“Get their bed ready,” said Aunt Patsy to Nancy, “and shut up the windows and doors, and light their candles, and see that you drive all the mosquitoes out of their bar, and make up a good fire in their stove, and carry up some bags of hot ashes to lay to his feet—­”

“—­and a shovel of fire for his head, and a mustard plaster for his neck, and some gum shoes for his ears,” Luigi interrupted, with temper; and added, to himself, “Damnation, I’m going to be roasted alive, I just know it!”

“Why, Looy!  Do be quiet; I never saw such a fractious thing.  A body would think you didn’t care for your brother.”

“I don’t—­to that extent, Aunt Patsy.  I was glad the drowning was postponed a minute ago, but I’m not now.  No, that is all gone by; I want to be drowned.”

“You’ll bring a judgment on yourself just as sure as you live, if you go on like that.  Why, I never heard the beat of it.  Now, there—­there! you’ve said enough.  Not another word out of you—­I won’t have it!”

“But, Aunt Patsy—­”

“Luigi!  Didn’t you hear what I told you?”

“But, Aunt Patsy, I—­why, I’m not going to set my heart and lungs afloat in that pail of sewage which this criminal here has been prescri—­”

“Yes, you are, too.  You are going to be good, and do everything I tell you, like a dear,” and she tapped his cheek affectionately with her finger.  “Rowena, take the prescription and go in the kitchen and hunt up the things and lay them out for me.  I’ll sit up with my patient the rest of the night, doctor; I can’t trust Nancy, she couldn’t make Luigi take the medicine.  Of course, you’ll drop in again during the day.  Have you got any more directions?”

“No, I believe not, Aunt Patsy.  If I don’t get in earlier, I’ll be along by early candle-light, anyway.  Meantime, don’t allow him to get out of his bed.”

Angelo said, with calm determination: 

“I shall be baptized at two o’clock.  Nothing but death shall prevent me.”

The doctor said nothing aloud, but to himself he said: 

“Why, this chap’s got a manly side, after all!  Physically he’s a coward, but morally he’s a lion.  I’ll go and tell the others about this; it will raise him a good deal in their estimation—­and the public will follow their lead, of course.”

Privately, Aunt Patsy applauded too, and was proud of Angelo’s courage in the moral field as she was of Luigi’s in the field of honor.

The boy Henry was troubled, but the boy Joe said, inaudibly, and gratefully, “We’re all honky, after all; and no postponement on account of the weather.”

CHAPTER VIII

BAPTISM OF THE BETTER HALF