Blue Kingdom (31 page)

A reassuring murmur answered this demand. They passed indoors. Other voices spoke distantly in the house.

Then: “Hey, Beatrice! I am mighty glad. How's the chief? Kin I see him?”

“Hush, hush,” was the response. “Walk softly, Jimmy. He's sleeping sound. He's been delirious for days. You'll hardly know him. But now he's better. He's sleeping. Walk softly, Jimmy. I don't want to waken him.”

Dunmore closed his eyes. He felt them come closer, and a sense of guilty joy rose in his heart. Yet there was also an odd weakness in him, so that he felt as though he hardly could endure looking upon them, face-to-face.

They stood beside his bed.

“Oh, my stars!” he heard Jimmy gasp presently.

“He looks thin . . . and wild, Jimmy. But he's much, much better. He's going to get well. Do you hear, dear? He's going to get well.”

“Why,” said Jimmy, with a choking gasp, “I kind
of thought . . . he looked like . . . like he was dead, Beatrice.”

“Look at the pulse in his temple, Jimmy.”

“Yeah. I see it now. Well, it wasn't much fun to stand there and see.”

“Oh, Jimmy, the hours that I've been through, hoping and praying. And Miss Furneaux and Rod. We've all worked. And now we've won.”

“Aye,” said Jimmy Larren, “you look like you'd been workin' for about the first time in your life. Is he gonna marry you, Beatrice?”

“I really don't know, Jimmy,” she said.

“Do you hope he will?” asked Jimmy roughly.

“What do you think, Jim?”

“Why, I think you ain't a fool,” said the boy.

“I hope I'm not,” Beatrice said, and she laughed a little, in the softest of voices. “You might try to put in a word for me, Jimmy,” she added.

“Me?” said the boy. “Why, sure I will, Beatrice. I'll get the talk around to you, some way. Now you go along and have a rest. You look sort of tuckered out.”

“Who'll take care of Carrick?”

“Why, who but me?” said the boy.

“Are you all right, yourself, Jimmy, dear?”

“Me? Why, sure I am. I'm gonna set here and rest, and take it easy, Beatrice. You go along.”

“Very well, then. Good-bye for a little while, Jimmy.”

Her footfall whispered from the room. The door suddenly closed with a light
click
.

There was utter silence, then Dunmore felt that a face and breathing were close to him.

“You faker!” said the sudden voice of Jimmy.

Dunmore breathed deeply.

“You faker!” Jimmy pronounced more loudly. “Open your eyes. You've been listenin' the whole time.”

Dunmore looked up. He saw Jimmy, looking pale and thin, close beside him, scowling. The scowl disappeared in a vast grin.

“It's sure good to see you ag'in, chief,” he said.

“It's good to have you here, kid. How's things?”

“Pretty good. The Tanks are busted to bits. You took the heart out of 'em, and then they fell to pieces.”

“I'm not sorry, Jim.”

“Naw, what should you be sorry about, chief?”

They paused and regarded each other thoughtfully, fondly, as brothers long tested might do.

“You figgered where you and me head for, from here?” asked Jimmy at last.

“No, I ain't. But, Jim. . . .”

“Well?”

“Suppose there was three in the party, Jim? What would you think?”

“Her? Aw, I don't mind. I've got used to her,” said Jimmy Larren.

Max Brand
^®
is the best-known pen name of Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, Destry, and many other fictional characters popular with readers and viewers worldwide. Faust wrote for a variety of audiences in many genres. His enormous output, totaling approximately thirty million words or the equivalent of 530 ordinary books, covered nearly every field: crime, fantasy, historical romance, espionage, Westerns, science fiction, adventure, animal stories, love, war, and fashionable society, big business and big medicine. Eighty motion pictures have been based on his work along with many radio and television programs. For good measure he also published four volumes of poetry. Perhaps no other author has reached more people in more different ways.

Born in Seattle in 1892, orphaned early, Faust grew up in the rural San Joaquin Valley of California. At Berkeley he became a student rebel and one-man literary movement, contributing prodigiously to all campus publications. Denied a degree because of unconventional
conduct, he embarked on a series of adventures culminating in New York City where, after a period of near starvation, he received simultaneous recognition as a serious poet and successful author of fiction. Later, he traveled widely, making his home in New York, then in Florence, and finally in Los Angeles.

Once the United States entered the Second World War, Faust abandoned his lucrative writing career and his work as a screenwriter to serve as a war correspondent with the infantry in Italy, despite his fifty-one years and a bad heart. He was killed during a night attack on a hilltop village held by the German army. New books based on magazine serials or unpublished manuscripts or restored versions continue to appear so that, alive or dead, he has averaged a new book every four months for seventy-five years. Beyond this, some work by him is newly reprinted every week of every year in one or another format somewhere in the world.