That was news to me. I'd met her a
couple o' times in the hall--pale little mite, hardly big as a baby, but
pleasant-spoken, an' with a way o' dressin' herself in shabby clo'es
that made the other women in the house look like bundles tied up
careless. But she didn't go out much--they had only been in the house a
couple o' weeks or so. 'Sick, is she?' I says. 'Too bad,' I says.
'Anything I can do?' I ask him. He stopped on the nex' step an' looked
back at me. 'Got a wife?' he says. 'No,' says I, 'I ain't, sir. But they
ain't never challenged my vote on 'count o' that, sir--no offence,' I
says to him respectful. 'All right,' he says, noddin' at me. 'I just
thought mebbe she'd look in now and then. I'm gone all day,' he added,
an' went off like he'd forgot me.

"I thought about the little thing all that mornin'--layin' all alone up
there in that room that wa'n't no bigger'n a coal-bin. It's bad enough
to be sick anywheres, but it's like havin' both legs in a trap to be
sick in New York. Towards noon I went into one o' the flats--first floor
front it was--with the kindlin' barrel, an' I give the woman to
understand they was somebody sick in the house. She was a great big
creatur' that I'd never see excep' in red calico, an' I always thought
she looked some like a tomato ketchup bottle, with her apron for the
label. She says, when I told her, 'You see if she wants anything,' she
says. 'I can't climb all them stairs,' she answers me.

"Well, that afternoon I went down an' hunted up a rusty sleigh-bell I'd
seen in the basement, an' I rubbed it up an' tied a string to it, an'
'long in the evenin' I went upstairs an' rapped at Mr. Loneway's door.

"'I called,' I says, 'to ask after your wife, if I might.'

"'If you might,' he says after me. 'I thank the Lord you're somebody
that will. Come in,' he told me.

"They had two rooms. In one he was cookin' somethin' on a smelly
oil-stove. In the other was his wife; but that room was all neat an'
nice--curtains looped back, carpet an' all that. She was half up on
pillows, an' she had a black waist on, an' her hair pushed straight
back, an' she was burnin' up with the fever.

"'Set down an' talk to her,' he says to me, 'while I get the dinner,
will you? I've got to go out for the milk.'

"I did set down, feelin' some like a sawhorse in church. If she hadn't
been so durn little, seems though I could 'a' talked with her, but I
ketched sight of her hand on the quilt, an'--law! it wa