Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for him. His patient did

not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas

office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to

reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of

the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that

he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ultimately wretched.

For the present, at least, K.'s revealed identity was safe. Hospitals keep

their secrets well. And it is doubtful if the Street would have been

greatly concerned even had it known. It had never heard of Edwardes, of

the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes operation. Its medical knowledge

comprised the two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner. When, as

would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson's injury, it would be more

concerned with his chances of recovery than with the manner of it. That

was as it should be.

But Joe's affair with Sidney had been the talk of the neighborhood. If the

boy disappeared, a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people had seen him

at Schwitter's and would know him again.

To save Joe, then, was K.'s first care.

At first it seemed as if the boy had frustrated him. He had not been home

all night. Christine, waylaying K. in the little hall, told him that.

"Mrs. Drummond was here," she said. "She is almost frantic. She says Joe

has not been home all night. She says he looks up to you, and she thought

if you could find him and would talk to him--"

"Joe was with me last night. We had supper at the White Springs Hotel.

Tell Mrs. Drummond he was in good spirits, and that she's not to worry. I

feel sure she will hear from him to-day. Something went wrong with his car,

perhaps, after he left me."

He bathed and shaved hurriedly. Katie brought his coffee to his room, and

he drank it standing. He was working out a theory about the boy. Beyond

Schwitter's the highroad stretched, broad and inviting, across the State.

Either he would have gone that way, his little car eating up the miles all

that night, or--K. would not formulate his fear of what might have

happened, even to himself.

As he went down the Street, he saw Mrs. McKee in her doorway, with a little

knot of people around her. The Street was getting the night's news.

He rented a car at a local garage, and drove himself out into the country.

He was not minded to have any eyes on him that day. He went to Schwitter's

first. Schwitter himself was not in sight. Bill was scrubbing the porch,

and a farmhand was gathering bottles from the grass into a box. The dead

lanterns swung in the morning air, and from back on the hill came the

staccato sounds of a reaping-machine.




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