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.