rrified
by the ordeal through which the child is passing.

"Go to the head-quarters, David," she says. "You are needed. Pa says
so. I will stay all day,"

"Oh, Mother Wandrell, what do you think?"

"Here is your Dr. Floddin, ask him."

The doctor speaks sadly. "He is much worse. What has happened?"

"The fires went out," answers Lockwin.

"Get some flaxseed at once. Get a stove in here. These fine houses
kill many people. Keep the body enswathed in the double poultice, but
don't let the emulsion touch his skin directly. What is the effect of
the medicine? I see he has taken a little. The bottleful is not going
fast enough."

"He has taken no medicine at all," says Esther. "It was spilled."

David Lockwin, starting for head-quarters, must now attend the fixing
of a stove where there is little accommodation for a stove.

"Give me the child," says the cook, "and the fire will not go out."

"It would be murder for me to go to head-quarters, and I believe it
would be double murder," he whispers to himself. He is in a lamentable
state. At two o'clock, with the stove up, the flaxseed cooking, the
boy warmly bandaged, the asthmatic sounds diminished, and the women
certain they have administered some of the medicine to the stubborn
patient, Lockwin finds that he can lie down. He sleeps till dark,
while Corkey organizes for the most tumultuous primaries that were ever
held in Chicago.

With the twilight settling in upon his bed Lockwin starts into
wakefulness. He has dreamed of two-old-cat. "Bully for the codger!"
the tribe of red-faces yell. In the other room he now hears the dismal
gasps of his curly-head.

He rinses his mouth with water, not daring to ask if the worst is
coming. He knows it is not coming, else he had been called. Yet he is
not quick to enter the sick chamber.

"David, it is your duty to make him take it," the mother says, as she
goes. "Esther, you look worse than David."

Thus the night begins. The child has learned to dislike the
imprisonment of poultices. The air is heavy with flaxseed. The basin
of stramonium water adds its melancholy odor to the room.

It is the first trouble Lockwin has ever seen. He is as unready and
unwilling as poor little Davy. It is murder--that furnace going out.
This thought comes to Lockwin over and over; perhaps the feeling of
murder is because Davy is not an own son.

It is all wretched and hideous! The slime of politics and the sme