"Hy, Joe! Come as soon's we could — in time to
do the cleanin', I guess."

Then he had come up to me and halted, with
a burlesque word of command to his rollicking
army.
"I see their smoke off Monumoy day before
yesterday, and I knowed they was bound here,
sure as you're alive — but they wasn't any wind.
Where's Allie?"

"Gone." I was so sick, that I hardly cared to
tell him even that. He looked at me with an
abrupt and puzzled seriousness — one of his peculiar
qualities.
"Johnnie Sousa told me. I met him up-street,"
he said.
I had nothing to say to this, for he and his men
and the street and the moon were beginning to go
round again in a sweeping, slow circle. His voice
came to me, muffled by great distance:

"My God! Joe, you're all cut to pieces."

He reached out and grabbed my hand, the left

808



STORM

one. I remember screaming at the fire that scorched
my arm. Then the wheeling world spun up and
up into the blackening sky. And I was conscious
that I started to fall, but never knew when I
struck the ground.
XXV



I WAKE IN THE NIGHT



THEY tell me now that I lay dead for a time,
and then came back to burn through days
and days and nights and nights with fever. The
doctor will have it that I must have run about
the streets, a huge and bleeding apparition, for
upward of an hour, with a hole the size of a half-
dollar in the back of my skull. I have to take these
things on the word of others.
