In the astonishing silence, I rushed toward Adam as he fell. Then I heard somewhere in the lobby a woman begin screaming, then a great rush of feet and babble of voices. Adam was bleeding heavily. He was stitched across the chest. The chest was all knocked in. He was already dead.
I looked up to see Sugar-Boy standing there with the smoking automatic in his hand, and off to the right, near the elevator, a highway patrolman with a pistol in his hand.
I didn't see the Boss. And thought: _He didn't hit him__.
But I was wrong. Even as I thought that and looked around, Sugar-Boy dropped his automatic clattering to the marble, and uttering some strangled, animal-like sound, rushed back beyond the statue of Governor Moffat.
I laid Adam's head back on the marble and went beyond the statue. I had to shove the people back now, they were crowding so. Somebody was yelling, "Stand back, stand back, give him air!" But they kept crowding up, running to the spot from all over the lobby and from the corridors.
When I broke through, I saw the Boss sitting on the floor, breathing heavily, staring straight ahead. He had both hands pressed to his body, low on the chest and toward the center. I could see no sign that he was hit. Then I saw a very little ooze of blood between two of the fingers, just a little.
Sugar-Boy was leaning above him, weeping and sputtering, trying to speak. He finally managed to get out the words: "D-d-d-d-does it hur-hur-hur-hurt much, Boss–does it hur-hur-hur-hurt?"
The Boss did not die there in the lobby under the dome. In fact, he lived quite a while and died on a clean, white, antiseptic bed, with all the benefits of science. For a couple of days it was given out that he would not die at all. He was seriously wounded–there were two little.25-caliber slugs in his body, slugs from a little toy target pistol Adam had had since he was a kid–but an operation was possible, and he was a very strong man.
So there was all over again the business of the waiting room with the potted plants and water colors and artificial logs on the cozy hearth. A sister of Lucy Stark came with Lucy the morning of the operation. Old Man Stark, the Boss's father, was too feeble to leave Mason City. You could see that Lucy's sister, a woman a good deal older than Lucy, dressed in country black with high-laced black kid shoes, was a strong-minded, sensible woman who had been through a lot and knew how to help somebody else through. You could look at her squarish, slightly reddened, coarse-skinned hands, with their square-cut nails, and know that she knew how to take hold. When she entered the waiting room there at the hospital and cast a practiced and critical, not quite scornful, glance over the potted plants and the artificial logs, it was like a pilot mounting to the pilothouse and taking over.
She sat very stiff and severe in a chair, not one of the chintz-covered soft ones. She was going to permit no spilling over of emotion, not in a strange room and at that time of the day–the time of day when every day there was breakfast to get and the children to fix and the men to clear out of the house. There would be a proper place and time. After it was over, after she got Lucy home, she would put her to bed in a room with the curtains drawn, and would put a cloth dabbled with vinegar on her forehead, and would sit by the bed and hold her hand, and would say, "Now just you cry if you want to, baby, then you'll feel better, then you lie still and I'll sit here, I won't leave you, baby." But that would come later. Meanwhile Lucy now and then stole a look across at her sister's hewn and eroded face. It wasn't exactly a sympathetic face, but it seemed to have what Lucy was looking for.
I sat over on the couch and looked at the same old picture magazines. I felt definitely that I was out of place. But Lucy had asked me to come. "He would want you to be there," she had said.
"I'll wait down in the lobby," I said.
She shook her head. "Come upstairs," she said.
"I don't want to be underfoot. You sister will be there, you said."
"I want you to," she had said, and so there I was. And it was better, I decided, even if I was out of place, than being down in the lobby with all the newshawks and politicos and curiosity-seekers.
It didn't take them awfully long. They said the operation was a success. When the nurse who had brought the news said that, Lucy slumped in her chair and uttered a dry, gasping sob. The sister, who herself had seemed to relax a little at the words, looked sharply at Lucy. "Lucy," she said, not loud but with some severity, "Lucy!"
Lucy raised her head, met the sister's reproving gaze, murmured humbly, "I'm sorry, Ellie, I'm sorry. It's just that I've–I've–"
"We must thank God," Ellie announced. The she rose briskly, as though she were about to step right out and do that before it slipped her mind. But she turned to the nurse. "When can she see her husband?" she asked.
"It will be some time," the nurse said. "I can't tell you exactly, but it will be some time. If you wait here I can let you know." She moved to the door. There she turned, and asked, "Can I get anything for you? Some lemonade? Some Coffee?"
"That's right kind and considerate," the sister said, "but we'll just say no thanks this time of morning."
The nurse went out, and I excused myself and followed. I went down to the office of Dr. Simmons, who had performed the operation. I had known him around the place. He was a sort of friend of Adam–about as good a one as Adam had, for he never had chummed up with anybody, that is, anybody except me, and I didn't count, for I was the Friend of His Youth. I had known Dr. Simmons around the place. Adam had introduced us.
Dr. Simmons, a dry, thin, grayish man, was at his desk, writing something on a big card. I told him to finish what he was doing. He said he was about through, the secretary picked up the card and put it into a filing cabinet, and he turned to me. I asked him how the Governor was doing. The operation had been a success, he said.
"You mean you got the bullets out?" I asked.
He smiled in a sort of chilly way, and said he meant a little more than that. "He's got a chance," he said. "He's a strong man."
"He's that," I agreed.
Dr. Simmons picked up a little envelope from his desk, and emptied the contents into his hand. "No matter how strong they are they can take much of this diet," he said, and held out his hand, open, to show me the two little pellets resting there. A.25-caliber slug is small, all right, but these looked even smaller and more trivial than I had remembered.
I picked one of them out of his hand and examined it. It was a little misshapen slug of lead. Fingering it, I thought of how a long time back, when we were kids at the Landing, Adam and I used to shoot at a pine board, and how sometimes we had dug the lugs out of the soft wood with a pocketknife. Sometimes the slug dug out of the wood hadn't been a bit more misshapen than this one, the wood was so soft.
"The son-of-a-bitch," Dr. Simmons said irrelevantly.
I gave the slug back to him and went down to the lobby. It was pretty well cleared out down there now. The politicos had gone. Two or three newspapermen still hung around, waiting for developments.
There weren't ant developments that day. Or the next day either. The Boss seemed to be getting on all right. But the third day he turn a turn for the worse. An infection had started up. It moved pretty fast. I knew for the way Dr. Simmons looked, even if he wouldn't say much, that he was a gone gosling.
That evening, shortly after I had arrived at the hospital and had gone up to the waiting room to see how Lucy was making out, I got the message that the Boss wanted to see me. He had rallied, they said.
He was a sick-looking customer when I saw him. The flesh had fallen away on his face till the skin sacked off the bone the way it does on an old man's face. He looked like Old Man Stark, up at Mason City. He was white as chalk.
When I first saw the eyes in the white face, they seemed to be filmed and unrecognizing. Then, as I moved toward the bed, they fixed on me and a thin light flickered up in them. His mouth twisted a little in a way which I took to be the feeble shorthand for a grin.