Free Clay Hand by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page A

hour. Well, the girl hadn’t the sense she was born with. She went round to another entry. Nobody knows how she got in, but to make an unfortunate story short, she was crushed by one of the loading cars.
    “Kevin was never the same after that, and the baby died of the flu. That’s the time it was—the epidemic after the first war. He worked around for a while, but he began ailing and the doctor said he was tubercular. So he went off one day. A few years later he came back, and stayed a while working, but he wasn’t up to it. He drifted off again.
    “We never heard a word of him for another ten years, and then one morning this old tramp, and that he was, showed up at the parish house asking for Father Duffy. Father Duffy was gone himself then. Father Joyce took him in, I’ll say that for him, and gave him an odd job around the church to keep body and soul together. But his mind was wandering, and he was always talking about the mines.”
    She sighed. “It wasn’t much of a shock to us, him going that way, with the gas backing in there from the new blasting.”
    She pulled herself up then. “Well, you’ll be wanting your supper.”
    “No, thank you, Mrs. O’Grady. I’ve work to do for the office. I’ve got to finish the story I was doing in Chicago, and get it off on the night train.”
    “Then you better get a move on,” she said. “The night train leaves at seven-thirty, and it’s five now. I’ll put something on the back of the stove for you.”
    Later that evening he was sitting in the living room, sleep heavy upon him. To fight it off, he smoked incessantly. The two regular boarders were listening to the radio—solid, contented-looking men who reminded him of the farmhands on his grandmother’s place, except for their complexions, the pallid faces of men who spend their days underground.
    Mrs. O’Grady sat among them, crocheting. For a while, Phil watched her, marveling at the dexterity with which she maneuvered the thread over her stiffened fingers, but the monotony of the movement made him even drowsier. When their eyes met occasionally, the old woman would wink at him, and he would shift positions and hang on. As well as sleep, he was fighting his thoughts of Margaret, and the desire to see her.
    Now and then one of the men would grunt at some amusing word from the radio, and exchanged looks with the other to see if he also enjoyed it. Phil’s presence was no more to them than a cat’s on the sofa. At nine o’clock they got up, and while one turned off the radio, the other knocked his pipe out into the coal bucket. Night in, night out, this was their routine. This and a Sunday movie, and good, solid food were their pleasures, and the world go hang, for they were not unhappy men.
    “You’ll hear the big fellow snoring in five minutes,” Mrs. O’Grady said when the men had gone upstairs. “It’s the most penetrating sound you ever heard in your life.”
    Phil went to the stove and flicked his cigaret into it.
    “You burn the coal up that way, opening the door for nothing,” the widow said.
    “Sorry.”
    “You’ll know the next time. You’ve the need of something to put a stick in your back. Go in my bedroom there and look in the cubby behind the basin. I’ve a drop I keep for colds and the like. Bring it and a glass.”
    Phil did as he was told. Finding the bottle, he went to the kitchen and brought two glasses from the cupboard. How many times had Dick done this very thing, he wondered.
    “Pour it,” the widow said. “And as long as you brought the extra glass you can give me a drop.”
    She watched him like a parrot from its perch. “Put enough so’s we’ll taste it, itself.”
    Phil poured them each a stiff drink.
    “What’s she doing tonight?”
    “Margaret? Resting, I guess. The inquest is set for nine in the morning.”
    “Wasn’t I given a summons?”
    Phil sipped his drink. Mrs. O’Grady emptied hers in one pull. “I have to take it down for I can’t stand the