U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [163]
doctor he went to said it was diphtheria and sent him to the hospital. He was terribly sick for several days after
-381-they gave him the antitoxin. When he was getting better Ed and Emiscah came to see him and sat on the edge of his bed and made him feel good. Ed was al dressed up and said he had a new job and was making big money but he wouldn't tel what it was. Charley got the idea that Ed and Emiscah were going round together a little since he'd been sick but he didn't think anything of it.
The man in the next cot, who was also recovering from diphtheria, was a lean grayhaired man named Michaelson. He'd been working in a hardware store that winter and was having a hard time. Up to a couple of years before held had a farm in Iowa in the cornbelt, but a series of bad crops had ruined him, the bank had foreclosed and taken the farm and offered to let him work it as a tenant but he'd said he'd be damned if he'd work as a tenant for any man and had pul ed up his stakes and come to the city, and here he was fifty years old with a wife and three smal children to support trying to start from the ground up again. He was a great admirer of Bob La
Fol ette and had a theory that the Wal Street bankers were conspiring to seize the government and run the country by pauperizing the farmer. He talked al day in a thin wheezy voice until the nurse made him shut up, about the Non-Partisan League and the Farmer-Labor
party and the destiny of the great northwest and the need for workingmen and farmers to stick together to elect honest men like Bob La Fol ette. Charley had joined a local of an A. F. of L. union that fal and Michaelson's talk, broken by spel s of wheezing and coughing, made him feel excited and curious about politics. He decided he'd read the papers more and keep up with what was going on in the world. What with this war and every-thing you couldn't tel what might happen. When Michaelson's wife and children came to see him he introduced them to Charley and said that being laid up next to a bright young fel ow like that made being sick
-382-a pleasure. It made Charley feel bad to see how miserably pale and il fed they looked and what poor clothes they had on in this zero weather. He left the hospital before Michaelson did and the last thing Michaelson said when Charley leaned over him to shake his dry bony hand was
"Boy, you read Henry George, do you hear . . . ? He knows what's the trouble with this country; damme if he don't."
Charley was so, glad to be walking on his pins down the snowy street in the dryicecold wind and to get the smel of iodoform and sick people out of his head that he forgot al about it.
First thing he did was to go to Svenson's. Emiscah
asked him where Ed Walters was. He said he hadn't been home and didn't know. She looked worried when he said that and he wondered about it. "Don't Zona know?" asked Charley. "No, Zona's got a new fel eri that's al she thinks about." Then she smiled and patted his hand and babied him a little bit and they sat on the sofa and she brought out some fudge she'd made and they held hands and
gave each other sticky kisses and Charley felt happy. When Anna came in she said how thin he looked and
that they'd have to feed him up, and he stayed to supper. Mr. Svenson said to come and eat supper with them every night for a while until he was on his feet again. After supper they al played hearts in the front parlor and had a fine time.
When Charley got back to his lodging house he met
the landlady in the hal . She said his