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By Root 4969 0

heard, north of the four corners, a siren and knew that Leander had got the police. He would sit there and catch his breath and his strength, he thought, until they came, when he heard the girl saying from somewhere in the darkness: I’m hurt, Charlie, I’ve hurt myself. Where are you? I’m hurt, Charlie. For a moment Moses thought: I’ll leave her too; but when she spoke again he pushed himself to his feet and went around the car, looking for her. Charlie, she said, I’ve hurt myself, and then he found her and thinking that Moses was the dead man she said: Charlie, oh Charlie, where are we? and began to cry and he knelt beside her where she lay on the ground. By then the sound of the siren had passed the four corners and was bearing down the road and then he heard, from the darkness, Leander’s voice and the voices of the police and saw their flashlights playing over the field—idly, inquisitively—heard their sighs as their idle, inquisitive lights touched the dead man and heard one of them tell another to go to the house and get a blanket. Then they began, idly, to discuss the fire, and Moses called to them and they brought their inquisitive lights over to where he knelt beside the girl. Now they played their lights on the girl, who kept up a bitter light sobbing and who, with her fair hair, seemed very young. “Don’t move her, don’t touch her,” a policeman said importantly. “She may have sustained some internal injuries.” Then one of them told another to get a stretcher and they put her on the stretcher—she was still sobbing—and carried her past the wrecked car and the dead man who was now covered with a blanket toward the many lights of the house.

Remember that crash on 7B—one of them said, but the question was put nervously and the others didn’t answer. The strangeness of the night, the probing lights, the distant sound of fireworks and the dead man they had left in the field had unsettled them all and had unmanned at least one of them and now they followed closely the one course open to them: to bring the girl into the lighted house. Mrs. Wapshot stood in her door, her face composed in a sorrowful smile—an involuntary choice of expression with which she always confronted the unknown. She assumed that the girl was dead; more than that she assumed that she was the only child of a devoted couple, that she was engaged to marry a splendid man and that she had been standing at the threshold of a rich and useful life. But most of all she thought that the girl had been a child, for whenever Mrs. Wapshot saw a drunkard lying on the street or a whore tapping her windowpane the deep sadness she always felt in her breast lay in the recollection that these unfortunates had once been fragrant children. She was unsettled, but she restored herself with a kind of imperiousness as she spoke to the policemen when they carried the stretcher through the open door. “Take her to the spare room,” she said, and when they hesitated, since they had never been in the house before and had no idea of where the spare room might be, she spoke as if they were stupid and had compounded the tragedy. “Take her up to the spare room,” she commanded, for to Mrs. Wapshot all the world knew, or ought to know, the floor plan of West Farm. The “up” helped them and with this they started for the stairs.

The doctor was telephoned and he came over and the girl was put in the spare-room bed. Small stones and sand had cut the skin of her arms and shoulders and when the doctor came there was some indecision about whether he should first pronounce the man in the field dead or look at the girl but he decided on the girl and they all waited in the downstairs hall. “Get her something hot, get her something hot,” they heard him tell Mrs. Wapshot, and she came down and made some tea in the kitchen. “Does that hurt?” they heard him ask the girl. “Does that hurt, does that hurt you at all?” and to all of this she answered no. “Now, what is your name,” he asked her, and she said, “Rosalie Young,” and she gave an address in the city. “It’s a rooming house,” she said. “My folks live