The Argosy, Vol. 75, No. 4 — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“ reason. MESQUITE RANCH. belt drawn too tightly about the lean figure of his patient. He lifted him up and directed Ted to loosen the buckle, which had slipped around to the back. Radford managed to pull the prongs from the eyelets and the belt from under Bullen. He flung it on the foot of the bed. “He’s just gotten over a fever. He needs the right kind of nursing and food. Call up Miss Thorpe, 2122 Murray Hill—’” Radford took his eyes from Bullen’s appallingly white face. He had heard Stratton’s words with a sudden real- ization that he was placed most pain- fully. The house was really no longer his to dispense its hospitality; he must make some other arrangement. ‘““ Midge, he’d better go to a hospital, It’s — it’s not exactly convenient to keep him here,” he suggested. Stratton gave him one of his search- ingly direct looks. Radford was ob- viously embarrassed. “No one need know how he came here. You can say he’s a friend of yours—” he began, thinking that Ted objected to the man’s presence in the house on account of the comment it might create. * He’s not a friend of mine,’ Rad- ford exclaimed. “‘ But that’s not the It—it would be decidedly em- barrassing for me to have him here.” “TI won’t take the responsibility of having him moved just now,” Stratton replied, grimly wondering what it was that influenced Ted Radford to behave like an unfeeling brute. The man’s condition was so preca- rious. His appearance must have told Radford that such was the case. Yet he refused to harbor him after he had had something to do with reducing the patient to helplessness. “Tf you’re afraid of his dying on your hands —” keep his disapproval quite out of his voice. “Tt isn’t that, Midge; but I—” _ Well, he can’t be moved!” Strat- ton said conclusively. “If you don’t he began, unable to, 733 phone to Miss Thorpe I'll do it my- self.” Emotions in us all are subtle things. It gave Stratton a sense of relief to find that the man he had injured was radically at fault himself. He began to suspect that the presence of Bullen in the Fifth Avenue house meant a good deal more than showed super- ficially and was seriously to the dis- credit of Radford. Almost the instant the thoughts took shape he disowned them as the disor- ordered and somewhat cowardly reflex of his own remorse about the caress he had given and taken from Rad- ford’s fiancée. But he could not argue himself out of the feeling that Radford was far from gracious in his treatment of the man he had harmed. It seemed small and unlike Ted that he should display a disposition to carry the punishment, which the man’s intru- sion might have necessitated, to a point of absolute cruelty. Stratton left the bedside and went to the telephone in the hall. He called up the number of the nurse with whom he trusted his most important cases. A pleasantly childish voice answered. “Hello, Natalie! Is Miss Thorpe there? I need her at once.” At that moment Bullen rose from the pillow with the erratic strength of a delirious man and began the horrible mumbling that was his poor substitute for speech. Stratton called Radford to take the phone while he went to the patient. The doctor’s big hands with their skilled touch soothed Bullen so that Radford could hear, undistracted, the voice that was asking a half dozen questions in the effort to establish the connection which seemed broken. “Hello! No, this isn’t Dr. Strat- ton, little girl,’ Radford replied, amused by the child’s excitement and the quaintly musical French accent that -did alluring little turns with. the unique English she spoke. Instantly offended dignity sounded over the wire as plainly as it could have CORMICLOOKS (E@)