“I’m sure—­” Burton’s eyes were watery and his voice thick—­“you wouldn’t do that.  M’ wife’s sick an’—­”

“Well, get on back to her, and—­if you want good advice—­when you get indoors, stay in.”  With a kindly tolerance the policeman assisted the pedestrian across the street and watched him tack along until he was lost to sight.

It was a bad day for uncertain feet and legs.  The town lay locked in a grip of ice which sheeted streets and sidewalks with a treacherous danger.  Horses struggled with hooves that shot outward, and children slid merrily and the elderly picked their way with a guarded caution.

Old Tom Burton made the trip back to the lodging-house and up the double flight of stairs in safety.  One leg was a little painful, for in that fine irony, which sometimes seems to prove Life a cynical humorist, Thomas Standish Burton had been endowed with a single relic of wealth and epicureanism—­he suffered from gout.  So, as he climbed, he laboriously favored the crippled foot.

Then he opened the door of his wife’s room and entered.  But after one step he stood still, then he brushed a sleeve across his eyes to see more clearly.  Elizabeth Burton lay, full length, on the floor near her chair—­and she seemed unconscious.  The old man hurried over to her and succeeded in lifting her weight to the bed.  She must have suffered a heart-attack and fallen as she tried to cross the room alone.  A great fear seized upon his heart and in some degree sobered him.  He listened for the heart-beat and clasped shaking fingers to a wrist that at first seemed pulseless.  But at last he found a faint flutter of life in the body he had thought lifeless—­so faint and wavering a flutter that it seemed only a whispered echo of a departed vitality.

For a while he stood stupefied, then he thought of Mary.  Of course, he must send word to Mary.  Perhaps, too, life could still be coaxed back, if a doctor came quickly enough.  Down the stairs he hobbled with a speed that drove him into a sort of frantic and clumsy gallop.  On the first floor he knocked on the landlord’s door and implored him to call a physician at once, while he himself went out to the telephone.

The nearest instrument was in a saloon and hither the old man hurried.  Mary had given him the number of the stage ’phone, and he called it.  Despite the coldness of the afternoon, perspiration burst out and beaded his forehead as he waited—­only to hear the exasperating voice of the operator announce, “Busy.”  Three times this was repeated and while he waited, pacing frenziedly back and forth, he sought, after each successive failure, to allay the jump and tremor of his shocked nerves with whiskey, and he poured generously.

At last he had the theater number and was told that Miss Burton could not answer just then, but a message would be delivered.

“Tell her to come home at once,” he shouted wildly into the receiver.  “Her mother’s dying.”