Slowly, cautiously, with his head swimming lightly on ahead of him and
a queer gasp of emptiness in the region of his chest that seemed to
need a great deal of breath, he managed a passage to the door, looked
down the long white corridor with its open doors and cheerful voices,
saw a pair of stairs to the right quite near by, and with his steadying
hands on the cool white wall slid along the short space to the top
step. It seemed an undertaking to get down that first step, but when
that was accomplished he was out of sight and he sat down and slid
slowly the rest of the way, wondering why he felt so rotten.
At the foot of the long stairs there was a door, and strange it was
made so heavy! He wondered a nurse could swing it open, just a mere
girl! But he managed it at last, almost winded, and stumbled out on the
portico that gave to the sea, a wide blue stretch before him. He
stopped, startled, as if he had unexpectedly sighted the heavenly
strand, and gazed blinking at the stretch of blue with the wide white
shore and the boom of an organ following the lapping of each white
crested wave. Those palm trees certainly made it look queer like Saxy's
Pilgrim's Progress picture book. Then the panic for home and his
business came upon him and he slid weakly down the shallow white steps,
and crunched his white feet on the gravel wincing. He had just taken to
the grass at the edge and was managing better than he had hoped when a
neat little coupe rounded the curve of the drive, and his favorite
doctor came swinging up to the steps, eyeing him keenly. Billy started
to run, and fell in a crumpled heap, white and scared and crying real
tears, weak, pink tears!
"Why Billy! What are you doing here?" The stern loving voice of his
favorite doctor hung over him like a knife that was going to cut him
off forever from life and light and forgiveness and all that he counted
dear.
But Billy stopped crying.
"Nothin," he said, "I just come out fer a walk!"
The doctor smiled.
"But I didn't tell you you might, Billy boy!"
"Had to," said Billy.
"Well, you'll find you'll have to go back again, Billy. Come!" and the
doctor stooped his broad strong shoulders to pick up the boy. But Billy
beat him off weakly: "Say, now, Doc, wait a minute," he pleaded, "It's jus' this way. I
simply gotta get back home t'day. I'm a very 'mportant witness
in a murder case, See? My bes' friend in the world is bein' tried fer
life, an' he ain't guilty, an' I'm the only one that knows it fer sure,
an' can prove it, an' I gotta be there. Why, Doc, the trial's going
on now an' I ain't there! It ud drive me crazy to go back an' lay
in that soft bed like a reg'lar sissy, an' know he's going to be
condemned. I put it to you, Doc, as man to man, would you stand fer a
thing like that?"