J.M. broke in to ask a final question, which she answered, making vain attempts to button her buttonless collar about a fat white neck, and following him as he retreated toward the street, through a lively game of baseball among the older boys.  No, so far as she knew there wasn’t one of the Yankees left that had lived here in old times.  They had gone away when the factory had come in, she’d heard said.  J.M. had expected this answer, but when it came, he turned a little sick for an instant, and felt giddy with the heat of the sun and lack of food and a desolation in his heart sharper and more searching than any emotion he had known since his boyhood.  Through a mist before his eyes, he saw his hostess make a wild warning gesture, and heard a yell of dismay from the crowd of boys, but before he could turn his head, something cruelly hard struck him in the side.  In the instant before he fell, his clearest impression was utter amazement that anything in the world could cause him such incredible pain, but then his head struck heavily against a stone, and he lay quite still in a little crumpled heap under the old elm which had sheltered his boyhood.

II

For an instant after he opened his eyes again, all his life after leaving Woodville seemed to have melted away, for there at the foot of his bed was the little, many-paned window out of which he had watched the seasons change all through his boyhood, and close above him hung the familiar slanting roof of his own little, old room.  However, when he stirred, it was not his mother but a rosy-faced Irish woman who stopped her sewing and asked him in a thick, sweet brogue if he needed anything.  As he stared at her, recollecting but dimly having seen her glossy brown hair and fair, matronly face before, she exclaimed:  “Ah, I’m Bridget McCartey, you know, an’ you were hurted by the lads throwin’ a baseball into your ribs.  It’s lyin’ here a week sick you’ve been, and, savin’ your pardon, the sooner you tell me where your folks live the better.  They’ll be fair wild about you.”

The sick man closed his eyes again.  “I have no family at all,” he said.  It was the first time in years that the thoroughgoing extent of that fact had been brought home to him.

His nurse was moved to sympathy over so awful a fate.  “Sure an’ don’t I know how ‘tis.  Pat an’ I left every one of our kith behind us, mostly, when we come away, and it’s that hungry for thim that I get.  I dare say it ill becomes me to say it, but the first thing I says to myself when I see you was how like you are to one of my father’s brothers in County Kerry.  It’s been a real comfort to have you here sick, as though I had some of my own kin near. His name was Jerry.  It’s not possible, is’t, that the J. on your handkerchief stands for Jerry, too?”

For the first time since he had left Woodville J.M. disclosed the grotesque secret of his initials.  In the flaccid indifference of convalescence it flowed from him painlessly.  “My name is Jeroboam Mordecai.”