"
Chantry made no comment. Opening a drawer of the desk, he fumbled amid a
litter of articles useful and useless, and, extracting a battered
stethoscope, shifted his chair forward until it was close to the other
and stuck the tiny tubes to his ears. Still without comment he opened
the rancher's shirt, applied the instrument, listened, shifted it,
listened, shifted and listened the third time--slid his chair back to
the former position.
"What else do you know?" he asked.
Landor buttoned up the gap in his shirt methodically.
"Nothing, except that the thing is in the family. My father went that
way when he was younger than I am, and his father the same." The stogie
had gone dead in his fingers, and he lit a fresh one steadily. "I've
been expecting it to catch up with me for years."
"Your father died of it, you say?"
"Yes; on Thanksgiving Day." The big rancher shifted position, and in
sympathy the rickety chair groaned dismally. "Dinner was waiting, I
remember, a regular old-fashioned New England dinner with a stuffed
sucking pig and a big turkey with his drumsticks in the air. Mother and
Frances--that's my sister--were waiting, and they sent me running to
call father. He was a lawyer, and a great hand to shut himself up and
work. I was starved hungry, and I remember I hot-footed it proper
upstairs to his den and threw open the door." Puff! puff! went the big
stogie. "An Irish plasterer with seven kids ate that turkey, I
recollect," he completed, "and I've never kept Thanksgiving from that
day to this.
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