"What about the dough they grabbed at the Glub?"
"There was only fifteen hundred tinned in to the property clerk."
"Ghrist, there was almost twenty thousand."
"Gan you prove it?"
"How could I prove it? They didn't give us a receipt."
"Who took it. Grouse?"
"Not personally. A couple of his men."
"Which ones?"
Doc didn't know. Things had been very confused at the time.
"They'll just say you're lying. You haven't got a chance."
They were sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, waiting for the doctor's report. When it came, it was not good. Ghance had a concussion and lacerations around the face and shoulders. What was worse, far worse, were five broken ribs, at least one of which had pierced the lung.
Dutch listened in silence, watching Doc's face, seeing how grave it was. Dutch didn't know much about sickness, but he had a horrible fear of death.
As they went down the steps Dutch asked, "How bad is it?"
"About as bad as it can be. If he dies, I'll hunt up Grouse and personally kill him with my hands. I just might do it anyhow."
"Let Joe do it. He certainly took care of CeUini."
"Shut up." Doc looked around to make sure they weren't overheard. "We've got to get Joe out of here before we do anything else."
"What are we going to do with him? You got any money? I'm broke."
"You always are." Doc had four hundred bucks, stashed in the toe of one of his shoes. He always carried what he called mad money.
"Think we'll get the dough back that was turned in to the property clerk?"
"Maybe in eight or ten months, but I doubt it. Joe ought to have some grocery money stuck away."
"He's been buying clothes for the kid."
Doc signaled a passing cab. "Well, maybe he can go out to that training farm imtil we get organized. We've got to send him away. Otherwise he'll be bragging to the neighbors how he beat hell out of Cellini and then we'U have him in jail, too."
Dutch said slowly, "I miss Chance."
Sure, Doc thought. He missed Chance too. He felt like a boat without a pilot. It was funny the way Chance had taken • over their lives and dominated their thinking. Why, twice at the hospital when he'd been trying to figure what to do the thought had leaped into his mind that he should go upstairs and ask Chance.
"We have to get a stake," he said, "and quick. There's going to be hospital and doctor bills and God knows what else."
Dutch said, "You could go back and try the boats."
"What would I use for money?"
"Well, what in hell do we do? This ain't camey season. I wouldn't be able to catch on if I wanted to."
"I've got a friend in Miami." Doc was thinking aloud, "He'd probably put me on, dealing, but it wouldn't pay much."
"You should stay here with Chance."
"I won't leave until we know more, but I can't just sit around on my ass and starve."
They told Joe about it slowly. Doc was afraid Joe might blow his top, but surprisingly Joe took it quietly. It was Judy the news affected most. Her gray eyes seemed twice as big as usual. "You mean he's going to die?"
Doc said, "There's a chance, but he's strong, and he lived pretty healthy, never lapped up too much booze. He might make it."
Judy was scared. She felt the uncertainty of the men. She reahzed more clearly now than she had before that it was Chance who held them together, Chance who made things
go-She started to cry. She wasn't used to crying, but somehow she just could not stop. Doc and Joe looked at her helplessly. Strangely it was Dutch who took charge. Dutch pulled her into his lap and she biuried her thin face in his shoulder.
"It's okay, honey. Chance will be all right. We'll all be okay. Stop it. Crying never helped anyone."
He looked across her tousled head. "What about that training farm, Joe? Would they take you and the kid for a few weeks?"
Judy's arms tightened about his neck convulsively. "I don't want to go no place. I want to stay with you."
She cried herself to sleep finally, and Dutch picked her up and carried her in and put her in Chance's bed.
Doc called the training farm. It was set. They put Joe and the girl on the bus for Painesville the next morning. The news from the hospital was not good. Chance had pneimionia.
Doc went downtown to talk to Sullivan. He didn't get any of their money, but he did get the word that Ed Crouse and the men who had helped him had been suspended.
The papers had picked up the story. There was a reporter
at the apartment when Doc got back home. Doc wouldn't talk. Mad as he was, he kept his mouth shut, for Sullivan had half promised that the Club would reopen after all the shouting died down.
But the papers foimd one of the men who had been with Grouse. He talked. The story broke. The sheriff was in trouble. There was the chance of a grand-jury investigation.
Reading the headlines, Doc realized that whatever hope he had of the Club's reopening was gone. The pubhcity had seen to that. The bank officially canceled the lease. It was then that Doc gave up. He wired his friend in Miami and caught the night train.
Chance was in the hospital for over five weeks. At first he was too sick to care about anything. Gradually his cuts and bruises healed, but they had to operate and remove one of the ribs.
Dutch came in every afternoon. Sometimes they only let him stay for a couple of minutes. Dutch had a job in a poolroom nights, and he had kept the apartment.
Chance was well past the crisis as far as the pneumonia was concerned, but he did not seem to gain strength. Dutch had lost count of the transfusions that had been given.
He was scared and lonely and confused. He had even stopped drinking for the first time in his adult life. Doc wrote every day. Doc was Hving on ten dollars a week and sending sixty-five to Dutch.
