I ran back to meet him.
caught him as he fell forward, and seated him in the middle of the road.
Tears of pain blurred his eyes. His breath came in convulsive, shuddering
gasps.
"For Christ sake, what is it, Laurie?" The kid suddenly became
awfully important to me.
"Naomi," he said in a voice he was unable to control.
"Sick?"
He didn't have to nod his head. "You gotta go for a doc."
I looked at his leg. "You came all the way on that?" I remembered
the twist of pain every time he moved.
"She can't breathe. You gotta hurry!"
"Sure," I said. I pulled him to the side of the road.
"About a mile down. You can telephone." I stumbled away, feeling
for the dark road under me, falling over stones to arise and continue on.
Half a mile or so away I made out the light of a house. At last, when a
dozen times it seemed I must stop to rest my aching lungs, I climbed the
steps and kuocked feverishly at the door. In twenty minutes the doc picked
me up, and not long afterwards, Laurie. The doc was a reserved person
with tight lips and bushy eyebrows. He drove a four-year-old roadster.
It was not difficult to gather that often as not his patients paid for services
with appreciation as with cash.
"Why didn't your folks call me yesterday?" he asked Laurie.
"They didn't think she was doin' bad."
"How's your leg?" The doc peered over the steering-wheel as he
manipulated a curve.
"All right," said Laurie.
"Do you think you can run a mile on a leg just a week out of its
cast?"
"I thought it was a sprain," I put in.
"Broken," the doc said shortly. "Why didn't your mother or dad
come, Laurie?"
"Dad's with Jenny. Mom went after Doc Luffner."
The doc passed a nervous hand over his eyes, as though trying to rub
something gruesome away. "Jenny's the cow," he said. He might have
been talking to himself. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Arriving,
we jumped out and entered the house.
In the kitchen, Laurir. took us
to the bed. A little girl lay in the center of it, a girl far too small to lie
alone in so big a bed. Her face had been washed clean. The golden curls