It got to the place where Dutch hated to go to the hospital. He never knew what to say to Chance. It was like trying to talk to a stranger. Chance had no interest in anything, and the doctors warned Dutch not to tire him.
Chance did not dislike the hospital. He simply was too tired to care. Aside from the hacking cough which hurt his chest, he had little or no pain, but the Hstlessness continued, and his strength did not return.
Finally the doctors said that Dutch could take him home, and Dutch sent for Joe and Judy.
Judy had changed remarkably. Her face had filled out, her skii had lost its taut dryness, and her hair, which had been duU, had a natural sheen. The farm and the food and the
fresh air had made a difference in Judy. But the change went far deeper than surface appearance.
It showed in ease of manner, in the certainness of her behavior, in the way she took command and made decisions for Joe. In her whole hfe she had known no sense of security until the night Chance had found her on the sidewalk. She had been terrified then, driven by a fear which was groimd into her.
Then in the few days between Christmas and New Year's she had begun to relax a httle, to beheve that in this apartment she might have found something she had never known, a home. But even then she had been nervous, watchful, always on the alert, sensing that she must please these men, that there was no permanent security, that she stayed merely by sufferance.
And the raid had almost snapped her akeady taut nerves. It had seemed the end of the dream.
The farm had brought her first real reassurance. The Beyers, who ran the place, had taken her at face value, accepting Joe's statement that she was his niece. There had been no questions, no prying into her past. She had had the run of the place, and, with all the cmriosity of a city child who had never seen chickens or pigs or cows, she explored it thoroughly.
Yet she was not sorry to leave. She came back to the apartment with an entirely diflFerent attitude, a proprietary feeling. It belonged to her as much as it belonged to Doc or Chance or Dutch or Joe.
There is seldom any question of ownership in the very
yoimg. Everything they see is theirs by right, and Judy had suddenly developed the feeling of possession. This transferred itself from the apartment to the men. They too were hers. She had aheady succeeded without half trying in reducing Joe to a kind of wilhng slave.
It was only when Chance came home that his appearance shocked her back into balance. He weighed less than a him-dred and twenty pounds. His face was waxlike in its thinness. His eyes, which had seemed to penetrate through her, had
dulled and the whites about the blue looked unhealthy, a little yellow.
She set herself to entertain him, to humor him. In the weeks that followed she talked to him endlessly, for she had heard the doctor say that his recovery now depended upon himself, upon his will to hve.
And that will seemed gone. He listened when she talked, but she knew that she had only a part of his attention. Strangely this only seemed to draw her closer to him, for she developed a maternal feeling.
Joe was almost no help. Joe would stand in the doorway of the front room, his scarred face deep with worry as he watched Chance, hardly saying a word.
Dutch was seldom there. He had increased his hours imtil he was now working at the poolroom from noon until midnight closing. It was the middle of March when the doctor told Dutch that if Chance was ever to get back his strength he had to go to a dry climate.
The news fell like a blow, just when Judy had again begun to relax. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in front of Chance's chair, trying to work a crossword puzzle, asking him what the words were.
Judy did not hear the front door open. She felt someone watching her and looked up to see Dutch standing in the hall doorway.
Her first thought was that he must have been fired. Why else would he be home at this hour? And her hard, practical mind considered the problem of how they were to eat. Then she sensed from the sagging expression on his big face that it must be something far more serious.
Chance looked up. He nodded to Dutch. He showed no surprise at seeing him, no curiosity as to why he was at home.
Dutch came into the room. He did something he had not done in a month. He walked over to where a bottle of whisky still stood on the side table. He puUed the cork and took a long drink from the neck.
**I just been talking to the doctor." His back was to Chance and his voice wasn't too steady. "He said some things I think maybe you should know."
Chance waited. The tips of his slender fingers picked aimlessly at the fringe of the robe with which Joe had covered his knees.
'*That lung of yours, the one the rib punched. The doc says you gotta go to a dry climate or it won't ever heal right/*
"What's he mean?"
"Look," said Dutch, "you know doctors. They use a lot of double talk. They confuse hell out of me."
"You know what he said." Judy was suddenly ridden by - impatience. "What did he say?"
Dutch turned to her. "Well, he's afraid of T.B., I guess. He didn't say just that, but, well, Chance has to get out of here, . and fast."
Judy walked across the room slowly, sat down on the couch ^ and looked around the apartment. She wanted to yell suddenly, to tell them that it couldn't happen, that this was home, ' that they couldn't leave.
Chance raised his head. He spoke with more force than he had used since the beating. "No."
Dutch stared at him. "No what?"
"I said no. If I'm going to die, I'll die right here. That's the ' end of it."
Dutch gave him a long look. Dutch took a drink from the ' bottle; then he walked out of the apartment. He wired Doc that night to come home. Dutch could not handle Chance, even when he was sick.
Two days later he met Doc at the station and told him what had happened. Doc listened in silence. "It ain't that he wants to stay here," Dutch ended. "If he did you could argue with him. The hell of it is he just don't want anything. He acts like he's afraid to stir out of that chair. Jeese, if it hadn't i>een for Judy, I don't know what I'd have done. The heart's gone right out of him."
"Weakness," said Doc. "People are like that when they're sick. T.B. ones are usually worse. They just don't seem to give a damn. Til talk to the doctor."
They rode over to the doctor's oflBce, and Doc talked to him for an hour. When he came out, Dutch got up from his seat in the waiting room.
**What's he say?"
Doc shrugged. "His test came out positive, but maybe there's not much involvement yet. However, he has to get out of here."
"Try and make him."
"Leave it to me." Doc had never conned Chance before, but he was going to try now.
He breezed into the apartment as if he did not have a care in the world. He grabbed Judy and kissed her and pinched her behind playfully. He shadowboxed around Joe and then grabbed him and kissed the center of Joe's growing bald spot. Then he walked over to Chance's chair, saying critically, "You look a mite better than when I saw you last."
"I must have looked terrible."
"That you did."
"How's Miami?"
"Good. People are beginning to forget there ever was a depression. But the joint's closed. The boys are moving out to Las Vegas."
"What in Christ's name for? That place is a graveyard. Even while they had the big crew building the dam, I heard that the gamblers had to play each other's games just to think they had action."
Doc laughed. "It's not that bad. The crowds are growing. It's only three hundred miles from Hollywood, remember, and since Mexico threw out gambling the movie boys have to have some place to play."
Chance lost interest. '"They've got clubs in town and in Pabn Springs. Willie Hook went out there last year, he stayed three weeks and couldn't take it. It's nothing but a honky-tonk."
"But legal." Doc helped himself to a drink. "Christ sake, no payoffs, no crooked cops, no juice, no raids, and you can look any man in the eye. They tell me a gambler in Vegas is just as good as a banker."
"What is this buildup? It wouldn't be because the damn sawbones says I have to live in a dry climate? Is that why you came back so fast? Well, to hell with it. I'm not going to Nevada."
Doc said calmly, "I am. I've had it as far as illegal opera-
tion goes. Do you think we'll get oiir Club back here? We won't. Did Dutch tell you the bank broke the lease?"
Chance shook his head. He showed no emotion. He didn't care about the lease or the Club or anything. He coughed and could not stop. Doc watched him with somber eyes.
"So we spUt up after three years."
"Why not?" said Chance when he could speak. *Tm no good to any of you."
"Just hke that, you're gonna quit?"
Judy gulped. She did not want to go to Nevada. But she did not want them to split up either. She walked to Chance's chair and took his hand. "Why shouldn't we go?"
He turned to look at her. Her eyes were pleading with him now. "What happens to Joe if you and Doc split up? What happens to me?"
He hadn't been thinking about her, or Joe, or Dutch, or even Doc. He had been sitting there day after day feeling very sorry for himself. He had about made up his mind that he was going to die. Not that he really cared, because when the Club closed, something closed within him. The Club had represented so much. It was proof that he, with nothing behind him, no education, no real training, could be important. It was all mixed up. He did not analyze himself too closely but he knew something that even Dutch and Doc had never guessed. He was scared inside. He had always been scared. His masklike front was to protect his fear, to keep other people from ever guessing how uncertain he was.
The blonde in New Orleans had represented one kind of victory, for it had proved to him a fact of which he was unsure, that he was attractive to women.
The Club had been another mark. He had done the impossible. Starting with nothing save the few tricks Dutch had taught him, he had built a bankroll big enough to open the Club.
It was gone, and with it his courage. To him the strange part about his relationship with Doc was that Doc was always certain of
himself, and yet Doc would consult him and take his decision as final.
But for once Doc was not listening to him. This frightened
him more than ever. If he had lost his grip with Doc and Dutch, he had indeed lost everything.
"Do what you like," he said. "Joe, help me into bed." In silence they watched the fighter half carry Chance from the room. When Judy turned around she was shocked. Doc was crying.
Judy was the only one of the party who enjoyed the train trip West, and she had not expected to. She had never been on a train before and everything intrigued her, from her upper berth to the swaying dining car.
Chance stayed in his compartment bed. Doc warned Dutch that Chance was worse. There were fever spots on his white cheeks and his eyes looked glassy.
Joe stayed with him most of the time. So did Judy when she was not prowling the train. Dutch had started drinking again and was seldom far from the bar car. Doc was restless. His impulse was to find a card game, but he wanted no trouble with Chance sick.
On the first afternoon out of Chicago, he went into the club car and sat down next to a tall man in a dark, neat, double-breasted suit. Doc would have taken him for a banker or a corporation executive but for two things. The man's lean face was heavy with windbum as though the skin had been exposed to harsh elements for fifty years, and the hat on the carpet beside the chair was big, broad brinmied, white—a cowboy's hat.
For ten years Doc had made his living by his ability to evaluate strangers, to guess their habits, their financial status, their likes, and their gulHbihty.
There was nothing gulhble about the man beside him. This Doc would have bet on heavily, and the blue eyes although a little remote did not seem unfriendly.
"Do you have a match?"
The man produced a kitchen match, which Doc struck on his thumbnail.
"Rancher?"
The man nodded.
"What part?"
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